Canadian university advertises for scientists expert in Indigenous “ways of knowing”

January 22, 2024 • 1:15 pm

The combination of Canadian wokeness and the migration across the Pacific of New Zealand’s “indigenous ways of knowing” trope has led to this ad by The University of Victoria.  The U of V wants to hire three candidates in any branch of science with expertise “in either (a) working with Indigenous ways of knowing, or (b) in infusing Indigenous science approaches and perspectives into science.”

Click below to see the ad:

But before giving specifics, this being Canada, the ad has to have a VIDEO territory acknowledgment, to wit:

We acknowledge and respect the Songhees, Esquimalt and WSÁNEĆ peoples on whose traditional territory the university stands and whose historical relationships with the land continue to this day. We invite applicants to watch the “Welcome to the Territory” video and to visit the Songhees, Esquimalt, and W̱SÁNEĆ Nations’ websites to learn more about these vibrant communities. To learn more about the Indigenous community on campus, please see the Indigenous Academic and Community Engagement (IACE) office’s website.

Well, whose territory is it? And shouldn’t they be giving the U of V back to either the Songhees, Esquimalt and WSÁNEĆ peoples? (I guess they first need to determine who morally owns the land.)

Oy! This is part of a job ad! Well, granted, it may help attract those three scientists who are tasked with furthering indigenous ways of knowing or melding them with modern science:

But now the real meat: the job ad itself. Bolding is theirs:

Indigenization and Decolonization at UVic
The University of Victoria is committed to the ongoing work of decolonizing and Indigenizing the campus community both inside and outside the classroom. UVic released our second Indigenous Plan in 2023 and the Faculty of Science has drafted its Indigenization Implementation Strategy (2022-2026) as we prepare ourselves for the work ahead. Decolonization and Indigenization are integral aspects of the 2023 UVic Strategic Plan and the 2022 Faculty of Science Strategic Plan.

To advance our work on Indigenization and decolonization, the Faculty of Science is excited to invite Indigenous applicants for three faculty positions in any field of Science. The three available positions are at the tenure-track assistant professor level and are cross-posted across our six departments: Biochemistry & Microbiology, Biology, Chemistry, Earth & Ocean Sciences, Mathematics & Statistics, and Physics & Astronomy.

Among the qualifications is this:

“The candidate has interest, potential or experience in either (a) working with Indigenous ways of knowing, or (b) in infusing Indigenous science approaches and perspectives into science.”

Do I need to emphasize once again that there are no “indigenous ways of knowing” beyond the ways that modern science “knows” things. To be frank, indigenous “ways of knowing” are inferior to modern science, which has a whole armamentarium for determining what counts as “knowledge” (experimentation, controls, replication, hypothesis-testing, pervasive doubt, and so on). In contrast, indigenous ways of knowing invariably come down to simple observation of natural phenomena or assertions (say, about the efficacy of plants as medicines) that aren’t tested using blind studies. And without verification and replication and testing, you don’t have knowledge; you have claims.

In addition, Indigenous “ways of knowing” are almost invariably gotten down with a large dose of spirituality, religion, or tradition. Some Native Americans, for example, deny that their ancestors came to the area around 20,000 years ago, saying that their tradition tells them that they were “always here.” Under indigenous ways of knowing, experiments must conform to what is sacred: you can’t build a telescope, for example, on Hawaiian land that’s seen as sacred, or send ashes to the Moon because “Grandmother Moon lit the way for our ancestors.” (There are better reasons not to clutter up the Moon.)

It’s also for these reasons that part b) above—”infusing Indigenous science approaches and perspectives into science”—is largely futile. What does this even mean? What is an “Indigenous science approach/perspective”? Does this mean that fish are best found in area X at time Y, and that berries are likely to be found in locality Z in the fall? Or plant Q can cure you if you have malady R? If so, then yes, that’s empirical “knowledge” of a sort, but it has to be tested using real science, not “Indigenous science approaches”. The approaches may suggest hypothesis, but these “approaches” cannot become part of modern science until they’re verified using the tools of modern science. In other words, there is not Indigenous science, only science done by Indigenous peoples using the methods of modern science.

