UPDATE: The site to which I refer below disappeared for a while this morning, and then reappeared. So the post right below still links to the right places:
Simon Fraser University in British Columbia recently adopted a policy of institutional neutrality. But its latest endeavor shows that it’s still in the thrall of wokeness, for it’s launched a policy of “decolonizing and indigenizing” STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics). Nothing good can come of their effort, for, as you see, it can mean only the adoption of indigenous “ways of knowing” in the sciences. There are several pages on the site, which was sent to me by a member of the Simon Fraser community. Click on the screenshot below to go to the “welcome” page and its links. The small print in the headline says this:
Welcome to the Decolonizing and Indigenizing STEM (DISTEM) Website, dedicated to decolonizing and Indigenizing STEM at Simon Fraser University (SFU)!
This website, originally designed to support STEM faculty, is a valuable tool for anyone committed to the decolonization of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics to decolonize and indigenize our teaching. Click the link to go to the web site. Most of the pages are just a bit of text and links to other sites or to the home pages of the authors.
To understand the importance of such systems in the decolonization of library classification, it is essential to explore Ashley’s work with the Indigenous Curriculum Resource Centre (ICRC) and her adaptation of the Brian Deer Classification System (BDCS). Most importantly, classification and categorization systems need to shift away from Western-European knowledge systems to prioritizing Indigenous ways of knowing and being, which are community focused. For example, a shift in language from “Indigenous Peoples – History and Culture” to “Indigenous Peoples – Communities,” moves the narrative away from historicizing Indigenous peoples toward their power, knowledge, and contemporary contributions. Not only does this shift place Indigenous Peoples and communities at the centre, but all other surrounding categories move outward to reflect their relationality to these communities and Indigenous knowledge. Such shifts in thinking and doing are crucial for STEM faculty and students to learn and apply. We strongly encourage you to follow the links provided above to gain a deeper understanding of these vital concepts and how we can all further decolonize our minds.
Note that the program is not designed to bring more indigenous people into science—though that may be one of its aims—but to CENTER the contributions “Indigenous Peoples and Communities” in teaching the content of science, at the same time “moving all other surrounding categories outward.”
Some of the aims from the Project History:
One of the major concerns faculty shared was that they lack the time and resources necessary to learn about and then implement these processes, both personally and professionally. This issue was exasperated because information and resources related to decolonizing and Indigenizing STEM, as well as teaching and learning, are dispersed and disconnected both online and off, which can be overwhelming for faculty, particularly those just beginning their decolonizing journeys. Thus, the DISTEM Website originally aimed to meet faculty needs by creating a central online living archive of relevant and varied resources focused on decolonizing and Indigenizing STEM, both generally and regarding teaching and learning, in postsecondary institutions.
As I always say, if there is indigenous knowledge that is part of STEM, then by all means incorporate it into STEM, for I seriously doubt that there is enough empirical knowledge in American northwest tribes to constitute a substantial moiety of modern science. Like the indigenous “knowledge” of New Zealand, it will consist largely of trial-and-error methods that the locals developed for subsistence: how, when, and where to catch fish, collect berries, build canoes, and the like. Indigenous knowledge is not a toolkit like modern science—a toolkit for finding answers that incorporates hypothesis-testing, experiments, statistics, blind testing, pervasive doubt, and so out. Rather, indigenous knowledge is a set of facts acquired independently of that tookit. But yes, there may be some indigenous knowledge there, but seriously, why would Simon Fraser make a whole program out of centering science on it.
You know why: they are displaying their virtue by sacralizing the practices of the indigenous people. But those people descended from other people who crossed over the Bering Strait about 15,000 years ago, and those people had their own knowledge. It’s bizarre to center the “knowledge” of tribes who flourished before modern science began, but again, that’s what you have to do if you want to show your virtue. And it’s too bad for science—and for Simon Fraser.
The “Prototype” page is the resource. The coloured circles and the orbiting dots are links – click one to make the dots stand still and get a pop-up with some text and a link to a resource. They are amazingly bad. I picked one from “Animals” and one from “Creation Stories”, and got links to old essays by the queer theorist Kim Tallbear. Not a scientist, and not writing about or engaging with science. The “Creation Stories” link is full of old tropes about the racism of human population genetics research. Ho hum.
