Last October I posted a critique of a new National Science Foundation (NSF) initiative designed to combine indigenous knowledge with modern science—in the U.S. this time, and to the tune of $30 million. The NSF was very optimistic, as you can see from the article below in Science (click to read; see also a similar report in Nature):
My main beef with that study is that it conflated a fusion of indigenous and modern knowledge with an attempt to create equity among researchers themselves. As I wrote at the time:
Thus, if you’re going to use money to improve science, and help indigenous people at the same time, virtually all of that money should be earmarked for training indigenous youngsters to learn science, and ensure that there’s no bigotry against them. That is, indigenous people should have equal opportunity from the outset to learn STEM. Then, those with talent and desire can become scientists using modern science. To my mind, this is better than simply scouring indigenous cultures for bits of knowledge that can be further investigated, or giving money to indigenous people without fixed projects to fund, simply as a form of reparations. To fund education rather than cultures themselves is preferable because the results are permanent and self-sustaining (once the pipeline is open, it tends to stay open).
But I was unaware that another “braiding” project—yes, they both use that word—attempting to fuse two “ways of knowing” had been undertaken by a different funding group: the U.S. National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM). This project had a mere $2 million in funding, with the dosh provided by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, and NASA.
I don’t know the fate of the NSF project, but the NASEM one didn’t last long, with the joint effort collapsing after a short period of time, and for two reasons.
Click the Science article below to read about the failure of the new endeavor:
The purpose of this endeavor, which involved a panel whose lucubrations were then to be published by NASEM, was this:
. . . to explore how best to pursue coproduction, the process by which scientists, Indigenous community members, and other scientific stakeholders jointly create and share knowledge in a way that values diverse perspectives.
. . . Gregory Symmes, NASEM’s chief program officer, confirmed the panel’s job was “to summarize what’s known about … coproduction,” and that he was aware of the committee’s desire to use the concept in its study early on. But, he says, “The study itself was not intended to be coproduced.” Instead, “We thought we could work through those differences” by, for example, including a discussion in the final report of the obstacles the committee faced.
Note that “coproduction” links back to the first NSF-funded study, involving “two-eyed seeing,” the notion that you can increase our knowledge of the world most efficiently if you combine vision from one “eye” (modern science) with vision from the other eye (indigenous “ways of knowing”). The original NSF project, which largely involved trying to fix climate change, reported this:
The center will explore how climate change threatens food security and the preservation of cultural heritages through eight research hubs in the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. (Ranco co-leads the U.S. Northeast hub.) Each hub will also serve as a model for how to braid together different knowledge traditions, or what its senior investigators call “two-eyed seeing” through both Indigenous and Western lenses.
The new NASEM study, which involved a committee of 11 members including three Native scholars, began well, with a harmonious initial meeting. But then things fell apart, and for two reasons (my headings below; quotes are indented):
1.) The committee was not tasked with producing the final report. Normally, National Academies reports are written by a National Academies-designated committee that includes both Academies members and selected experts who are not Academies members. In addition, every study has many other ‘participants’ who are not members of the committee, but interviewees or presenters who bring information into the discussion, while not participating in the committee’s internal deliberations or report writing. Also excluded from writing the report are people who could conceivably profit from what that report says, and this may have involved people excluded below.
Committee members knew the approach ran counter to NASEM’s rules for what it calls a consensus study. “The traditional way in which a National Academies report works is that you go and meet with people, and they can inform you, but they can’t participate in the [committee’s] deliberations or help shape the report,” says committee member ecologist F. Stuart “Terry” Chapin, emeritus professor at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.
But in this case some of the members of the committee, realizing that they wouldn’t be writing the final report, were upset. The deliberations about “coproduction of knowledge” apparently didn’t involve the coproduction of the report. The indigenous members also felt that they were marginalized in the deliberations:
Many committee members who spoke to Science say they believed their assignment—to explore the “challenges, needs, and opportunities associated with coproduction of environmental knowledge between scientists and local and Indigenous experts”—would require them to take a different approach given the subject matter. “At our first meeting [in August 2023], several people raised concerns that here was a project talking about coproduction of knowledge, but we weren’t allowed to use those processes to carry out the study,” says Gordon, who runs a company that advises scientists and government agencies on coproduction.