It is, then, more or less of a travesty for the U of V to hire three Indigenous people to “decolonize” science, which means, of course, to throw away the tools of modern science, developed by oppressive colonizers, and use whatever empirical/spiritual knowledge the new professors have. Or, as Wikipedia puts it,

According to Mpoe Johannah Keikelame and Leslie Swartz, “decolonising research methodology is an approach that is used to challenge the Eurocentric research methods that undermine the local knowledge and experiences of the marginalised population groups”.

Yes, science, now used worldwide by many non-European people, is still seen as not only “Eurocentric”, but as “undermining local knowledge and experiences” of Indigenous groups. But that like science undermining, as some Māori insist, their tradition that their Polynesian ancestors discovered Antarctica in the 7th century A.D?  If so, then “colonizing science”, which really means using modern science, is going to win, for it tells us that there is not a shred of evidence for such claims. As best we know, Antarctica was seen by Russian sailors in 1820.

These job ads, then, are threefold travesties. They undermine real science by replacing scientists who could be finding out real stuff with scientists committed to buttressing Indigenous “ways of knowing”. They suck up money by funding largely futile endeavors. And, worst of all, they confuse students (and the populace) about what science really is: a set of methodologies, developed over a few centuries, that gives us ever closer approaches to truth. It has no legends, Gods,  or spirutuality.

One could add, I suppose, that these adds are really efforts to advance science, but a big DEI initiative to advance Indigenous people themselves. That’s fine, but you shouldn’t don’t do that by sacralizing their ways of knowing. Instead, you ensure that they get the opportunities to study and practice modern science—the so-called “Eurocentric” science that is the only real “way of knowing”. To do otherwise is to erode the understanding of science.

***********

Finally, we see below the racial requirements (their bolding). Note that you don’t really have to be an indigenous person; you only have to identify as indigenous, and do so in writing. But that is weird. If the University has an equity plan and the government a Human Rights Code limiting applicants to Indigenous peoples, on what basis do they allow a non-Indigenous person who self-identifies as one? (I doubt such people would be accepted for the job anyway.). Of course this would be considered a violation of the law in America, but Canada isn’t the U.S.

In accordance with the University’s Equity Plan and pursuant to section 42 of the BC Human Rights Code, the selection will be limited to Indigenous peoples. Our search committee will review the pool of applications from those who self-identify with this designated group. Candidates from this group must self-identify in their cover letter to be considered for this position.

h/t: Luana

46 thoughts on “Canadian university advertises for scientists expert in Indigenous “ways of knowing””

  1. Harvard has a land acknowledgement too:

    Harvard University is located on the traditional and ancestral land of the Massachusett, the original inhabitants of what is now known as Boston and Cambridge. We pay respect to the people of the Massachusett Tribe, past and present, and honor the land itself which remains sacred to the Massachusett People.

    https://hunap.harvard.edu/land-acknowledgement

    2. the Massachusett, the original inhabitants of what is now known as Boston and Cambridge.

      … for some value of “original” that is around 7 or 8 thousand years after the original inhabitants (tribe name, and language, and indeed, skin colour – unknown) were first expelled in the normal round of “nation” upon “nation” internecine violence and upheaval.

    3. Yes, and if they and all the other virtue signalers really feel remorse about their “colonization” of the land, they should give the land back or pay reparations. The latter could come in the form of back rent for use of the property. They should also pay for the use of the land going into the future through leases or other negotiated arrangements. Some of this stolen land has become quite valuable, and the original inhabitants should surely share in the appreciated value. No? Anything less is disingenuous. Go out and find the descendants of the original inhabitants and start the conversation.

      1. It’s a little more complicated than that, Norman. What the decolonization/land-back movement wants is not fee-simple “ownership” of private land currently owned by settlers. That would just give them a municipal property tax liability which, if they couldn’t pay it, would make it forfeit to the municipality. (The Indian Act paternalistically forbids bands to own their Reserve land to eliminate this very risk.) What they want is state sovereignty over the vast tracts of land, to take it back from Canada. On this land they would organize their own 633 governments, pass their own laws, develop a foreign policy, and deal with fee-simple land ownership any way they chose. They might respect current deed holders, or they might not. They might allow current settlers to stay on as rent-paying tenants, or they might ethnically cleanse them, unless the United Nations Cavalry came riding to the rescue of….white people? Nah.

        This process is very much like the River-to-the-Sea movement where the state of Israel ceases to exist, which is why the events of 7 Oct had such resonance among the decolonization crowd in North America. The purpose of land acknowledgements is to keep reminding us that our Canadian sovereignty is tentative, not just that UVic might considering giving its land back.

