The Conversation, which seems a reputable and often interesting site, now has some dire results of a survey of non-Māori New Zealand scientists. The new survey shows that many (but thank goodness not all) of these have been captured by the drive to sacralize the indigenous Māori “ways of knowing, or Mātauranga Māori (MM).
MM does contain some empirical knowledge, mostly of the practical sort like how to catch fish or when to harvest berries, but also includes religion, morality, the supernatural (the ubiquitous vitalism called mauri), guides to behavior, legends and word of mouth, and other non-scientific concepts that many see as “ways of knowing.”
Have a gander at this article (click to read). Note the “gender divide” mentioned in the headline, and guess how it shakes out:
Some indented excerpts (the article summarizes a research paper you can read or download here; I have not read it but assume the authors’ summary is correct. I could find no indication that the paper has been published or even accepted (I may have overlooked that), but if it is only submitted for publication and not peer-reviewed and accepted, it’s not really kosher to discuss preliminary results in a place like The Conversation.
While the New Zealand government plans to review 28 pieces of legislation with a view to changing or repealing references to the Treaty of Waitangi, the science sector is embracing engagement with Māori and leading the way in linking science and Indigenous knowledge at a national scale.
We surveyed 316 researchers from research organisations across New Zealand on their engagement with Māori and their attitudes towards mātauranga Māori (Indigenous knowledge system). We found the majority agree engagement is important and mātauranga Māori is relevant to their research.
Our preliminary findings show most of the surveyed researchers engaged with Māori to some degree in the past and expect to keep doing so in the future. A majority agreed mātauranga Māori should be valued on par with Western science.
. . . We examined the responses of the 295 non-Māori scientists in our survey and found 56% agreed mātauranga Māori should be valued on par with Western science. Only 25% disagreed. Moreover, 83% agreed scientists had a duty to consult with Māori if the research had impacts on them.
What? Valued on par with Western science? That is the result of the researchers having been ideologically captured by the widespread drive to make MM coequal with modern science. (An alternative hypothesis, which should not be ignored, is that many of these non-Māori scientists are hiding their real feelings, knowing that they could get fired or exorcised if they don’t go along with the ideological program.)
That said, of course if a project has impacts on Māori, they should certainly be consulted. That is only fair. But consultation does not mean that researchers must do what the Māori say, especially if it involves nonscientific things like incorporating the supernatural, as with the story of the kauri trees and the whales (see below)
If you study MM and know anything about modern science— mistakenly called “Western science” by MM advocates—you’ll know that this belief in coequality is simply fatuous.
More:
. . .New Zealand has been at the forefront of developing a nationwide approach through the 2007 Vision Mātauranga policy. This science-mātauranga connection has given New Zealand a global lead in how to meaningfully and practically mobilise science and Indigenous knowledge at a national scale.
In contrast, the US only recently developed its national Indigenous science policy.
The merging of Indigenous and Western knowledge is particularly important in the high-tech innovation field. Here, New Zealand’s approach is starting to have real impacts, including supporting innovations and capabilities that would not have happened otherwise.
Through years of engagement with the research and innovation sector, Māori are increasingly expecting the sector to work differently. This means both engaging beyond the laboratory and being open to the possibility that science and mātauranga Māori together can create bold innovation. Examples include supporting Māori businesses to create research and development opportunities in high-value nutrition, or using mātauranga to halt the decline of green-lipped mussels in the Eastern Bay of Plenty.
If you look at the “bold innovation” link, you will find a dearth of examples in which MM has actually enhanced the acquisition of scientific knowledge; rather, it’s largely a program for incorporating Māori researchers into projects actually driven by modern science. But would you expect anything else given that the empirical aspects of MM are all practical, aimed at helping people survive off the land? Given that, the “merging” of the two “ways of knowing”, much less promulgating the idea they are coequal, is a foolish endeavor.