In the following, Kyle White is an “environmental justice expert at the University of Michigan and a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation.”
. . . Whyte also vented his frustration that the committee’s statement of task did not require that the study be coproduced. However, he told participants at the February workshop he “was willing to keep working on the project” to “figure out a way to do this right.” But in late March, he and three other committee members wrote to their colleagues and NASEM staff calling for the study to be “paused.” The four proposed instead writing an interim report on how to “allow equitable participation by Indigenous partners” that could be the basis for a new study on coproduction.
. . . Another participant who was not a committee member, Philomena Kebec, says comments she and other Native people made about coproduction during discussions at breakout sessions weren’t brought back up during plenary sessions and felt like sidestepping. Kebec, a member of the Bad River Band of Lake Superior Chippewa and its head of economic development, says Native representatives were hoping for a dialogue about traditional knowledge across a range of scientific topics as well as “about the power dynamics affecting the ability to share information effectively.”
The issue of “power dynamics” will come up in a second.
2.) The second workshop was to be held in an indigenously-owned casino, and the NASEM didn’t want that.
But that high didn’t last long. Before a second workshop in February, tensions arose over the choice of its venue, which was the Kewadin casino owned by the Sault Ste. Marie tribe of Chippewa Indians in Michigan. Tribal casinos hold important meaning to Native nations as places of gathering and bastions of tribal sovereignty. Yet several sources told Science NASEM leaders saw the venue as inappropriate for a meeting the institution was sponsoring.
The tension made four members of the committee write to the NASEM asking that the deliberations be “paused” and that they be allowed to write an interim report. But that didn’t fly. Shortly thereafter, Whyte was told that he was dropped from the committee, and then the committee (and the whole study) were dropped and removed from the NASEM’s website.
The whole thing was a big failure. Yes, the casino fracas looks a bit trivial, but there are really two issues, not emphasized in the report, that doomed this project to failure, as it will doom others like it.
First, while there is indeed indigenous knowledge, and some of it can indeed be “braided” with knowledge coming from modern science, the latter is far more broad and important than the former. Indigenous knowledge, as far as I can see from reading about it, involves conclusions, based on trial and error, that help local people lives their lives in their environment. It involves things like when to plant and harvest crops, where and when to hunt and fish, how to navigate (in the case of Polynesians) and so on. It’s practical knowledge, which still makes it knowledge, but does not involve empirical studies of the wider world like the ambits of modern chemistry, physics, and biology.
Even if we think about the knowledge that we “colonists” use to live our lives in our environment, that depends heavily on modern science: we take antibiotics, use cellphones, fly in planes, rely on scientifically-generated weather predictions, and so on. When you think of how indigenous knowledge not derived from modern science can be braided with it, almost all of the braid will consist of knowledge coming from modern science. There is simply no way to make indigenous knowledge coequal in breadth or social importance to modern science. It sounds patronizing and colonialist to say that, but that’s really the way it is. (Note that Science buys into the erroneous “Western knowledge” trope in the title above; this trope is insulting to the many people around the world who do science.)
This lack of coequality is exacerbated by the second observation: these discussions are as much about power as about science. It’s an attempt of “minoritized” groups to wield as much scientific power as do majority (“Western) groups—a way, I suppose to compensate for historical bigotry against indigenous people. The power trope is most obvious—and successful—in New Zealand, where the attempt to equalize science with local “ways of knowing” has already infiltrated science, secondary schools, and colleges. Here are two expressions of it in the article:
“There’s a dearth of knowledge on how to apply other ways of knowing,” said Chad English of the Packard foundation, speaking at the panel’s kickoff meeting. “And it’s not just scholarship,” English noted about the scope of the study. “It’s also about addressing the power dynamic—who is at the table, and whose voices are being heard.”
and from the quote above:
Kebec, a member of the Bad River Band of Lake Superior Chippewa and its head of economic development, says Native representatives were hoping for a dialogue about traditional knowledge across a range of scientific topics as well as “about the power dynamics affecting the ability to share information effectively.”
