#indigenous science

Honestly part of it is that I think everyone should get more spiritual about science

In most places, at most times, for most of history, science, magic, and religion were all the same thing

(I took an entire class at Berkeley on this. It literally changed the way I understand the world.)

If we define "magic" as "anything that cannot exist under the laws of nature," then "anything that exists in nature" by definition can't be magic. Possibly, this is not a useful definition of magic

.

Every other story in the life science that comes out these days is just

Article: *says something*

Indigenous people: WE TOLD YOU SO

e.g.,

Science: Every living thing is interconnected.

Indigenous people: WE TOLD YOU SO (x)

Science: Trees and plants can talk to each other (x, x, x)

Indigenous people: WE TOLD YOU SO

Science: XYZ plant is medicinal!

Indigenous people: WE TOLD YOU SO (too many cases to count)

.

One of the only defining principles of my religion (Unitarian Universalism, if it matters) is that everyone has a piece of the truth

Everyone. Every religion, every person, every living thing

For a good chunk of the 1700s-1800s, science was called "natural philosophy"

Now, we learn the world through the study of genes, the study of atoms, the study of molecules. We are the universe studying itself.

.

"We are the universe becoming aware of itself," says Neil deGrasse Tyson

"For the first time, we have the power to decide the fate of our planet and ourselves. This is a time of great danger, but our species is young, and curious, and brave. It shows much promise," says Carl Sagan. (x)

"Because the cosmos is also within us. We're made of star-stuff. We are a way for the cosmos to know itself," says Carl Sagan (x)

.

Life becoming capable of something new has changed the planet before. It has caused mass extinctions far, far worse than the one we are in. (x, x, x)

But for the first time, we - the species of life capable of new things (ecosystem-scale deliberate change) - can stop ourselves from doing more harm

.

Idk. My teachers and professors made me read the existentialists and the Transcendentalists and the beats and ancient Egyptian spell papyri and ancient Egyptian medical papyri, and sometimes they're the same papyri. Currently I edit book science books and spell books for a living. I''m getting weird about it and it's been really good for my ability to live in this world

.

"With all its sham, drudgery, and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world."

So anyway shout out to potatoes! Thank you ancient Andean agricultural scientists! Literally what can't the right potato do

Restoring Indigenous aquaculture heals both ecosystems and communities in Hawai‘i

For generations, native Hawaiians have understood that their aquaculture systems, fishponds known as loko i‘a, serve as nurseries that seed fish populations in surrounding waters. For the first time, a team of scientists from the Hawaiʻi Institute of Marine Biology (HIMB) have modeled this feat of Indigenous science in a study.

“We are using science to translate ‘ike kupuna, or Indigenous knowledge, into policy,” said study co-author Kawika Winter, an ecologist at HIMB and He‘eia National Estuarine Research Reserve (NERR).

“The value of this paper is that it’s one of the first, if not the first, to really show that there are ways to do aquaculture in ways that benefit the system around it.”

In partnership with He‘eia NERR and Paepae o He‘eia, a nonprofit organization dedicated to stewarding the He‘eia loko i‘a, an ancient Hawaiian fishpond enclosing 36 hectares (88 acres) of brackish water, the team simulated different restoration scenarios in Kāne‘ohe Bay on O‘ahu Island based on a simplified food web. The study found that restoring more of the bay into fully functional loko iʻa would grow fish populations not just within the ponds, but across the bay.

“Aquaculture has a really bad reputation for basically destroying areas around it, but those are commercial approaches to aquaculture that aren’t holistic in their thinking or values-based like Indigenous management,” Winter said. “Rather than ensuring the health of the system, commercial aquaculture is concerned with maximizing profits.”

Winter attributed the success of the loko i’a design to Indigenous thought processes: “Indigenous thinking is operating within the opportunities and constraints of this system and figuring out a way to make things abundant within that context, sometimes even increasing abundance beyond natural levels.

Restoring ecosystems and relationships

Since co-founding Paepae o He‘eia in 2001, study co-author Hi‘ilei Kawelo, a sixth-generation Hawaiian from Kāne‘ohe Bay, has witnessed thousands of volunteers transform the He‘eia loko i‘a.

With the ongoing restoration, Paepae o He‘eia has seen both the aquatic environment and participants’ well-being improve with increased access to traditional foods, strengthening their relationship to place, and fortifying their family and community relationships. “For me and for a lot of our employees, this is one of our outlets, if not our primary outlet for exercising aloha ‘āina [love of the land],” Kawelo said.

“‘Āina is so important, because it is a term for a system that has the nature and its people in an inseparable reciprocal relationship,” Winter said. “The concept is core to this work because it’s about getting back into a way of thinking where there is no separation between the lands, the waters and us.”

While the overarching goal of Paepae o He‘eia and other fishponds is to revitalize Hawai‘i’s extensive Indigenous aquaculture system, Kotubetey said he knows the work may take generations.

"So then I go to my Research Methods class, thinking I got it figured it out. In this class, the teacher (you got it, another white guy) said that your research must be ethical, that we must follow guidelines set out by the university for research on human subjects. The rules are there, my teacher said, to protect the Indians from unscrupulous researchers. Who made these rules I asked, you guessed it, a bunch of white guys. They decided we need protecting and that they were the ones to decide how best to protect us from them."

Published Mar. 30, 2019.

Excerpt:

“The recognition of First Nations contributions to science has been on the rise in recent years. In astronomy, instead of teaching constellations and stories from the Greeks and Romans, many Indigenous people are turning to teaching the star stories of the people who have lived on this land for thousands of years.