The green-lipped mussel project, involving an important source of food, comes up again and again in these studies, and involves the use of traditional fiber materials to facilitate the settling of mussel spats. And it did indeed increase the number of spats.
But I see this project mentioned over and over again as an example of the fruitful combining of MM and modern science. If their merging is so successful, why do we find the same example used repeatedly?
And why is there no mention of ludicrous examples of merging, such as the useless attempt to revive the dieback of kauri trees by smearing their trunks with whale oil and whale bones, and playing whale songs to the trees (see here and here). The MM basis for this “science” is a Māori legend that the kauri trees and whales were created as brothers, but the whale-trees went roaming into the ocean, and the kauri dieback, really caused by soil-borne oomycetes (thanks modern science for that), is said by MM to reflect the trees’ longing to be with their whale brothers. Such is the kind of research that is also taken seriously by advocates of merging MM and modern science.
One more thing: the gender difference. I guessed, based on the greater empathy of women as well as their greater religiosity, would involve female researchers being be more sympathetic to incorporating indigenous ways of knowing into science. I was right:
However, there was a significant gender difference: 75% of women compared to 44% of men agreed mātauranga Māori should be valued on par with science. Only 8% of women disagreed with that statement compared to 34% of men.
That is a substantial difference!
The study reached two conclusions. The second was the observed difference between male and female non-Māori researchers in their desire to value MM as coequal with science. The authors say this needs more work, but I think it can already be explained by the difference between the sexes in empathy, “people” orientation, and religiosity.
The first conclusion was this:
First, it seems that exposing researchers to engagement with Māori communities may create a more open attitude to mātauranga Māori. A key aspect of the past few years has been to broaden the science sector’s engagement with various communities, including Māori.
The Vision Mātauranga policy has been explicit about this in the innovation sector and research and development areas. It appears likely this approach has, at least for some non-Māori researchers, created an openness to consider mātauranga Māori as an equivalent, although different, knowledge framework.
Again, I am not dismissing MM as without any value. What I am seriously questioning is the idea that MM is “an equivalent, although different, knowledge framework.” I don’t even know what that means, since I don’t see MM as even coming close to the methods of modern science in acquiring knowledge, or “justified true belief.” MM lacks nearly all the tools of modern science, like hypothesis testing, pervasive doubt and questioning, replication, peer review, the use of statistics, and so on. How can it possibly be coequal with modern science?
But the burgeoning drive to sacralize indigenous “knowledge” shows that wokeness, of which this drive is one example, is not on the way out. By all means incorporate indigenous knowledge into science if it is shown to be empircally true. But to do that the indigenous knowledge has to be verified using modern science. Otherwise it remains in the hinterlands of Aunt Jobiska’s Theorem: “a fact that the whole world knows.”
This reeks of dialectical alchemy.
Women give their input to the problem as coequal with men, as indeed they are all colleagues – full-stop. We are to let the data speak for itself with blind detachment.
But ah – the dialectic finds an ideologically productive contradiction : “75% of women compared to 44% of men agreed mātauranga Māori should be valued on par with science.”
Negation->
->Aufheben der Mātauranga Māori
…. I thought of JBS Haldane the other day, if he and Hitchens could apply their brilliant wits to the matters of the day now,… we can only imagine…
There is a similar divide among the supporters of the transing of children, where support is also in direct opposition to the interests of women themselves. I assume this is something to do with women having it drilled into them that they must be kind, be conflict resolvers etc, but I rather wish someone would womansplain it to me.
Munchausen by proxy.
It might not have to be drilled ; it could be… women’s nature.
I assume these universities have signed on to the UNESCO Education 2030 Agenda with the emphasis on epistemic justice: “Epistemic justice implies the right of every people to their own knowledge and ways of generating, legitimizing and valuing it”.
🎯
A combination of fear (of reprisal for repudiating Maori “science”) and empathy (by kind women who want to support their fellow New Zealanders).
