The British medical journal The Lancet has become infamous for being woke (its editor is beyond redemption), and is most infamous for the cover below. As I once said, its wokeness makes it the British version of Scientific American, though it deals with original research and is entirely (or supposed to be entirely) medical in nature.
The journal has just become a bit more infamous by publishing a glowing paean to “Indigenous Peoples and their knowledges” (is “knowledge” suppose to be plural here?), seemingly making the knowledge of indigenous people coequal to the knowledge produced by modern science. In other words, it’s adopting what seems to be the national policy of science education in New Zealand.
Click to read; it’s free (the pdf is here). The authors are from Uganda, Canada, Tanzania, New Zealand (of course), the U.S., and Canada:
The main message, besides the boilerplate about oppression, is that indigenous people have knowledge that is essential in helping us solve not only the problem of global warming, but also “health discourse.”
Now you know that’s not really true. While indigenous people may have some observations bearing on the effects of both human health and especially global warming, it’s up to both national politics and international science to address global warming. (I don’t have much confidence they’ll remedy the problem.) And it’s up to modern medicine to deal with health issues. We’re way beyond the days of herbal cures and chanting. To say that indigenous “knowledges” is not only important, but “the optimal way forward” (see below) is to indulge in hyperbolic and performative rhetoric.
But let me give a few quotes.
Indigenous Dene Elder Francois Paulette from northern Canada talked about climate change at the 2015 Parliament of the World Regions and warned “Your way of life is killing my way of life.”
He ended his speech with the words: “Rise! It’s time to stand up for our future.”More than 8 years after this speech, an estimated 68% of the Northwest Territories, Canada, which includes the Dene Peoples territory, was evacuated due to 238 wildfires. Communities lost their homes and hunting and food-foraging areas and were exposed to poor air quality for months on end. Elder Francois’ words still ring true today for many Indigenous Peoples around the globe. We are still far away from the world understanding the impacts of climate change on Indigenous communities and the need to move towards efficient and comprehensive action for planetary health.
Indigenous Peoples have experienced historical and ongoing colonialism, ecocide, epistemicide, racism, and severe marginalisation and are disproportionately affected by poverty and reduced life expectancy.Yet despite these challenges they continue to protect and steward about 80% of all the remaining biodiversity on Earth. For Indigenous Peoples, every day is Earth Day, with the basis of their lives underpinned by a healthy relationship with the planet and extensive Indigenous Traditional Knowledges (ITK) developed over millennia. However, Indigenous leadership within planetary health practice to shape research, policy, and practice is still challenged by a multitude of factors.
It’s simply not true that indigenous people steward 80% of the Earth’s biodiversity. First of all, the reference seems to be talking only about Australia. Second, the reference appears to show that 80% of the Earth’s biodiversity occurs in areas occupied by indigenous people. There’s no evidence I can find that the locals are “stewarding” that biodiversity beyond the statement, “This highlights how indigenous communities have mastered how to live alongside nature in a way that other communities have not.” It seems that living in areas with biodiversity is equivalent to “stewarding” that biodiversity. But we know that’s not true. In many cases indigenous people have destroyed biodiversity, like the extensive burning of natural forest by the Māori or the burning of prairie by Native Americans not to preserve it, but to get food, as well as their mass slaughter of bison by driving them o0ver the cliffs. That killed far more animals than they can use. What kind of “stewarding” is that?
ITK is also extolled for its “practical knowledge”; and indeed, that’s where it excels: understanding the place and rhythm of where food grows, how to catch that food, how to make stuff that one needs to live (knives, baskets, and so on). But ITK is not equivalent to modern science in many ways that are important: ITK is not generally driven by hypothesis testing, double-blind congrolled experiments, statistics, an atmosphere of doubt, and so on. While ITK is a bag of practical observations, modern science is a bag of tools for finding out stuff.
