Recently I am getting more emails from various countries—all of whose senders wish to be anonymous—about indigenous people trying to combine their own “ways of knowing” with science or to represent them as an alternative to modern science (often mistakenly called “Western” science). The anonymity, of course, comes because criticism of indigenous people is about the worst blasphemy you can commit against “progressive” liberals, who regard indigenous people as historically and currently oppressed by “settlers”.
In this case, though, the indigenous knowledge isn’t purely indigenous, but an effort to piggyback on or to ape modern science. The article below, from the Royal Society of Chemistry News, involves Australians and Aboriginals together trying to develop an indigenous periodic table.
When you ask “a periodic table of what?”, it appears to be a periodic table of the elements. But the elements were identified by modern science, and of course placed in the modern periodic table by the work of non-indigenous chemists and physicists. The proposed indigenous table, however, uses the very same elements, but wants to classify them in a different way: by how they are used, how they are connected to the land, and so on. This would also change the names of the elements.
Also, as the article points out, there are over 400 indigenous groups in Australia, each with a different language and presumbly a different culture, so we’d get dozens of periodic tables. If that’s the outcome, then what is the point of this exercise?
Click on the headline below to read the short article:
The craziness of this endeavor, which seems to have no point save to give indigenous people something resembles what the “Western” settler-colonialist scientists have, can best be seen in a few quotes. “I have a dream today”, says one professor, who is not aboriginal but apparently an “ally”:
‘I have a dream of walking into a chemistry lecture theatre and seeing two periodic tables – the traditional one and a periodic table in the language of the Gadigal whose land we teach on,’ says Anthony Masters, a chemistry professor at the University of Sydney in Australia. The Gadigal are one of over 400 different Aboriginal communities in Australia and the Torres Straight Islands that have their own distinct set of languages, histories and traditions. Masters has pulled together a team of Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal scholars to investigate what an Indigenous periodic table might look like. Together, the multidisciplinary team aims to organise the elements in a format that represents the relationships between them based on Indigenous knowledge.
Masters, apparently not even a member of the Gadigal, seemingly wants to do this as a scientific sop to the aboriginals “whose land we teach on.” But if that’s the case, I’m sure the Gadigal would much prefer to be paid for the appropriated land, or given their land back.
So what is this table? Well, perhaps it doesn’t seem to involve elements, but compounds or minerals:
In reality, Aboriginal people developed their own knowledge of the chemical elements and their compounds. This includes uranium in its mineral form, which they called sickness rocks because they were aware that mishandling them could cause illness. Moreover, Aboriginal Australians have been using the iron oxide-based pigment ochre for at least 50,000 years. Historically, it had economic value, being traded between different tribes, but it also remains central to several cultural practices including body painting and decorating sacred objects. ‘Ochre is used as a pigment, and it can be formed into different colours – which is material science. It can be used as a disinfectant, as a sunscreen. A lot of these things are to do with its interaction with light,’ explains Masters who uses these examples to teach his undergraduate students about attributing knowledge to the Indigenous community.
But uranium doesn’t occur free in nature (often it’s found as “uraninite“, also known as “pitchblende”, UO2 but with other minerals), and ochre, according to Wikipedia, is “is a natural clay earth pigment, a mixture of ferric oxide and varying amounts of clay and sand.” (One of the few elements that can be seen occurring in its pure form in nature is sulfur.) Are we to have a periodic table of compounds, then? If so, that will be a very large periodic table! The problem of distinguishing elements from compunds isn’t even mentioned, but it appears that they want to do this for elements (see below).
The article then says that the traditional and correct periodic table of the elements is largely useless to an indigenous person:
The idea to develop an Indigenous periodic table arose because Masters started looking into how language influences our understanding of chemical knowledge and how chemistry is taught at Australian universities. ‘How do you know that oxygen and sulfur have similar properties? You can’t tell from the names,’ says Masters. Regarding palladium, he points out there is little to no value in an Indigenous student learning about an element named after an asteroid, which in turn was named after a Greek goddess. And what about neon, which William Ramsay named after the Greek word for new, but it’s hardly new after 120 years. Instead, Masters wants Indigenous Australian students to grow up with a periodic table in their language, just as it exists in other languages around the world.
But you don’t discern chemical properties from the names but from the position in the scientific periodic table. And who cares what the element is called? Scientists or anybody who wants to learn chemistry, that’s who. But Masters & Co. want to change the names of the elements/compounds. If you make a periodic table in this way, if you even can, it will not help indigenous people learn modern chemistry; it will in fact impede them.
But it appears that this project is grinding exceedingly slowly, and I doubt it will happen at all, especially because it’s limited to just one group of aboriginals. The slowness may result from their need to construct the table by talking. Bolding below is mine:
Troy explains the team’s first step was to ask the Sydney Mob – which encompasses over 29 Indigenous communities based in the Sydney region – if an Australian First Nationsperiodic table was something they would be interested in. They were. And so began the delicate process of establishing what scientific understanding of the elements is inherent in Aboriginal Australian knowledge systems.