        As a practical matter, only a few indigenous dreamers want actual sovereign land back which they would have to govern with no money from the Canadian state and the flight of private capital. What they do instead is a continuous lawfare of land claims which they settle for enormous cash payments. They agree to “allow” us to retain sovereignty over the contested land area but with expanded obligations to “consult” with indigenous people before we do anything with it. Some of the money then goes to finance the next lawsuit and the rest goes we know not where. It doesn’t seem to be making ordinary indigenous people themselves any better off but the lawyers and consultants are making out like gangbusters.

        1. Thank you for your comment. I completely agree with you that the indigenous peoples have their own positions and tactics regarding the redress they would like to obtain from the colonizing group. My comment was meant to apply only to the institutions that adopt land acknowledgment statements and to the people who start meetings with land acknowledgment statements. (The latter seems to be happening here in the U.S. with some frequency.) My point? I doubt their sincerity.

        2. This is the process in NZ also, and to some degree in Australia. Even with the best of intentions, and piles of money, uranium land, etc. elites of these communities always end up better off and screw the poor sods in their own communities. Which in Australia is pretty grim.

          “Sacred sites” in the Australian context always struck me as strange for nomadic people, kind of a contradiction.

          Fortunately Australians roundly rejected “The Voice” in a referendum:
          https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-67110193
          After 30 years I’m still a (dual) citizen but couldn’t vote overseas in NYC.

          D.A.
          NYC/FL

        3. It seems to me that our current government’s policy of “speaking nation to nation” with bands has rather encouraged just what we didn’t need: another sovereignty movement.
          Incidentally, I came across an article two days ago (in the NP of all places) suggesting that the housing crisis be solved by letting indigenous people use their ancient lands to build condominiums, free of all municipal, provincial and federal taxes, and not subject to planning and development regulations! And I am totally certain that such condos would be well maintained and run, with no corruption whatsoever.

    4. Isn’t it traditional for faculty positions in Science to be held by people qualified in some way? Why does the U of V say you can just self identify as being qualified in a field that doesn’t pass scientific scrutiny?

      Call me old fashioned, but I like people working on nukes, medicine and aerodynamics to have real qualifications, not imaginary ones.

      1. Tsk tsk Joolz, you missed the point, “the science faculty are excited “ this overrides all need for actual science. Canadian idiotic virtue signalling at its best! Sock boy Trudeau will be delighted. I wonder who is paying for all this crap?

  2. And shouldn’t they be giving the U of V back to either the Songhees, Esquimalt and WSÁNEĆ peoples?

    I’m betting that those peoples were merely the last-but-one to have stolen the land off others and colonised it.

    Fun fact: I think it’s true that there is only one location in the world where we can be fairly certain that the current inhabitants of the land include the direct descendants of the very first wave of settlers.

    Even funner fact, the above inhabitants are the only indigenous people anywhere that the UN refuses to recognise as being indigenous and refuses to recognise as having any say in the status of the land they inhabit.

    Anyone guess where?

      1. I don’t think so. There’s no population there in the sense of families giving birth and raising children, who then go on to raise their own children there.

        Geographically close though!

          1. You might be right! (In which case my assertion of “only” would be wrong.) There might also be some Inuit peoples who qualify, since they are a relatively recent migration into empty land (I’m not fully sure though).

            But I was thinking of the Falkland Islands, which were first settled (in the above sense of families raising children) by British settlers, and their multi-generational descendants are still there.

            [Before that there were occasional landings by whaling ships and various military landings claiming it for Spain, France, England or (what is now but wasn’t then) Argentina, but no settled population.]

            Notably, the UN’s “Special Committee on Decolonization” refuses to recognise these direct descendants of the first settlers as having any say in the status of the islands.

        3. There’s no population there in the sense of families giving birth and raising children, who then go on to raise their own children there.

          The Argentinians are at least part-way down that road, having had at least one infant born on the continent. Some time in the early 80s, IIRC – back when there was a Malvinas Jaw-Jaw, instead of the Malvinas Blatant Populist Sentiment Appeal (400-odd fatalities).
          What has happened to that/ those child/ren, I do not know. They’re old enough to be subject to some serious economic blandishments, whether by the government or the Argentine equivalent of “Married At First Sight” or similar barrel-scraping advertising programmes.