It is of course churlish to mistreat indigenous people or make them feel inferior, especially when they’re invited to participate with others on an equal basis on a panel like this. But perhaps the “power imbalance” ultimately reflects the “knowledge imbalance” that I describe above. If your group isn’t really coequal in scientific knowledge to another, you can hardly expect to have as much influence in the conclusions as does the group espousing the more effective and important “way of knowing.”
That, of course, is no excuse to ignore people or talk over them. But perhaps it’s time to have a hard look at the “indigenous science versus modern science” issue and lay out which “way of knowing” is most important in doing things like fixing anthropogenic climate change or ameliorating epidemics of infectious disease. People avoid this discussion because it’s uncomfortable—indeed, the University of Auckland, after promising such a discussion, has avoided it for three years. But eventually it’s a discussion that must be had, and it helps nobody to pretend in the interim that all “ways of knowing” are equal.
h/t Jon
I feel a “coming back down to Earth”-y feeling from this…
One hopes so for sure. But in my neck of the academic woods we’re still pretending that indigenous people are magical ewoks with special insight that non-indigenous people lack. This is especially patronizing toward my indigenous colleagues and neighbours who are scientists with knowledge & expertise based on research and scholarship. But instead of paying attention to them, we’re obliged to pay attention to administrative drones with titles like “Associate Director, Indigenous Policy and Pedagogy” or “Indigenous Executive Lead”.
Where is your neck of the woods?
“[T]he unceded traditional territories of the Coast Salish peoples, including the səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh), kʷikʷəƛ̓əm (Kwikwetlem), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh Úxwumixw (Squamish) and xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam) Nations.” I prefer “conquered” to “unceded”; potato, potahtoe.
Ah, I think we are in the same neck — I live in the Southern Gulf Islands. I got a taste of all this on a recent visit to the Royal BC Museum, where the “Pioneer Town” has been grudgingly re-opened, but with new “contextualizing” plaques to make sure we know everything is about colonialism; all the displays about 19th- and 20th-century settlement and industry have been closed; and the entire floor of First Nations artefacts is closed for as long as it takes for the museum’s chosen First Nations partners to meditate on how it should be displayed. Basically only about one-third of the museum is actually open, though they still charge full-price entrance …
As an institution, it would be fair to say that the RBCM, which fifty years ago was ranked among the top ten museums in North America, has been completely captured by this agenda, without any mandate from, or reference to the wishes or interests of, the wider public.
Hello Jonathan Dore, and thanks(?) for your warning.
Coming from further south in Coast Salish territory, I used to visit the RBCM regularly on visits to Victoria.
It certainly used to be one of the best small museums in the world—evidently no longer. Alas.
Well, howdy, neighbour.
Yes that institution has been completely captured.
Discovering what works using trial and error isn’t limited to indigenous people, but describes how human beings learned and still learn to live in their environment. It’s a ubiquitous form of common sense, one which can easily cohabit with intuitive, mystical, special ways of knowing added to either the product or the explanation.
Science is uncommon sense — analytic and objective, universal and cumulative, grounded in the need for criticism and the rejection of special ways of knowing. It really can’t “work together” with systems it excludes by definition. I think that all we can end up with is either a sophisticated school presentation on Native American practices or a patient pause while some marginalized people interject irrelevant views which need to be ignored as soon as they’re finished..
Yes!
And I’m glad you don’t feel constrained to be “nice” vs. truthful. (I find it easy to identify with Alice in “Dilbert”.)
