#indigenous science

Nanye’hi (pictured), a Cherokee leader, called for peace between the denizens and settlers. When the U.S. Supreme Court decided in 1832 that Georgia had no authority over the Cherokee, which was a sovereign nation, President Andrew Jackson ignored the ruling. Source: Tennessee State Museum website. Note: Photo could not be authenticated. 1 November 2024 Today feels fresh, just like when you…

Uncovering Pacific Pasts: Histories of Archaeology in Oceania

Edited by Tristen Jones, Hilary Howes and Matthew Spriggs Chapter 27: The first Lapita pottery found in Fiji: Links to an early Pacific world by Matthew Spriggs

More here: Exploring Lapita pottery through observation and art — Science Learning Hub

The Fiji Museum

JUST OPEN A CAN I miss the days when we made garlands with strips of colored paper folded into rings and glued together for the Christmas tree. In winter we would crack nuts that arrived with their shells intact. My father would split walnuts by gripping together two in one fist. Some nuts were impossible to break—like macadamias—whose shells resist bashing and end up whole in the…

What is at issue here is the importance of recognizing that permaculture’s roots lie firmly and deeply in the ancient, fertile, organic soil of indigenous science. To overlook and ignore that is to leave permaculture at the mercy of the dogmas of mainstream science, and the latter’s view of the manifold, complex systems in nature as nothing more than resources to be exploited. From this vantage point, humans control, degrade and exploit the land to become obedient, consummate consumers; and the indigenous science of cultivating a reciprocal, regenerative relationship with the Earth, in which the human acknowledges her innate connection to Earth, is dismissed as "unscientific" and empirically unsound.

Taking Steps to Recognize Indigenous Peoples

Let’s Start with Names Seek-Seek-Qua by C. Coleman Emery When I returned home from a September camping trip, I opened my book (Night of the Living Rez) and found a plastic knife holding my place. I had used the knife as a bookmark while reading during a rainstorm in a cabin in the woods. We rented a two-room shack at Lake Olallie Resort, which is sequestered in what is now called the Mount…

Excerpt from this story from Nation of Change:

Ignorance of Native science and the centuries of knowledge it represents is hardly limited to Clear Lake. The California Department of Fish and Wildlife’s historical inability to distinguish among seven separate species of abalone (well known to coastal tribes, including the Chumash, Ohlone, and Yurok) led to successive waves of over-exploitation. All seven species are currently in trouble; the one remaining viable fishery—red abalone—was shut down in 2017 and will remain so until 2026. In the western United States, which is experiencing the worst drought in 1,200 years, government-mandated fire-suppression plans replaced millennia of Indigenous wildland stewardship that included vegetation management and the intentional burning known as “good fire.” Instead, every year, millions of acres burn, homes are annihilated, and people die in catastrophic wildfires that cost billions of dollars.

With climate change escalating superstorms, heat waves, mega-floods, and drought, Indigenous science can no longer be ignored. For almost two millennia, beginning with local inhabitants of the Mediterranean who provided baseline data for the 600 plants described in Dioscorides’ De Materia Medica in 77 CE, Indigenous peoples have furnished substantive source material for scientific research.

As it turns out, Indigenous knowledge is exceptionally nuanced and deep. It is cumulative, place-based, and acquired largely through observation and experimentation on both large and small scales. Indigenous science—including contributions highlighted in the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Indigenous Climate Hub—is crowd-sourced citizen science taken to the next level, constructed over multiple generations in close relationship with the species, habitats, bodies of water, weather patterns, and other natural phenomena surrounding the observers. It is not superstition or isolated observation or pseudoscience, all misinterpretations stemming from the racist and classist assumptions of Western explorers and ethnographers starting in the 17th century and persisting to the present day.

M.C. Escher image, untitled Twisted Truths I just learned about a bill that will allow Florida schools to restrict how faculty teach American history in primary and secondary schools. The news report notes Governor Ron DeSantis says “woke ideology is an attempt to really delegitimize our history and our institutions.” What is “woke ideology” and what does he mean by “our history?” I checked…