Being mindful of and engaging with Aboriginal culture is central to the project, and face-to-face consultations are the preferred medium of meeting in Indigenous communities. So, the team has started the process of yarning – an Indigenous practice of sharing knowledge through conversations – with elders from the Gadigal clan. ‘The idea of yarning is that you give people a chance to talk and then you consider what they talk about. And then you respectfully engage with what they’ve been talking about,’ explains Troy. This means the project is developing slowly as yarning can take a very long time, with no expectations or pressure on the Indigenous people to immediately embrace the project. They are still planning yarning workshops (at the time of publishing) to continue engagement with as many of the community as they can.
. . . There is no timeline for when the team might complete its first Indigenous periodic table, but the team has begun developing a methodology to move the project forward. Part of that includes creating a blueprint that other Aboriginal groups can adapt and use themselves to document the elements and the relationships between them. With over 400 languages in Australia, each element may have a different meaning. ‘It’s in that spirit that the Periodic table is an obvious example. There are different ways of looking at things. And for me, that’s one of the beauties of [chemistry],’ concludes Masters.
. . . The meetings and conversations, which have already been under way for two years, have confirmed the project is worthwhile.
Really? How so?
Finally, it becomes clear that the goal is indeed to make an indigenous periodic table of elements, not compounds. And the purpose is given below as well: an indigenous periodic table (which does not now exist) is needed because a simple indigenous representation of the scientific periodic table might “erase Indigenous knowledge”:
So far, the team notes that the Gadigal spoken to in initial meetings like how the traditional periodic table combines nomenclature from Latin and Greek, as well as Arabic and Anglo-Saxon, but this is subject to change as more community members are consulted. ‘Some of the elements are named after people. Some are named after their qualities. But it is quite inconsistent,’ says Troy. They are therefore looking for a consistent style in the Gadigal language that might work and considering the relationship between the elements in the understanding of local knowledge holders. One idea is to group together elements that are part of daily life, elements that hold a special place in ceremony and elements that are avoided.
. . . It’s important to understand that the team doesn’t intend for an Indigenous periodic table to be a direct translation of the traditional periodic table because that could end up erasing rather than celebrating Indigenous knowledge. And it might not necessarily look like a table. Rather they’re aiming to represent the elements in a chart that also reflects Indigenous understanding concerning how an element connects to the lands, water and skies on which the First Nations people live. ‘We have to translate the concept culturally,’ says Tory, using a First Nations approach. Strategies the team is investigating include, but are not limited to, using Indigenous language to express a unique characteristic of an element or using Indigenous language to express the etymology of the English term. However, the most important factor is that the choice is made by the Indigenous community to suit their cultural and ideological foundations.
So they are apparently going to take the elements known from modern chemistry, many of which are not encountered by indigenous peoples in a pure state (hydrogen, neon, etc.) and group them together in ways that are supposed to be useful to the local people. But since they don’t know the pure elements, how can they do this? I cannot see how.
More important, why are they doing this? It appears to me to be a performative act to ape modern science but in a far less useful way: “See, we can order the elements according to our own culture.” That is fine if they want to try, but that ordering, even if it were possible, will not be useful in teaching chemistry to aboriginal people. The periodic table is useful because it tells you something about the atomic structure of an element, which in turn tells you something about how it behaves chemically. What other kind of ordering makes sense?
Finally, given that indigenous people from various parts of Australia, and of the world, encounter different compounds that are used or recognized differently, even if one could make an indigenous periodic table of elements (which seems to me impossible), there would be dozens or hundreds of them, each representing the concepts of a different culture. There will not be a “correct” periodic table and so, in the end, we will have many orderings that represent sociology or anthropology and not science.
And that means that Anthony Masters’s dream is only a pipe dream, and his Indigenous Periodic Table does not belong in a chemistry lecture theater.
h/t: Ginger K.
Jerry, surely you did not intend to write “the periodic table is useful because it says something about the MOLECULAR structure of an element …”. Atomic structure would make sense.
Speaking of chemistry, an old professor of mine had a funny saying: “When we read about atoms bonding with other atoms, it sounds as if the atoms are being friendly. But actually atoms are greedy SOBs who just want to steal each other’s electrons.”
But some atoms share electrons! At least with some other atoms who are their friends. Atoms are like very tiny people … Ok, I will stop now.
Atoms share electrons only in the same sense that two equally powerful athletes share the rope in a tug-of-war.
For me, it is like the atoms are making love.
Someone call Philip Ball.