The article also has the obligatory denigration of “western” science, too, and a denial that indigenous “ways of knowing,” contain more than empirical fact. But in fact ITK, like New Zealand’s Mātauranga Māori, comprises far more than practical knowledge, including religion, mythology, traditional stories, superstition, morality, and guidlines for living. My bolding below:
ITK is increasingly informing climate and biodiversity solutions. Although this is positive for Indigenous recognition, Indigenous Peoples who hold this knowledge are not usually directly involved in leading such efforts due to structural marginalisation. Implementation movements need to ensure that Indigenous Peoples and their rights are platformed first and foremost within any discussion around ITK. Additionally, ITK is often deemed myth or legend, or faces erasure within western-based institutions, despite it being replete with practical understandings of ecology, meteorology, and the relationship to the environmental rhythms gained over generations of observation and experimentation. Scientific disciplines, including within the medical and health sciences fields, therefore continue to largely marginalise ITK and there are expectations that it should conform to a western standard of evidence as the sole grading rubric of validity—a demonstration of the continuing effects of colonisation.
Well, yes, we need to bring as many voices as possible within science, but by “voices,” I don’t mean “ethnic groups”. I mean we should cast the net as wide as possible looking for scientific talent, and if we find a bit of practical indigenous knowledge to help move science forward, well, so much the better. But in the end, the statement in bold gives away the authors’ desire to “decolonize” modern science: “western standards of evidence” are apparently not the only standards of evidence for judging knowledge. But if they aren’t, what other standards should we use? Tradition, superstition, and so on? Modern science is simply a toolkit of methods used to ascertain what is true. And there are no other ways to find out what’s “valid” beyond that. (I’m using “science” as “science construed broadly” here, as, for example, what a mechanic does to find out where the problem is in a car.) If the authors think there are ways of knowing beyond this, let them tell us. As it is, you won’t find a single example in this article besides the unsubstantiated claim that indigenous people “steward” 80% of the world’s biodiversity.
It’s hard for me to go on, as this article suffers from the diagnostic problem of all such sacralizations of indigenous knowledge: a lack of examples of how indigenous knowledge has contributed to modern knowledge. A few anecdotes will not suffice. After all, the National Science Foundation has just allocated $29 million to establish a “Center for Braiding Indigenous Knowledges and Science (CBIKS)”, and there had better be substantial payoff to justify that kind of dosh.
The article goes on, but the ideas are familiar: because indigenous people were oppressed and treated badly (often true!), their “knowledges” should be seen as almost sacred, but certainly very valuable, and coequal to “western” science. But if you look at the advances that modern science has made in just 150 years in physics, chemistry, biology, and so on, none of them would even be possible with indigenous knowledge. Yet that knowledge is to be considered highly important, and, without it, say the authors, science is blinkered:
Without meaningful engagement and data representation, Indigenous initiatives are sidelined or neglected. Indigenous Peoples and their knowledges should not just be “considered” within climate change and health discourse and practice, which is typically the case now, but platformed as the optimal way forward.
Platformed as the optimal way forward? What does that mean? Why can’t ITK just be “considered”? Finally, we hear once again the notion that ITK is one of two essential eyes in science’s way of finding knowledge (I believe this metaphor comes from Canada’s First People):
Researchers, practitioners, and policy makers need “to see from one eye with the strengths of Indigenous ways of knowing, and to see from the other eye with the strengths of western ways of knowing, and to use both of these eyes together” for the survival of our planet. We need to understand that Ko au te awa, ko te awa ko au (I am the river, and the river is me).
You see how both eyes are considered necessary and coequal to move science forward? I don’t think that’s the case. Indigenous ways of knowing can, as I’ve said, add practical knowledge to what modern science has found, but it’s by no means a coequal “eye.” And I don’t understand why I have to adopt the mantra that the river is me to study hydrology. After all, I never learned much about genetics from thinking “I am the fruit fly, and the fruit fly is me.”
I’ll regard indigenous knowledge as more important when its promoters start giving us examples—real examples, not anecdotes about catching eels—of how it has made, or can make, important contributions to empirical knowledge. We shall see what the NSF’s $29 million produces.
I have to say that “epistemicide ” is a new one on me.
The people who push this nonsense are tacitly admitting that they can’t win an argument based on facts, so they must insist on a system of knowledge that allows them to make up their own rules.
“Scholasticide” used by members of my faculty union in reference to the destruction of universities in Gaza by fighting between Hamas and the IDF.
“Scholasticide” is a good term for what the ‘scholars’ who coined the term are doing to their own universities.