Maybe the women are just more comfortable with being duplicitous. Giving the socially desirable answers on a survey (knowing the results, including sex splits, will be made public making themselves look kind), while having no more intention than the men to actually follow through in their scientific practice.
It would be good to know what the scientific disciplines were represented by the “researchers” surveyed. If women are over-represented in the disciplines where obeisance to MM could increase their grant funding you would expect those women to express more inclusive opinions.
The astronomical knowledge of the Māori is extremely limited compared with that of other pre-Western societies including Mesopotamia and Egypt. The Māori never made such fundamental distinctions as that between planets and stars. It looks as if Māori ideology completely ignores the way scientific knowledge actually develops from its early beginnings in various cultures — in the Mediterranean world, in China and India, and in Mayan cosmology— all of which were vastly more developed than Māori thought. History of science should be taught in New Zealand, so New Zealanders aren’t left with the idea of a contrast between indigenous Māori thought and Western science. Awareness of how science really developed would bring out how limited Māori knowledge was. The historical development of science requires forms of written records. You can’t predict an eclipse (as ancient thought in the West did) if you can’t write down dates so you can systematically study patterns of occurrences.
The whole thing is plain ridiculous. I’m afraid to investigate how far Canada has gone down the same road.
There doesn’t seem to be a single body of native knowledge in Canada, as might be expected in a much larger country filled with many competing arrivals (as compared to NZ, which is relatively small and where the Maori arrived in canoes over a thirty year period). (That may not stop someone concocting a pretend body of knowledge…)
But for the way that a similar thought invasion has occurred, see:
https://quillette.com/2024/11/29/lessons-from-a-teachers-college-battle-over-free-speech-and-decolonization/
Thanks for the link. Off to read now.
I read the report here (ourarchive.otago.ac.nz/esploro/outputs/report/Survey-of-Scientists-Engagement-Behaviours-in/9926590274501891). It doesn’t include all of the study results: just an abstract, explanation of the methods (survey questions), five data graphics of preliminary results, and an appendix (demography of participants).
Like many online surveys the response rate was terrible: the report says 18% of 1679 researchers who were invited. Strangely, that’s 302 participants, but the report says it’s based on 316 responses from participants. I didn’t try to figure that out.
One question asked participants to rate the statement “Māori knowledge should be valued on par with academic knowledge” but the report doesn’t include those results or show that “56% agreed mātauranga Māori should be valued on par with Western science” (per the Conversation). For most of the survey questions, participants were asked to rate the statement “from 1= Strongly disagree to 5 = Strongly agree”. Without seeing the results it’s hard to know what it means that “56% agreed” relative to that five-point scale. I guess the authors are holding back those results.
It would be easy for most of the participants (mainly in natural sciences and health research, but about 20% in humanities) to agree that “scientists [have] a duty to consult with Māori if the research had impacts on them” because the vast majority of natural sciences research has no specific impact on Māori. The “if” is a get-out-of-jail-free card.
Others will know more than I do about how this affects the practice of research in Aotearoa New Zealand. Here on Turtle Island, my understanding is that the effects are small. Lots of scientists use that work-around in grant proposals. Most of the work done by most astronomers, biochemists, mathematicians, geologists, geneticists, etc. has nothing to do with local indigenous knowledge. So one can add soft-focus content about possible or desirable (but imaginary) linkages in the grant proposal, and then carry on with training grad students and making discoveries after the grant is awarded.
But eventually the requirement to link research plans and results to local indigenous knowledge will constrain what questions get asked. I expect this bias will be most significant in health research and in ecology (the two areas of science most easily linked to indigenous knowledge, because those were the things indigenous people were trying to work out for themselves). But I could be wrong.
That 18% response rate includes an offer of a 25 $ gift card … lol
I would suggest that they just rounded down the true percentage, which is 18.8 and a bit.