Also see :
The Consciousness of the Atom
Alice A. Bailey
1922 (first printing)
Lucis Trust Publishing
New York, NY
Yes, a simple error. I’ll fix it, thanks!
You’re a biologist, not a chemist/physicist, no shame!
“ally” – as we know – is a word with import.
I was just yesterday reading psychological therapist biographical sketches which specifically assert their position as “ally”, or of course part of a larger “allyship”.
If one had time, a large set of the critical literature might be found as an iceberg to the easy-to-absorb word “ally”.
I happened to find it – this is from the Ontario Institute for Education Leadership. Since urls don’t work great here, it will have to be found by search. I put an excerpt specific to “ally” :
[ begin excerpt ]
The Differences Between Allies, Accomplices & Co-Conspirators May Surprise
You
by Tiffany Jana Ph. D.
Allyship is the thinking and learning stage.
• An ally is mostly someone who believes in the equal rights of all people, or a
specific group of people.
• An ally is someone who supports equal justice in theory — often with thoughts
and prayers, and sometimes with words in small group settings.
• An ally may care about social justice issues but doesn’t actually show up and
take action
[ end excerpt ]
One might read further about what is meant by “conspirators” – my only point is, these single words have a lot behind them in terms of thought and published literature.
‘Ally’ under DEI means:
White Cis Person who sits down, shuts up and does whatever the BIPOC tells them without question.
If that sounds like a slave, then you are right.
It’s a grift. Somebody is getting paid by the hour to do this, with no financial accounting expected because that would be racist. Or else the time of the participants (except the professor-“ally”) has no monetary value because they are on welfare anyway.
Jobs program. There will need to be indigenous people involved. The sad thing is that the best way to get indigenous people involved in chemistry is to have them get chemistry degrees. This will only benefit the few who get to be part of the committee that is making this periodic table.
To be a little harsh… from my own 18 or so years growing up there (and NZ)… the knowledge most valuable to Aborigines in chemistry would involve not elements but a better understanding of the complicated chemicals that have ruined them as a people. You can probably guess a few of them.
They have BIG chemical problems but not of the teaching the periodic table type.
D.A.
NYC
Do we need a slightly different word for this kind of endeavour by folx like Professor Masters? I agree with Mike that it’s a sort of jobs program for the indigenous collaborators but not for the scholar himself. It’s not exactly a grift because he’s on salary and will get paid whatever kind of scholarship he pursues. I think this form of scholarship is easy: universities want faculty members to indigenize their work; the scholar can bask in his colleagues’ admiration; there is a ready market for the product; it leads to publications and news items; and nobody involved has to think too hard along the way. Can someone come up with a snappy term for this sort of lazy virtuous CV polishing?
It’s like “buffing the chart” in medicine. I’d call it “de-colonizing the CV.”
Yes. This reminds me of the “design” advice my wife found in some book or magazine: Arrange your books by size and color! (She almost recommended doing this; but thought a moment and didn’t.)
Only someone who never reads a book could propose this. Only if you buy your books solely as decorations, not as useful tools or pleasurable art.
But many librarians, at least some of whom do probably read books, advocate for storing books by size (if not color). It can save loads of expensive shelf space, and computer-aided shelve-and-retrieve systems don’t care about the book ordering scheme as long as it is well defined and carefully adhered to. Even at home my books are sorted first by size class (again to save space on shelves of various heights) and then by subject, and yes, I do read them fairly frequently. I do find it a bit harder to imagine a sensible reason for people to propose sorting books by color, though I note that there are plenty of books that advocate sorting people by color.
Is there any evidence for this claim, that Australian Aboriginal people called uranium ore “sickness rocks”? I’m dubious that the ore would cause sickness unless one was mining it or purifying it and breathing in dust.
For that matter, is there any evidence that Australian Aborigines had any conception of “chemical elements and their compounds”, as opposed to merely knowing about substances such as ochre and charcoal?
I call nonsense on the “sickness rocks” story. The major risk in uranium ore mining is accumulation of radon gas from decay in unventilated deep mine shafts, which imposed a risk of lung cancer independent of cigarette smoking and highly synergistic with it. Almost all present-day uranium mining is from open pits where radon gas blows away on the winds. In the concentrations found even in high-grade Saskatchewan ore the element itself is not a health hazard to miners where ventilation (forced or natural) is provided. (Radon can accumulate in other underground mines, too, and in household basements.)
The notion that surface deposits of uranium oxides in their variegated form would be recognizable to aboriginals as all the same thing, and that they could associate casual exposure to these not very interesting rocks with (much) later illness seems far-fetched. Further, is there any evidence that aboriginal tales of sickness rocks came from areas in Australia where uranium actually occurs?
I grew up in Aus, and heard this story before in the Northern Territory 25+ years ago. The explanation was that there were regions with such high concentrations of uranium in the soil that prolonged exposure to the radon gas was sufficient to cause illness, and that the indigenous people had cultural knowledge of where these places were. It’s certainly true that there are vast quantities of uranium in the ground in Aus, but am certainly willing to believe that the story was apocryphal!