[Grace Dillon:] Nowadays, I think in terms of Indigenous sciences rather than science. I feel that’s the way we should think about all sciences, as plural, whether we label them Westernized, Indigenous, or whatever form they may take. Let me quote from Gregory A. Cajete, a member of the Santa Clara Pueblo Nation who has worked in the field of Native science or sciences. He asks, “What is Indigenous science?” According to him, “It is knowing how to live in a place sustainably.” [...] What I love about current Indigenous Futurisms and how they’re changing is that they aren’t constrained by this binary between Western science and Indigenous or non-Western science. One example is Nalo Hopkinson’s novel The New Moon’s Arms (2007), set in the Caribbean. There’s this scene close to the end of the book, after the characters have suffered all of this environmental and extractivist injustice, where the grandmother is passing on her traditional ways of knowledge to her grandson but, since he goes to school, they’re actually teaching each other. “Intergenerational” doesn’t imply a hierarchical, top-down elders’ passing of knowledge only. It’s more of an exchange of ideas. This is what I see going on between generations in our Indigenous communities right now. In the science fiction field, my goal is to quietly change the mission for the top-notch journals in the field that are still simply clinging to stories about advanced technology and this linear way of thinking about knowledge as mere accumulation. [...]

---

[PNM]: In Brazil, the word that the postwar fascist regime used for clearing certain areas of the country to allow for so-called development was “pacification,” which was applied to both Native peoples and the landscape. Instead of saying that they would cut down a forested region or displace and “educate” its local Native communities, they’d call the whole process “pacification.” So that’s become an extremely loaded word in the Portuguese language. Beyond the term’s historical associations with the military fascist regime, it reinforces the colonial notion that equates Native peoples with “nature” and a violent wildness, like the threatening woods that you just mentioned. Going back to your ideas, it’s been almost a decade since your anthology Walking in the Clouds was published. And what a decade it was! We saw an intense transformation in the field of science fiction, with a wave of Indigenous, black, Asian, and many other nonwhite authors, [...] being published and offering some of the decade’s most challenging stories. [...] Do you find that multispecies entanglements and the inclusion of nonhuman beings has also grown in visibility, within and outside these stories? I’m asking this because, for instance, in Brazil, debates about the rights of nonhuman or other-than-human beings have been key to Indigenous [...] discussions for at least the past two decades. There, the debate mostly centers around plant or animal persons, and moreover the [...] question of “what is human,” from an Indigenous point of view. That is, the knowledge that terms like “animal,” “plant,” “human,” and “spirit” may mean something much broader than how modern sciences define them. 

[GD:] Back in 2012, I was talking about animal persons, rock persons, phenomenological persons, plant persons, and so on, and you could sense a quiet skepticism among some people. They would see it as a form of animism, when in fact I was talking about sciences. For example, plants literally converse among each other; plants that live in toxic areas warn other plants to stay away. There are many examples of nonhuman persons in fiction about sciences. Take Thomas King’s novel The Back of the Turtle (2014), a story about a First Nation scientist who is developing chemicals for a bioengineering company that is truly extractivist and toxic, until he sees how that’s impacting the land, together with its animal and plant persons, and he is thrown into a crisis. Does he want to be a scientist? Or at least a scientist in that kind of context?

-------

[PNM:] How do you see the relation between science fictions and Native myths and mythology? While the modern mind may eventually recognize the cultural value of Indigenous myths, it refuses to see them as scientific evidence. I wouldn’t want to project a meaning onto these stories, so I say this very carefully, but although in Brazil you may not find a great presence of Indigenous science fiction, Native traditions and myths almost seem to perform science-fictionally, in how they both rupture modern categories and expectations and allow for imagination beyond colonial frameworks.

[GD:] I have a lot to say about this. The first thing I’d like to do is to eradicate the term “myth” or “mythology,” because that implies that these stories are false or that they are fictions that should be questioned. Instead, what I do -- and this is what I grew up with -- is to call them “stories.” Everything is storytelling. Indigenous sciences are embedded in stories; this is how we share our Indigenous sciences. I grew up in an [...] anarchist community that was Anishinaabe-founded, at least to some degree. So, when I read Ursula K. Le Guin’s 1974 novel The Dispossessed, I could absolutely understand the whole process of community and of shunning or shaming a person as a form of power and control, but also the recognition of combining art with science, rather than understanding them as separate. Although her story is science fictional, by acknowledging the role of storytelling in this combination between art and science, Le Guin again takes the fiction out of science fiction, and works with other forms of science. Our word aadizookaanan means “ceremonial stories” or “sacred stories.” Most First Nations don’t share those sacred stories with outsiders. However, in 2012 many of the nations I belong to -- and you should know that we Nish peoples are often called the pacifist-anarchists among other Indigenous nations -- got together and decided to share not only our gikendaasowin, meaning herbal knowledge and science and how they interact with ceremonies and songs, but also our aadizookaanan. We decided that some of our sacred stories needed to be shared globally, because they were necessary right now for dealing with Mizzu-Kummik-Quae, Mother Earth. So the reason I’m interested in science fiction is that when I was little and we had firesides, sweats, and other ceremonies, we were telling stories about star peoples that came to earth in, basically, space canoes. For me, the concept of a spaceship was not unusual. And, of course, we are all star people. We are made of stardust, which is scientifically accurate. Everything is made of stardust.

---

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.