No Dr. B. – get with the times. Episdemicide is the best New Thing! It cropped up this or last year, as always, in the most deranged places.
Get all aboard the Marginalized Express!
YOU may be a victimized winner!
D.A.
NYC
The original indigenous life is the closest known model of the state-less life communism seeks to get back to. It is also why the United Nations theosophical doctrine – by Robert Muller – goes into indigenous life as an important model (I do not have quotes prepared). In some return to the fallen state fantasy, it can work now in the 21st century “because science” (as the saying goes). Muller develops ideas about controlling “evolution” at all levels.
It’s a disgrace to abuse and manipulate people, history, and science as Edvers, et. al. do. I wonder if the UN has some interest in this.
#Dialectic
I mean return from the fallen state (generally).
I am assuming that all these authors are living in different countries. Dare I ask how they indigenously communicated to co-write this article? Smoke signals? Knotted quipus? Forked sticks?
But I am grateful that they, and The Lancet, made use of Gutenberg’s printing process – indigenous European knowledge, developed further in medieval Germany and later – to print this and so widen our horizons.
Good point. They’re all likely using the Internet too.
The Lancet (From their website)
Our manifesto – Highest standards for medical science
‘The Lancet sets extremely high standards. We select only the best research papers for their quality of work and the progression they bring.’
Oh dear, how embarrassing that The Lancet has been caught up in this ‘woke’ nonsense.
If my Great Great Grandfather – Arthur Ernest Sansom MD, etc. (see wikipedia and who had a fulsome obituary in The Lancet -1907) were alive today, he would no doubt be more than disappointed to think that the pioneering Medical research that appeared in this most august journal, including his own during the late Victorian period, should be equated with ‘indigenous ways of knowing’!
Are we going backwards?
We sure are going backwards, by golly. ‘Cause that’s where the good times were. Besides, for the best indigenous knowledges, all you need to do is attend the best indigenous cowledges. (Intended as a reply to Wm. Taylor comment 4 above)
It also looks like Dr. Nicole Redvers, the lead author, is a naturopathic doctor, which may make the contents of the article more understandable.
Diversity hire. But it’s worse than that. Everything she’s doing is crazy “indigenous” stuff.
https://www.schulich.uwo.ca/epibio/people/faculty/core_appointees/dr_nicole_redvers.html
I think I’m going to be sick.
But not in London if I can help it.
What is a Dphilc, by the way? A typo, or does the ‘c’ mean something?
Looks like a typo to me, but I notice it’s on several sites, all connected to her. No other hits on “DPhilc” that I could find.
DPhil candidate maybe?
(Meeoowww!)
I always laugh at this “marginalization” claim from groups that are the very front and center, the most idolized, aspirational fringe who actually hog the limelight in all public discourses!
Marginalized my …. smudge.
Indigenous Science is so very, very cringe. So emblematic of the left’s view of natives as wee forest Ewoks. The patronizing nature of leftist discourse is embarrassing and like the Palestinian “cause” it demeans us to take their moral claims seriously.
I’ve a big problem with intergenerational guilt. “You” did this to “us” is nonsensical when talking about people who have been dead for centuries, whom nobody has ever met…
D.A.
NYC
“that’s where it excels: understanding the place and rhythm of where food grows, how to catch that food, how to make stuff that one needs to live (knives, baskets, and so on).”
Please provide evidence:
1. How indigenous food growers are able to achieve higher yield per acre and avoiding depletion of arable land better than modern agriculture
2. How indigenous hunters / fishermen / ranchers are able to sustainably harvest animal resources on a large scale better than modern management practices
3. How indigenous knife and basket makers can produce goods that are of higher quality and made more efficiently than modern engineering and manufacturing. Or for that matter how baskets are better for storing peanut butter than glass or plastic containers.
ITK does not excel vs. the standard of modern science and technology. ITK may have better results in certain areas (farming, ranching, basket weaving) than in other “ways”, but that’s a low bar.