Well said, Sastra. The same reasons science and religion do not and cannot inform each other. I am sad to be living in this time of the dismantling of the scientific endeavor.
If indigenous knowledge is coequal to science, shouldn’t it be explored beyond the confines of the countries where the institutions thus promoting it happen to reside? What’s so special about the Maori ways of knowing, for example, that induces New Zealanders to focus exclusively on them? Have they somehow established that they’re superior to, say, those of Bantu tribes, the Yanomami, or their neighboring Aboriginal Australians?
Excellent point.
“Braiding” is so female coded! Hilarious, beyond parody.
I’m curious about the gender mix of all the woke maximalists. I got curious about this watching the Palestinian pro-terrorist demos at our universities which were profoundly female. Well above the more female uni students of today and in the humanities. It was a total chick show – to be flippant. 🙂
Perhaps we have some kind of immunity against male style dysfunction (aggression) but are powerless against female dysfunctional behavior?
Just spitbaling here. I’m a big time old school (1970s onwards to about 2014) feminist in my attitudes and the way I’ve run my entire life, including working for Hillary’s campaign. But I won’t let women skate on bad behavior or grotesque effects on our civilization because they’re women.
D.A.
NYC
Never mind female coded terms, the word ‘braiding’ reeks of cultural appropriation. Such terminology should only ever be used by black people when referring to their own hair, or the hair of an equivalently marginalised person who has sought and gained permission to wear their hair that way from the entire black community. In any other circumstances, the use of ‘braiding’ is extremely problematic. This could easily have been avoided had they first hired a sensitivity consultant to censor their racialised and deeply offensive language choices.
I believe the term “braiding” owes much of its popularity in the indigenosphere to this book:
https://www.amazon.com/Braiding-Sweetgrass-Indigenous-Scientific-Knowledge/dp/1571313567
Looked up your link: “As a botanist, Robin Wall Kimmerer has been trained to ask questions of nature with the tools of science. As a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, she embraces the notion that plants and animals are our oldest teachers. In Braiding Sweetgrass, Kimmerer brings these two lenses of knowledge together…”
Needless to say the book is enthusiastically recommended by many of our local New Zealand exponents of mataurangaballs – see for example the largely content-free seminar on “Learning benefits of a knowledge systems approach to science” here:
https://www.sciencelearn.org.nz/resources/3343-learning-benefits-of-a-knowledge-systems-approach-to-science
I did dip into the book to see what they were on about, but retired defeated after a few pages on the doings of Skywoman.
National Academies committees are tasked with writing final reports. I think what happened here is the following: The indigenous people on the committee were part of the report writing, but they objected to the fact that the report was being written by the conventional process (in which they were a minority) and not by ‘coproduction.’ Using coproduction would have involved also inviting the indigenous ‘participants’ (the many other people who were providers of information, but not committee members) to join in writing the report, which likely would have led to a very different report.
Unfortunately for the coproduction advocates, both opening up the report-writing to non-committee members, and holding a meeting at a venue where a committee member might profit, would have run severely afoul of the Academies’ procedures for avoiding conflicts of interest.
Since Galileo, scientists have sought universal knowledge open to people regardless of nationality, race, or religion. Scientists have used experimentation to provide the neutrality that wards off local bias. From the scientific point of view, local bias has no right to be called knowledge unless it can pass the test of scientific peer review.
The rise of progressivism, postmodernism, and anti-colonialism has lead to demands that the reality testing that is science be offset by the fantasies of local bias, similar to the demands of creationists to “teach the controversy.” In essence, the demands are an embrace of religion. Given that colonialism has much to do with the imposition of religion, the demands seem rather odd.
What I found frustrating about the NASEM article was the lack of examples of coproduction. The Wikipedia article “Co-production (approach),” found at “https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Co-production_(approach),” provides both examples and definitions.
Coproduction, it seems, has to do with providing and receiving public services. As such, it is not about science, but the application of scientific knowledge, which is technology. Discussions of indigenous knowledge are thus rife with misunderstandings because people are speaking different languages.