If you click on the green dot in the “Gender Roles and Gender Identity” site, for instance, you get one reference and its summary:
Two Spirit
Garrett, M. T., & Barret, B. (2003). Two Spirit: Counseling Native American Gay, Lesbian, and Bisexual People. Journal of Multicultural Counseling and Development, 31(2), 131–142. https://doi.org/10.1002/j.2161-1912.2003.tb00538.x
The cultural world of the Two Spirit, the traditional role of Native individuals believed to possess both male and female spirit, is explored in both “old ways” and current-day experiences. Cultural beliefs and meanings around sexual identity are discussed from a Native perspective with recommendations for counseling Two Spirit clients. (A Spanish translation follows.)
This has nothing to do with STEM.
In one respect this seems harmless, because there’s no way in tarnation for this stuff to really make its way into STEM. But in other ways it’s not harmless, as it warps scholarship, pretends that sociology or ideology is hard science, and makes a mockery of true STEM.
Poor Simon Fraser. In the end they are not decolonizing of indigenizing science, but sacralizing Native Americans.
It is at amusing and probably appropriate that SFU pretty much stands for “Shut the F*ck Up”.
When SFU opened in 1965 some wags at at UBC referred to it as SFA and pretended it stood for Simon Fraser Acadamy. But of course they really meant Sweet F*ck All.
We have a short but ironic history. The provincial government of the day was conservative, and chose our site in a far suburb of Vancouver away from the liberal atmosphere of UBC. Government imagined SFU as a conservative counterweight to the commies over in West Point Grey. To their horror, the staffing of the original departments was overwhelmed by American liberals fleeing the Vietnam War. The book by Hugh Johnston “Radical Campus” tells the story well. We’re much more conventional now, but at the time we wuz radicals.
I attended 1969-73, graduating with a degree in Math / Physics.
There were radicals on campus but not in the Physics Department.
Many American profs plus grad students fleeing the Vietnam war.
(Ordered the book.)
Either trim the fat at these universities or create an impermeable barrier between the rigorous areas of research and knowledge and the non-rigorous ones.
The non-rigorous group’s biggest flaw is that they do not expose themselves to falsification…they either don’t understand the concept or are actively hostile to it. They know the answer in advance and seek to justify it, which is no different than a religious mindset.
Unfortunately, these non-rigorous areas are probably the growth areas for universities as they can be watered down academically to accommodate the most unprepared students. And since talented, hardworking people will not want to waste their time in an unproductive field, these non-rigorous areas become populated with the dimmest and/or most activist type of professor and administrator.
These people, not having much real research to do or the ability to do it, will therefore devote their time to politicking, activism, and other things completely ancillary to the point of a university, which is the production of new knowledge and the transmission of the best of what human minds have produced. But Prof. Grievance Studies usually doesn’t have the desire or horsepower to contribute to that effort.
It’s a bit like a toxic mold that has to be at a minimum contained lest it overwhelms the entire place….
When they talk about decolonizing STEM, what they mean is destroying objectivity and enshrining relativism. The decolonizers can’t succeed in a world of objective truth.
They believe, either implicitly or sometimes explicitly and overtly, that objectivity IS the primary problem. So called “facts” are only preferred narratives. Objectivity is merely a lense through which to view the world and is oppressive since it is inextricably bound up with its history of Eurocentricism, racism, colonialism, cisheteronormative patriarchy, and etc.
Looks very amateurish to me. This will never get any traction, fortunately.
Last year my university had a $50 million budget deficit; this coming year it’s $20 million. They filled those holes by firing >100 nonacademic staff last year, and by freezing academic hiring this year. But they’re still spending ~$8 million per year on consultants like the folx who created DISTEM. The lead consultant was given a 3-year postdoctoral fellowship by my university’s teaching-and-learning office. The product seems to have been that sad little website.
[edit to remove references to the identity of the lead consultant – not directly relevant]
Somehow things seem much crazier there than here at Victoria.
Ha yes maybe. Imho the Victoria municipal government is way worse than Burnaby. And you have that super interesting Pritzker-funded chair in transgender studies.
https://www.uvic.ca/research/transchair/index.php
But maybe your university governance is better?
