True cultural change doesn’t happen unilaterally. Cultural innovations occur in deep relationships between land, spirit and groups of people. A person ‘of high degree’ in traditional knowledge may find a song in a dream if they are profoundly connected to land, lore, spirit and community. But that song must then be taken up by the people and modified gradually through many iterations before it becomes part of the culture. Besides, that song can only be found through a ritual process developed over millennia by that community. The song itself is not as important as the communal knowledge process that produces it.
Most lasting cultural innovations occur through the demotic—the practices and forms that evolve through the daily lives and interactions of people and place in an organic sequence of adaptation. When these processes are unimpeded by the arbitrary controls and designs of elevated individuals they emerge in ways that mirror the patterns of creation.
— Tyson Yunkaporta, Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World