Regarding indigenous claims of better heath care practices, the solution is quite simple. Set up some trial doctor offices and hospitals, sponsored by the organizations such as Lancet, NSF, and NGOs that support indigenous knowledge, and have them operate exclusively using indigenous learned practices – none of that evil western stuff. Allow voluntary sign up, but that sign up should require care via indigenous sources exclusively. After 10 years of operation, do an analysis of results (track them via knots and beads if you like). If results are positive, then expand the reach of those facilities, if not then end them. Any negative effects of such care should be documented, but no western medicine should be allowed under any circumstances for those participating in receiving the indigenous care. Authors of the Lancet piece should be first in line, right?
And let’s also include indigenous dentistry in your trial.
Door knob and string? No, I guess that’s an old British solution, so simply White Supremacy
PCC(E), I think it’s helpful to distinguish between the actual supposed content of indigenous ways of knowing – what knowledge they actually produce – and the *methods* by which they produce it. You have noted where indigenous knowledge works, but the methods of producing knowledge is where science wins hands down (unless an indigenous method happens to be co-equal with a scientific method).
My paper for the Lancet would be about an occupational disease of journal editors where they cease to be about curating the best research but become more interested in the journal as a vehicle to promote their own ideology
Critical Medical Theory
Where is all this knowledge that the indigenous hold. Why are they keeping it secret? If it as powerful at solving climate issues or other world problems why the delay?
Why because it does not stand up to scrutiny or indeed effective results.
Under the indigenous stewardship Australian landscape was permanently altered and it has been proposed that this caused the demise of the megafauna. All humans alter the environment and this seems to be an intrinsic facet of human nature. I am not sure that we should embrace this aspect of ourselves.
“… because it does not stand up to scrutiny or indeed effective results.”
Which means it is the scrutiny and origin of what effective results are in the first place that is targeted for Transformation.
““Indigenous Peoples and their knowledges” (is “knowledge” suppose[d] to be plural here?)…” – J. Coyne
Yes, the plural form of “knowledge” is common in Wokespeak, but it wasn’t invented by the Woke Left.
“D2) knowledges =def. whatever is known in the sense of
i) things known, regardless of whether they are known by a specific subject or not, i.e. res cognita or simply items of knowledge that can be introduced by the clause “it is known that…”
ii) individual cognitions, that is formulated items of individual knowledge that can be introduced by the clause “[name/pronoun] know[s] that…”
iii) sciences, that is consistent bodies of (i) and/or of (ii)
iv) any (finite/infinite) disjunction of (i)/(iii)”
(Floridi, Luciano. Scepticism and the Foundation of Epistemology: A Study in the Metalogical Fallacies. Leiden: Brill, 1996. p. 328)
Here are historical examples of the use of “knowledges” (taken from the Oxford English Dictionary):
* 1670: A. Roberts Advent. T.S. 146 “They do it by the Knowledges that they have of Nature.”
* 1626: T. H. Caussin’s Holy Crt. 123 “To proceed..by such knowledges, as are common, with brute beastes, and forsake those of men.”
* 1825: Coleridge Aids Refl. (1848) I. 128 “It is the office..of reason, to bring a unity into all our conceptions and several knowledges.”
* 1836-7: Sir W. Hamilton Metaph. (1859) I. iii. 57 “These two cognitions or knowledges have, accordingly, received different names.”
* 1872: Lowell Wks. (1890) IV. 184 “With Dante wisdom is the generalization from many several knowledges of small account by themselves.”
* 1782: Wolcott (P. Pindar) Ode to R.A.’s iii. Wks. 1812 I. 20 “With scarce more knowledges than these He earns a guinea every day with ease.”
* 1581: Sidney Apol. Poetrie (Arb.) 20 “Poetry,..the..first nurse, whose milk by little and little enabled them to feed afterwards of tougher knowledges.”
* 1605: Bacon Adv. Learn. ii. xvii. 9 “The mathematics, which are the most abstracted of knowledges.”
* 1825: Coleridge Aids Refl. (1848) I. Pref. 19 “A land abounding with men, able in arts, learning, and knowledges manifold.”
* 1860: Marsh Eng. Lang. 28 “The superior attractions and supposed claims of other knowledges.”
Another excellent and useful comment!