    2. The earliest anatomically modern humans emerged 200,000 to 300,000 years ago in in southern Africa. I guess there. Other places humans have come and gone, stolen land from previous settlers for as long as we know.

    3. Iceland is the only nation whose current inhabitants are its first inhabitants. But, as European, they do not qualify for indigenous status.

      1. Plus of course they are white and successful which automatically deprives them of indigenous status. Sarcasm!

  3. I’d be interested to know how the UN SDG goals and ESG metrics work to make this job what it is. I assume it’s the same as any other higher ed administration agenda incentivized by the UN — and their “red thread” of “transformation” as described in :

    Parr, et. al.
    “Knowledge-driven actions: transforming higher education for global sustainability”
    2022
    UNESCO
    https://doi.org/10.54675/YBTV1653

    … BTW “sustainability” is coded Marxism for the sustain of communism.

    [ Ouroboros ]

    “As above, so below”
    –Corpus Hermeticum

  4. Has there ever been a paper published in a reputable journal using indigenous knowledge that advance physics, astronomy, chemistry or mathematics? (With apologies I’ve excluded biology and geology as they could draw upon historical knowledge in some limited circumstances.)

  5. I recently read Steven Pinker’s book Rationality. In it he makes the rather good point that all humans (at least some of the time) act rationally, and have always done so. Pinker defines rationality as ‘the ability to use knowledge to attain goals’. He illustrates this with the example of the San (the bushmen of the Kalahari) and their methods of hunting. Their ‘ways of knowing’ for hunting are rational. Pinker then points out how rationality has been refined over time with the development of, inter alia, logic, induction, and (Bayesian) probability. In this way dead-white-male rationality is seen as the refinement of universal rationality. I think this is PCC’s point put another way. Consequently it would be helpful to separate indigenous ‘ways of knowing’ into those that are effective and those that are not effective ‘to attain goals’ i.e. which are rational and which irrational. Some of the rational ones are valuable. If you are hungry in the Kalahari desert, find one of the San, because they will be better at getting food than you are.

  6. I am a multiple-time graduate of the University of Victoria. Victoria — indeed, British Columbia as a whole, is almost completely subsumed in the indigenous narrative and wholly bought into the victim-oppressor trope. UNDRIP is in legislation here as BCRIP, and it affects (or infects) almost every aspect of everything. UVic even has an “indigenous law” faculty, although what indigenous laws they are teaching are unclear. What is more clear is that “indigenous law” really means learning means and methods of using that dastardly colonial law to get more money from Canadian taxpayers. There should never be an “unceded land” narrative for Victoria because the land was all covered under one of the 14 Douglas Treaties (that conveniently get dismissed when inconvenient, which is all of the time lately).

  7. I would like to see a coherent statement of what an indigenous epistemology is all about. What counts as evidence? How does one generate hypotheses? How does one test hypotheses? How does a concept enter the established canon of what is known about the world? Are there books on this topic that are open for independent evaluation? Does independent evaluation even count as something that matters?

    Help us “western” scientists understand what you are proposing as an indigenous “way of knowing.”

  8. About 70 Canadian university signed the Scarborough Charter, which commits each school to hire about a dozen black and about a dozen indigenous faculty members. This hire is part of that commitment at UVic.

    “On what basis do they allow a non-Indigenous person who self-identifies as one?”

    My university is preparing to do the same. An important but so far top-secret process is to lay the groundwork for deciding who is indigenous enough to be interviewed for those jobs.

    The need for this new policy became urgent a couple years ago: my university gave an honourary doctorate to Mary Ellen Turpel-Lafond, who leveraged her pretendian status into government, administrative, and university appointments. When it came out that she was just a white girl from Niagara Falls, my university (which is all in on indigenization) asked for the doctorate back, and started trying to figure out to make sure that never happens again.

    1. I don’t see the problem. Ms. Turpel-Lafond just self-identified as a Treaty Indian, which would no doubt qualify her at U. Vic.

      She also self-identified as having received an LLM from Cambridge when she had not, of having served as a QC in Saskatchewan when she did not, and having co-authored a book which doesn’t exist. We must bear in mind that self-identification is the basis of non-Western, holistic, spiritual Ways of Knowing. It is better spelled self-identifiction, and we may soon see academic departments of Critical Self-Identifiction Studies.