I always find it hard to imagine how “centering” culture that is less advanced – by any metric at all – can result in virtue.
Is it like how parents put their little kids’ finger paintings on the fridge?
Or.. a la Family Guy: The Beatles putting Ringo’s songs “right here on the fridge, Ringo.”
Patronising.
I’m forever asking, but never getting an answer, on WHAT precisely these ways of knowing actually are in real life.
D.A.
NYC
Funny you should mention parenting little kids. These attempts remind me of my experience with the old Sensitive Mommy push to remove competition from games and other endeavors in order to help our children become better at cooperation and sharing.
No, STEM will not improve academically when decolonized and indigenized — but ALL the students will have more fun and build good character! Everyone’s a winner and no feelings hurt.
It’s all fear, David. There is some guilt, ginned up by activist capture of the schools and media, but the real emotion is fear that we might actually be in for a reckoning that we are powerless to prevent: that we will find we can’t enforce sovereignty on the land inside our borders because the consent to be governed is withdrawn by people we are afraid of but who aren’t afraid of us. Our own activist Courts seem disposed to undermine the sovereignty of Canada over a group of its own citizens. Under a recent Minister of Justice/Attorney-General, Government policy was to “defend incompetently” against indigenous land claims and other lawsuits, giving the Courts little choice but find for the indigenous plaintiffs.
If you go by relative annual spending, Canada is 2.5 times as afraid of our indigenous minority (3-5% of the population depending on how you count them, not including Pretendians) as we are of all our actual and potential foreign enemies all over the globe. Viewed this way, all these decolonization efforts, driven by cynical Marxists keen to abolish private property any way they can, using whatever idiots are useful, represent efforts by our institutions to ingratiate themselves with indigenous activists, by creating cultural safety zones, in the hope they will be nice to them when our government hands over the keys to the Treasury and to the Army.
Americans can’t really grok this because you never think about aboriginals from one year to the next. You can do land acknowledgments secure in the knowledge that you will never hand back any land, and your government would never dare to make you, given that you are all armed against the possibility. What we are doing in Canada should just seem silly to you and should mystify you as to why we would degrade the integrity of science in so trivial a pursuit. Fear makes people do strange things. Our nostrils are quivering as we can smell it on the wind.
“This issue was exasperated because information and resources related to decolonizing and Indigenizing STEM…”
Not knowing the difference between “exasperated” and “exacerbated” exasperates me.
+1
I bet near every faculty of science is funding these types of projects.
They have a staff of 5, hopefully part time at most, plus website development and maintenance costs. Dollars well spent !!
“Finally, we’d like to thank SFU’s Aboriginal Strategic Initiative (ASI), Transforming Inquiry into Learning and Teaching (TILT), and Faculty of Science for their support and funding.”
When I hear phrases like ‘decolonization of library classification,’ it reminds me of when someone at the British Library had a wobble categorising a book. It was called Homo Britannicus by Prof. Chris Stringer of The Natural History Museum. The subject was the history of human evolution in Britain, but the Librarian thought it concerned another sort of homo, and put in the LGBT section!
I went to one of the webinars linked in that wheel ; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CW0qPWqekDM
My gosh… One quotation tell you all ( 31’25 mark) :
“I don’t think indigenous people need astronomers. Indigenous knowledge exists without astronomers, or physicists, or chemists. But if we want science to grow, evolve, and represent humanity, we need indigenous knoweldeges, and we need to embrace, and learn from people like Wilfred Buck”
In fact, some indigenous American cultures thought they needed astronomers, and were fairly advanced in astronomy.
Alas, they used their astronomical data mostly to know the right time for human sacrifices, which were their main “toolkit”.
Mike in comment #5 reports from SFU: “But they’re still spending ~$8 million per year on consultants like the folx who created DISTEM.” Consultancy’s been a spectacular growth industry for many years. It is probable that the entire cult of DEI was foisted on academia by Diversity Consultants, a population of shamans who began in the 1980s, disguised as “Educational Consultants”. Look up, for example, one such pioneer in the The Kaleel Jamison Consulting Group, at: https://kjcg.com/judith-h-katz .
Lord, how these people love acronyms.
Of course, they’re PWLAs.