The 18% response rate is probably also telling. Those who subscribe to the MM fallacy would be more likely to respond. There’s also the likelihood that many respondents were not ‘real’ scientists as NZ institutions employ many in soft social ‘science’ fields (as the authors of the paper are). Sadly, the RSNZ merged in 2010 with the Humanities Society of New Zealand and has been much poorer for it, with those in the humanities fields believing themselves to be scientists.
I hope this can help explain the sex based differences. If many people in the Humanities participated, that would increase the number of women responding and increase the number of people who agree. It disturbs me to think that a substantial percentage of women in STEM fields would believe indigenous knowledge was on par with science. It sounds as if most people threw the survey in the trash.
Completely agree. I sincerely hope no women in STEM buy that idea.
Only 20% in humanities & social sciences per the report; 75% in natural sciences, engineering, tech, medical & health science; 5% agriculture, missing, other.
The title of the article should read … The majority of people who replied support …
This doesn’t need to be an all or nothing challenge to navigate. Native people in my state have thousands of years of knowledge to contribute to our understanding of local environments and of the use of natural materials growing in or mined from those environments. A geology instructor at Central Washington University, Nick Zentner, has teamed up with an elder of the Wenatchee People, Randy Lewis, to tell stories about the plants, floods, rocks and glaciers of central Washington. He also shares stories of his people, through time. Fascinating stories, available on YouTube, that include knowledge learned from surviving the ice age floods in their tribal lands thousands of years ago. Stories that alSo include their religious or cultural beliefs about powerful creatures that preceded humans in those environments. Arresting narratives that can compliment our current scientifically oriented stories about the same environments. It’s a partnership that can work if we don’t become confused about the purposes of each and if we don’t confuse money expended with respect earned.
Totally agree the stories are cool, and the history is too. As a citizen and a human I have a lot of respect for the cultures and stories. My neighbours and university colleagues who are indigenous are good people and great scholars & scientists.
But as a scientist (evolution, genetics) I think the stories are irrelevant or wrong. When I’m working as a scientist I don’t exactly lack respect for indigenous cultural history, I just don’t need to pay it any attention in order to do science.
And no knock against Nick Zentner, good youtube channel.
The catch is how authentic it is. A story told on grandpa’s knee that he was told the same way and so on. Many can have been embellished over the years, most of all after science discovered stuff.
A bit like a game of Chinese Whispers that involves 10.000 people.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts Mike. I can understand and appreciate your view of origin stories. Randy Lewis said he learned about the use of plants from the members of his grandparents’ and great grandparents’ generations as they picked the plants for food and medicine. Or for baskets or mats. Or found rocks that once might have been shaped into tools or weapons or used to carve petroglyphs. That kind of info can partner with science pretty well, can’t it?
To answer your last question, and at the risk of sounding rude, no except maybe in a very limited scope. It’s interesting no doubt, but I don’t understand how it can partner with science at all. If you’re implying that material science / materials engineering could learn that a certain type of rock can scratch a different kind of rock, please explain how that can expand scientific knowledge today.
The problem is how authentic they are. He had probably told those stories by his grandpa while on his knee and that’ll have gone back 10,000 or so years.
There is little record of them from before they cross-contaminated with more recent understandings of geological history and run a serious risk of being embellished. There is no denying the history of ice sheets and floods though but as you said with arresting narratives, they are often romanticized for the sake of storytelling.
No denying local resource knowledge though. Food and tools are a must for survival.
Randy Lewis’s video in Moses Coulee #1 doesn’t start encouragingly well: at the beginning of time people spoke holy languages that animals could understand. Ghosts speaking to him in dreams, vouchsafed by his grandmother. And the rocks recorded the sounds they heard under the influence of heat, “or coolness, whatever.” I’m going to try to listen to these with an open mind but the first minute challenges me. The comments below the video are nearly all fawningly indulgent.
