Indigenous Knowledge and the Future of Science

August 15, 2019 9:24 AM

Research on First Nation land often exploits the people who live there. What discoveries could come out of true collaboration?

Living in the community gave her an irreplaceable edge in understanding the caribou. More importantly, it granted her the time and space to win the trust of community members. Their knowledge shaped her work. Polfus is part of a growing movement of scientists who don’t just “consult” with Indigenous communities—they immerse themselves in them, learn from them, share knowledge with them, and return something to them in the process. The Dene call this mode of thinking “łeghágots’enetę,” translated to “learning together.”

posted by poffin boffin (5 comments total)

Going to have to blow the trumpet for Aotearoa here. We're sailing the path to research led by mana whenua and, I think, leading the world in indigenous research by Māori, for Māori, and led by Māori. One of the latest projects: Māori as oceanographers - Funding secured for cross-cultural ocean knowledge network

Still, "leading the world" in this area isn't great. I'll recognise that there's a long way to go. For example, Vini Olsen-Reeder wrote the first PhD thesis in te reo, the Māori language, but that didn't happen until 2017.

(Disclaimer - I work for the Ministry that funds the NZ science system.)
posted by happyinmotion at 12:20 PM on August 15, 2019 [6 favorites]

This post also made me think of New Zealand! Particularly the work by Keoni Mahelona and Te Hiku media, working on speech recognition and text-to-speech for Te Reo Māori. Keoni himself is originally from Hawaiʻi, a computer scientist, and works on indigenous people's rights to their own data. He's active in native Hawaiian rights too, he has some things to say about the Mauna Kea protests as well here in this podcast.

I'm particularly struck by the connection to the passage in the post's article

Polfus is part of a growing movement of scientists who don’t just “consult” with Indigenous communities—they immerse themselves in them, learn from them, share knowledge with them, and return something to them in the process.

There's such an arrogance to scientists coming from outside and saying "we're here now to discover the truth of your world". Learning to work with the local people, to respet and learn from the Dene's knowledge local ecosystems or Māori's expertise in their own language.

I'm still a pretty hardcore believer in science and the scientific method. But there's no reason you can't do science with indigenous peoples, rather than in spite of them. Particularly in the modern era where many indigenous folks have access to the same scientific education the outsiders have.
posted by Nelson at 3:07 PM on August 15, 2019 [3 favorites]

I work with someone who collaborated with a Northwestern tribe to help them control invasive weeds using biological control. He enjoyed the experience.
posted by acrasis at 3:48 PM on August 15, 2019

Yes!

Researchers who want to work in Heiltsuk territory must now get approval from the Heiltsuk Integrated Resource Management Department. It’s a way for the First Nation to vet projects before they begin. Housty says ultimately it’s about the expression of Heiltsuk sovereignty over their lands and waters—something from which the First Nation has never shied away when it comes to other pressures on its resources.

“It’s not enough to say you’re sovereign—you have to act sovereign,” Housty says, quoting, as she often does, the community’s elders.

Most applications are accepted or returned to the researchers with suggestions on how to improve them. Some have been outright rejected—“often social-science-research questions that we felt were racist or exploitative of the community,” explains Housty.

posted by spamandkimchi at 5:27 PM on August 15, 2019

nice to hear this is happening. see also "braiding sweetgrass" book by robin wall kimmerer. she's a native american academic and talks about reconciling those styles of knowledge...
posted by danjo at 7:27 AM on August 16, 2019 [1 favorite]