Some years ago a company drilled wells in a water-poor district in India. The locals were grateful until drinking the arsenic-tinged ground water caused illness. The company was forced to add filters to the wells to eliminate the arsenic. Now imagine that indigenous knowledge claimed evil spirits inhabited the water. Would it have been responsible for the company to ignore the locals, dig the wells, and leave? No. The responsible thing to do would have been to test the water beforehand. The point to be made here is that the indigenous knowledge was indeed knowledge because it passed the test of science. Most such claims don’t. They are silly traditions or mere superstition. And yet the progressives, postmodernists, and anti-colonialists want people to dismiss modern science as just another point of view.
Sorry, but I’m not sure what you mean by “the indigenous knowledge” here. Do you mean the knowledge that drinking the water made people sick? But of course curing that problem required modern science testing the water to see what caused the problem.
Yes, I mean the knowledge that drinking the water made people sick. No, I don’t mean that evil spirits inhabited the water. My bad.
What god adjusts my GPS then? Bloody good job who ever it is!
Time co-ordination is looked after by Chronos, Saturn, and sometimes Gullveig (Heidr). HTH 🙂
Due to the weirdness my GPS often comes up with, apparently mine is run by Loki, God of Mischief.
I can’t believe that educated people support initiatives like these. I know not everyone has a scientific background, but anyone who is sufficiently educated to contribute to one of these ‘investigations’ should have the critical faculties to identify it as total bollocks. This isn’t research, it cannot reveal useful information about the world. At best, it’s an expensive and wasteful form of virtue-signalling.
The people prepared to be involved and contribute to such ‘studies’ either lack the ability to understand what knowledge is and how it is produced, or they are simply disingenuous and willing to say anything to further their agenda. In most cases I think the latter is true.
These initiatives will never produce anything useful. There are too many incompatible forces, competing to move things in another direction. It’s like trying to blow a soap bubble in the shape of a kangaroo.
I can’t believe that educated people support initiatives like these. I know not everyone has a scientific background, but anyone who is sufficiently educated to contribute to one of these ‘investigations’ should have the critical faculties to identify it as total bollocks. This isn’t research, it cannot reveal useful information about the world. At best, it’s an expensive and wasteful form of virtue-signalling.
The people prepared to be involved and contribute to such ‘studies’ either lack the ability to understand what knowledge is and how it is produced, or they are simply disingenuous and willing to say anything to further their agenda. In most cases I think the latter is true.
These initiatives will never produce anything useful. There are too many incompatible forces, each competing to move things in another direction. It’s like trying to blow a soap bubble in the shape of a kangaroo.
Oh, dear. As a long-time staff officer at NASEM I know several of the people involved in this project and some of the causes of failure. Those of us at NASEM who knew what we were doing knew that a successful project needs two things. First and most essential was a good statement of task. Second was either an excellent staff officer or an excellent committee chair, preferably both. I have managed to produce good reports despite poor committee chairs, and I occasionally saw a good committee chair save a study from a poor staff officer, but a vague statement of task makes things very difficult. One has to actually re-interpret the statement of task if it’s bad, and it takes good leadership from the committee chair and staff to do that, if it can be done at all. It seems clear that the statement of task was a major problem in this case. The strongest case for braiding among the natural sciences is in ecology, because so much of ecology is observational, as is indigenous knowledge. But even ecology needs the scientific method, so even there braiding can’t lead to complete coequality. But I have seen it work.
Of course the meeting was going to be held in a casino! And probably the band owning the casino and charging for its usage was connected to a committee member. Such mutual aid is normal practice among our first nations, and to be fair, masonic orders and suchlike do exactly the same. Useful, survival-oriented behaviour for any group in a competitive environment, but a far cry from open tenders and ethical standards for arm’s length contracts.
An example of other knowledge being forced into science that went awfully wrong is the Deutsch Physik which luckily went down with the III. Reich.