In primitive times, a shaman held responsibility for the knowledge and history of the tribe.  Sure, everybody would help, but one or two people would show a capacity for memory, for reading natural signs and for mending trauma and interpersonal relations.  And in between their own hunting or providing for themselves, they would devote their energy to shamanism.

As soon as we invented writing, the tribe's knowledge could be written down, and the position of shaman filled by a bureaucrat.  Security of knowledge threatened to shift from hinging on the pittance of community acknowledgement required by the shaman, to "who owns the books" and/or "who can read".

Knowledge preserved in books that is not memorized or does not stem from historical or intellectual context, ie: living memory, is knowledge that can actually be destroyed.

A job requiring interpretation of information in context differs from one which requires only reactive response to data.  This is a fancy way of saying, a bureaucrat can be accurate, but a shaman is always right.

The miserable human world is contorting a number of ways - high rate of suicide, burgeoning drug abuse, violence and inequality.  This is because there is a shamanic deficiency.  People equate artistry with shamanism because of the charisma and image of popular artists.  But artists are some of the most deficient, useless/dangerous people I've ever met.

Artistry is just one skill.  You could have a guy who was a crap father, but if he took his son fishing that one time, and if his son learnt something about life and death and the order of things from the dad, he still would have accomplished more than most artists do in their lifetime.  Artists in the mainstream right now inflame people's desires, patch over their spiritual wounds and remove them from their heads to numb their feeling that something is wrong.  Those things will always sell.

We have a terrible shamanic/historical disconnect in Canada right now.  Our elders from the last generation are almost all gone.  It would be bearable if we had an intact shamanic tradition with a sound line of context.  We're actually going to have to fake it until we catch up to modern techniques and their consequences because right now they're all out there competing with us and they're not going away.  Which is horribly dangerous because our link to the ancient past is severed.