    2. I doubt that it will be adequate to “identify” as indigenous. Pretendians are being exposed regularly and they don’t do well afterwards.

      I don’t know why the Pretendian phenomenon is so common. A recent famous case is the singer Buffy St Marie. She spent decades claiming native ancestry. CBC TV did an expose on her. Turns out she is of Italian ancestry and was born in Massachusetts. There are native groups who specialize in finding Pretendians.

      1. Bring back Archibald Belaney! The founding father of the pretendians and by far the most successful!

  9. Lifting my head from the shame in which it has been hanging…

    This is just a reparations scam to restrict hiring to one grievance-prone racial group but with the scam dressed up in indigenous mumbo-jumbo to make it look less nakedly racist and cowardly. Very few indigenous people in Canada know how to use traditional ways of knowing to do anything practical any more. They are totally immersed in and dependent on the modern technological and rent-seeking economy. There is no pretense that the successful candidates will do any research that actually uses any of the special ways of knowing blathered about in the advertisement…or, likely, any research at all. The university doesn’t care that we are making fun of it. None of them do. “The issue isn’t the issue. The issue is the revolution,” as I heard James Lindsay say. Or, in this case, hoping that the revolution smiles indulgently on its enablers.

    What if the university can’t find any certifiably indigenous candidates with the qualifications or “potential” expected? (“PhD or expect to achieve it soon–all but dissertation.”) In the fine print in some of these ads — and they are now commonplace — you can read that the university may offer the position to someone with a terminal degree (i.e., not a research doctorate) plus professional experience in a related field. A high school science teacher with an M.Ed. might suffice for these positions if they would otherwise go vacant. Everyone has “potential”, right? A degree in architecture was specifically mentioned as a fall-back indigenous qualification for a federally funded research chair in engineering science at the associate or full professor level at University of Waterloo a couple of years ago.

    As for “self-identification”, I think it is safe to say that the formidable indigenous women who run UVic will make damn sure that no “pretendians” get hired. There has been altogether too much of that lately.

    1. “What if the university can’t find any certifiably indigenous candidates with the qualifications or “potential” expected?” One tactic I’ve seen at an Ontario university is to advertise for a “biologist” of any stripe, from genes & molecules to ecosystems. This is ~never done except for Scarborough Charter job ads. A friend predicts that even with these efforts we will end up raiding our new black colleagues not from Canada but from the best universities in Africa.

      Sorry for over-commenting here.

    2. “The issue isn’t the issue. The issue is the revolution,”

      Hey, that’s my line! 😉

  10. This trend is so dispiriting, for science, education and our society in general.

    And it is so DEEPLY patronizing. The left treat indigenous people like wee forest ewoks.

    Seems like as soon as we got on the way to slaying the beast of Christianity, even stupider woke bs came along.

    I’m so not with those (like Ayan H. Ali) who see monotheisms as the only cure for this. You don’t excise one disorder by replacing it with an older one.

    This nonsense, woke, has to be battled separately. I’m glad you’re part of doing so, PCC(E).
    D.A.
    NYC

  11. Insane.

    Our department is hoping to leverage this into hiring an actual scientist by the way, while giving the University the chance to look virtuous according to their own standards.

  12. PS As a foreigner, the explicit race-based hiring and land acknowledgements are utterly noxious. However, from asking around, the business with land acknowledgements is unintentionally quite funny. Claim is that it reflects what the various bands would historically do in large gatherings, wherein the tribal leader of one “nation” would welcome another “nation” to their land. Anyway I find this amusing because that makes this a textbook case of what would in other circumstances be cursed as “cultural appropriation.”

    Somehow I suspect that local bands would not be so amused if they learned that our Korean department chair has to go through the ritual with a bunch of mostly white/Asian scientists whenever we have a faculty meeting.

  13. It is easy to predict the outcome when this fashion trend reaches Britain, as is no doubt under way already. Computer courses will teach that the concept of “pixels” came from the Picts, through their special Pictish Way of Knowing. All faculty meetings will begin with a land acknowledgment to the Beaker Folk. And special provision will be made to appoint faculty who show descent from (or at least self-identification with) Cheddar Man.

  14. I self-identify as a member of the Franks, the Germanic tribe indigenous to the Main river valley. May I apply to those positions?

    Edit:
    One would hope that one cheeky indigenous researcher would test how absurd of a ritual he could rope the faculty into.

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