The periodic Missoula Floods pre-date the earliest archeological evidence of humans in the region. Just as well. These were Noah-like deluges from repeated ruptures and re-formation of ice dams as the Cordilleran Ice Sheet began to retreat 15,000 years ago, allowing the enormous glacial Lake Missoula to pour in an awesome torrent down the Columbia Gorge, with flow exceeding all the world’s current rivers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missoula_floods
The Missoula Flood hypothesis was first proposed in the 1920s. It seems likely that Mr. Lewis has incorporated some of this science into his story. I’m not clear about what purpose these stories serve except as tests of “respect.” Perhaps we’ll see.
Excellent points all, Leslie. One tiny quibble: the amount of time indigenous people have been in the America’s has been pushed further and further back by scientists so flood memories may not be a modern invention. Nick Zentner’s first video with Randy was entitled something like Native American Geology and, outside of interruptions to check whether the technology was working, it was a good field lecture.
Regardless of whether there were people around when the Missoula floods were happening…Knowledge of eye-witnessed events passed intelligibly accurately by oral recounting for 12,000 years — 200 – 400 generations of story-telling — when scientifically supportable evidence has been publicly available for the entire life of the current story-teller? Sorry, I don’t believe a word of it. Find me a written transcript of an interview with an indigenous story teller from before 1920 that includes accounts of long-ago Floods and then we can talk about what those accounts might possibly mean. But contaminated by modern knowledge? No. Then it’s merely a “just-so” story.
How has Maori ‘science’ advanced over the years? Years ago some blog commenter said science was a religion. I replied what religion overturns it’s creation myth in a decade as science did with the big bang. Look at what has been overthrown in our view of the atom. That is science. Our current understanding of a phenomena is simply our starting point for developing a better understanding of that phenomena. There are no people running around advocating for the 120 year old plum pudding model of the atom. Maori ‘science’ starting points are forever their starting points because it is not science it is dogma.
There was one paleontologist at a display at Te Papa (a place you’d find “interesting”) about Argentine dinosaurs who said if they didn’t relent to the “moderates” they’d have to with Brian Tamaki and his ilk.
Even the curators didn’t get why they had Genus and Species names translated as that made no sense, violated biological standards and made it seem they had many names when a dinosaur’s name is totally a classification and not some gift.
The display even invoked in one small section the creation story, renamed geological periods, renamed Pangia of all things and had identical (I think) placards in both languages giving information and unlike an amazing Chinese display from nearly 20 years ago the scientific data was really watered down and basic. The last time they had a basic general one and more advanced stuff as well.
Te Reo is a very poetic language but not easy to translate internationally standard terminology where in many cases they just make it a lone word but down here they refuse, everything must be translated or termed in a Te Reo manner and they hance trivialized everything to make it work.
I had to hold back calling that guy a sleezy coward and a disgrace who had no right to be there.
Also, in their natural history hall they fill is with religion.
The total sample size was 316, and most likely a biased sample I would have thought. AFAICT, in the section “Attitudes towards Collaboration with Māori” the participants were asked how strongly they agreed or disagreed with the following two statements:
“Māori knowledge should be valued on par with academic knowledge”
“Researchers have a duty to consult with Māori iwi or hapū who might be impacted by their research”
The first statement hardly seems equivalent to “mātauranga Māori should be valued on par with Western science”.
Think of the career and social implications of saying “No” to this survey.
I can hear the “RAAACIST” chants outside the office from here.
Reading about NZ has become depressing.
D.A.
NYC
A scientist at Te Papa just about told me that the coward. Said it was better to relent to the moderate and friendly religious ones over Brian Tamaki.
I suppose that non-Maori scientists in NZ are afraid to voice their true opinions. And I expected the gender gap, because women from a very tender age are trained to do as told, and treated harshly for any act of disobedience that is easily forgiven to boys/men.
You don’t know women down here!
