Vol. 12 No. 1 (2013)

Scholars in the Fourth World engage in a wide range of intellectual and practical pursuits directly benefiting nations throughout the world. Our Associate Scholars Program benefits from the extraordinary efforts of more than forty-five dedicated researchers, social activists, political leaders, healers, writers, and traditional knowledge holders. These scholars carry on the traditions of intellectual inquiry practiced in many different cultures in addition to conventional empirical inquiry. The results are often quite surprising and always informative. The disappearance or declining use of ancient knowledge systems mirrors the destruction of cultural communities throughout the world. This increasingly rapid destruction of cultural communities reflects the damage to societies by the removal of peoples from their territories either as a result of natural disasters or imposed force by outside peoples. When a people is forced to leave a long used territory and the population is subsequently fragmented, culture collapses and the continued use and application of a knowledge system risks decline or complete disappearance. UNESCO and other international institutions as well as individual knowledge holders struggle to preserve these knowledge systems, but it is more apt to suggest that ancient knowledge systems must be maintained with the people and their culture in relation to their lands and territories. These forms of knowledge should be applied as systems of thought existing in parallel with each other with no system of thought dominating another. While knowledge systems may influence each other they tend to inform and prove beneficial if they are understood as discrete systems of thought. The culture embraces the language and the system of thought in relation to the land in the material world as well as phenomena in the immaterial world. We have new samples of scholarship in this issue that reflect aspects of different knowledge systems that have practical applications as well as important contributions to the greater body of human knowledge.