I work as a biologist in Canada. I think this post is a bit unkind or ignorant of the value of “TK”. I agree with the premise, that they are not coequal: one is a system of belief (much effective true) the other a tool to test, verify, and expand knowledge. Therefore, I’m totally skeptical that tk has anything serious to contribute to large scale problem solving issues of climate change or medicine. However, many indigenous people do seem to understand that the earth/local ecosystems are systems; this is important because you cant expect to continually take more from a system and not have it break down. However, it isn’t only indigenous people that appreciate systems, and not all of them do, but sure, it is more prevalent in their cultures.
The second area tk is very valuable is in understanding ecology where there are impacts (eg forestry -> moose populations). However, although I find it incredibly useful, I consider it more like a mother load of observation for hypothesis testing. There is a lot of great knowledge on the systems they’ve interacted with for many generations, but it isn’t magical. It’s important that we aren’t hubristic as we build scientific models, a huge historical problem, but that does equate the two.
Overall, the lancet article falls into a new traditional trap: sacrilizing and pontificating indigenous anything. Ironically, this is also somehow deprecating to western/scientific (not the same things) and cantering. Are there eastern and African ways of knowing? I’m not sure, but epistemological nihilism seems to be the destination of that path.
Agree there are sometimes useful tips in ITK that could point a scientist towards new lines of research. But notably this doesn’t seem to work the other direction: scientific discoveries never cause indigenous “Knowledge Keepers” to update their cosmology or traditional knowledges. This seems to be because ITK is by definition traditional and not updatable, whereas science is by definition trying to overturn (or at least stress-test) traditional knowledge.
A second criticism of the comparison between outcomes from scientific research (sometimes it leads to technological innovations like the log skidder that have bad ecological consequences like clearcutting and soil erosion) and ITK is that almost all indigenous cultures lacked the technology needed to leave a really bad ecological footprint on the land and the ocean. It doesn’t make sense to say that “many indigenous people [know that] you can’t expect to continually take more from a system and not have it break down.” In spite of such knowledge, people in those cultures would certainly have caught all the salmon and cut down all the trees (cf. the Maori deforestation of New Zealand and the extinction of the moas) if they’d had gill nets and chainsaws and could use those technologies to keep their children fed and warm and happy. There’s nothing inherently conservationist (or inherently exploitative) about the people in those indigenous cultures: they’re people like everyone else.
More or less agree. And yes, technological comfort is huge, many FN in Canada as they adapt their lifestyles to say hunt with ATVs and high powered rifles have more impact. They are also consumers just as everyone else of non renewables (pickup trucks, tvs houses, meat consumption, etc.). They are becoming major stakeholders in forestry, LNG, etc. So yes, they are people like everyone else (I say this a lot). However, from my experience, many FN in North America have cultural norms of “take only what you need” and an understanding if you take more, the environment will not give back to you. As flawed as they are as all of us, I don’t see this understanding at a cultural level in many of our cultures at the lay person level. I do think that, as much as we are all inclined towards material comforts, our societies would be better suited to tackle issues like climate change our in my own province the impacts of forestry on everything from species at risk conservation to drought/flood mitigation if we understand, not just the details (thats for experts), but broadly that there are impacts, and not just to fairy hippy ideals.
I don’t want to overly expand the lack of awareness in my province to all other societies (at least maybe not in extent). Likewise we can’t paint indigenous in a broad brush. Indigenous itself is so broad and nebulous, there is no concrete definition. It isn’t based on agriculture, because many indigenous societies had forms of husbandry or slash or small scale agriculture. it isn’t tied to being somewhere a long time, Māori haven’t been in NZ that long. It isn’t even on being there first, the Inuit expanded into northern Canada, being the 3rd culture to come to our arctic (successively the previous cultures “disappeared upon new comers arrival), and European (I.e. quebecois) have been in parts of Canada longer some indigenous people have been in their territory. Ultimately, what does indigenous mean? It isn’t defined in the UN declaration (probably for these exact reasons). I have no answer. But I do think that as much as thee is much bullocks around indigenous in places like Canada or NZ, there has been disenfranchisement and a lack of taking them serious. On of my concerns about the fetishising and tokenisation is that it won’t be all that better than the disenfranchisement.
For Matauranga Mahabharata there’s the old stalwart, Ayurvedic medicine. But one takes this with grains of salt picked up using Choprasticks.
“Choprasticks”
Perfect!