How exciting that NZ has established a “global lead” in merging modern science with indigenous knowledge, as in those breakthrough discoveries in fundamental science regarding greenlipped mussel spats. Can Canada be far behind? Surely the Two-Row Wampum Belt, memorialized at several Canadian institutions of higher learning, reveals Canada’s pursuit of an Iroquoian-Algonquian-Salishan-Wakashan approach to limited Western science categories of thought. We await
new breakthroughs in the subatomic physics of blue mussel spats in PEI.
What many readers may not realise is that most grant funding in NZ is contingent on having a percentage Maori input, such that you get up to a 7x funding multiplier having 20% Maori research team members – even in computer science! It’s in their financial interest to value Mātauranga Māori.
Thanks for this simple and decisive explanation. So, ideological capture is
not mysterious in the least—and the way it could be reversed is obvious. It is possible that the US will soon conduct interesting experiments on how funding policies can reverse ideological capture in the groves of academe.
The Marsden fund is one avenue for research grants. Three recent blog articles cover this:
https://www.kiwiblog.co.nz/2024/11/royal_society_tells_asian_and_european_male_researchers_to_stuff_off.html
https://www.kiwiblog.co.nz/2024/11/the_800000_lotto_draw_for_researchers.html
https://www.kiwiblog.co.nz/2024/11/more_on_marsden_funding.html
I have often been the lone skeptic or atheist in women’s groups and have come to believe that a “toxic femininity” counterbalances “toxic masculinity.” This consists of an exaggerated and almost aggressive adherence to the desire to foster harmony, practice kindness, learn to be accepting, discount truth and reason, and replace it with wonder and emotional connections. In my opinion, this is a mix of nature and nurture. It’s highly beneficial in moderate doses, of course. But there are limits.
Toxic femininity might explain the high levels of otherwise reasonable, rational women supporting indigenous knowledge over science, and trans-identified males over reality. I don’t think we’d see the same statistics if the Māori had been treated more fairly in the past. An over-excited impulse to nurture and protect requires constant reminders that certain groups have been harmed, are weak, and need support.
It is premature to conclude that the observed gender gap is actually do to gender because the study authors have apparently not attempted to control for any underlying differences between the men and women surveyed that could account for their differing attitudes toward MM. Age and field of study come immediately to mind.
Maoris were not good stewards of the environment. They burned much of New Zealand to clear the land, destroying native habitat and causing large extinctions, including the moa.
Regarding indigenous knowledge: we all come from the same basic stock, which spread throughout the world and then settled in areas and stayed there over time resulting in a lot of indigenous populations (though none are truly indigenous dating back to the beginning of humankind except in Africa).
Some peoples, such as the North American population, did not advance much in the growth of knowledge (for example, if a culture has been weaving the same basket design for thousands of years, this is not advancement), whereas other indigenous peoples developed mathematics, industry, science, durable communication tools, and other technology. Why is the science of the peoples who failed to improve technology for thousands of years being considered to be on par with the science of those peoples who did advance? Knowing how to dig tubers with forked sticks is far inferior to using modern farm equipment in terms of productivity, cost per unit supplied, quality of output, as well as quality of life for those involved in the digging of said tubers (much easier to sit inside an air conditioned tractor cab of 8 hours than to be bent over in the sun for a hundred hours to do the same amount of work!). If I were an indigenous tribal farmer digging potatoes by hand, I’d be looking to John Deere to have another way of knowing how to do that job rather than looking to how my ancestors did it. There is no inherent nobility to failing to advance science and technology.
In connection with comment #14 about the financial rewards of Matauranga Maori, here is something comparable on this side of the Pacific. At my former
institution’s SOM, the Associate Dean for Well-Being has just sent around a bulletin about “well-being” grants, to wit:
” In 2024, Well-Being Grants supported over 200 projects. Please take a look at some stories from last year that might inspire your creativity:
Projects that fostered equity, diversity and inclusion (EDI), such as a free market stocked with essentials and an EDI book club for dieticians.
…Faculty, staff and trainees across UW Medicine (inclusive of administrative, clinical, education and research areas) are encouraged to apply for grants. “
Free money if you use the right words.