Yeah, I’m calling bullshit on the sickness rocks; the radium concentrations outdoors are going to be so low as to be negligible. I suppose it’s possible they found out by eating the ore and giving themselves heavy metal poisoning, though from what I hear, it’s not particularly appetizing.
The other option for self-poisoning would be to enrich the Uranium to derive the most radioactive isotope, Uranium 234. However, it would be rather tricky given that they would first need to mine and process a lot of ore with some pretty niche chemicals to extract the uranium. It’s pretty unlikely that a pre-technological society would manage this.
Then, they will need to use a centrifuge to enrich and separate the isotopes, which will be even more challenging for the Aborigines. Operating a handheld centrifuge, spinning at one revolution per second, the cable/arm of the centrifuge would need to be about 130 kilometres.
And the bucket at the end of the arm with the sample in it would be going ~ 3 million km/hr.
In the early years of the Internet, there was a great moral panic going around about how you could actually find information about how to make nuclear weapons at home!! I thought, “Nooo…surely not. But hell yeah!” Somewhat nervously, in case the Mounties were looking over my shoulder, I typed in the indicated URL and I got to a clever site that explained the process. It was part tongue-in-cheek explanation in simple terms, part parody, and part plea for better nuclear proliferation safeguards. In explaining the technique of isotope separation, the authors advised not to work with uranium hexafluoride gas because it is poisonous and so corrosive it would destroy everything in your kitchen. So they proposed some (facetious I think) liquid preparation that you poured into a plastic scrubbing bucket, attached a rope to the handle, and got her spinning round and round your head. You had to be careful not to allow the U-235 that was coming to the top like cream to reach critical mass or geometry, hence the size of the bucket had to be calculated carefully ahead of time. Small batches please. Inspired silliness.
That’s hilarious. I’m not surprised you were nervous visiting that URL!
It’s funny cause I too imagined a bucket on a rope, but those guys were one step ahead on the health and safety front as I never even thought about the gas escaping.
I wouldn’t want an indigenous scientist trying my technique without proper safety measures against the hexaflouride, so I took another look at my arithmetic. The numbers look good, but given the speed of the bucket, I reckon any escaping the gas will be chemically neutralised by immediately turning into plasma.
I’m not sure if exotic states of matter are encompassed by indigenous ways of knowing, so I suppose it’s best to give them a heads up. Either way I’d strongly recommend eye protection and a high viz vest. It wouldn’t hurt to also label the bucket ‘CAUTION: HOT’.
P.S. I’m sure indigenous ethics committees oversee these things. Given the speed of the rope and the height of kangaroos, traumatic marsupial decapitation is a real possibility. A small step ladder should be used to raise the scientist and rope above kangaroo head height.
Fortunately, nuclear weapons are way beyond the capability of a person or group of people. Unfortunately, chemical and biological weapons are not. A Japanese cult made chemical weapons (people died). A cult in Oregon made biological weapons.
Another note for the Wokepaedia -that is the only possible use of the table or tables proposed-
I nominate this for the neologism of the week.
It’s all fine and good to categorize things in different ways based on utility or other characteristics, but doing so doesn’t advance science.
Categorization is one thing, scientific classification is something different. The reason that we use the periodic table in chemistry is that organization into the periodic table encapsulates their masses, their electron structures and their chemical properties all in one place, and provides a theoretical framework for further work. Yes, there are other ways to group things, but those other ways don’t have the explanatory power of the periodic table. It may make people feel useful, but I rather doubt that the effort described in the article will lead to anything that advances chemistry.
And, when you understand it, it’s effing beautiful.
“Mendeleev’s Periodic Table, which just during those weeks we were laboriously learning to unravel, was poetry, loftier and more solemn than all the poetry we had swallowed down in liceo; and come to think of it, it even rhymed!” — Primo Levi, “Iron” in his book, The Periodic Table
About the rhyming, cue Tom Lehrer’s “The Elements”.
Good lord, thought I’d landed on the Babylon Bee for a moment. Luckily I’m feeling rather mellow this evening so chuckled away at that article. Thanks Jerry.
It did remind me, seeing Gadigal mentioned, that airports in Australia started calling big cities by their traditional names as well. They must have toned it down, or I’ve become accustomed to it, as it hasn’t irked me in a while, but I still remember being in an airport in Perth and saying to my wife “where on earth are all those people going to?” looking at a very busy gate. Sign said Gadigal. She said that means Sydney!
This whole undertaking sounds like a Far Side cartoon writ large.
Or one of Calvin’s “brilliant” ideas that Hobbes shoots down.
It seemed like a hoax.
Yes. This is a bit offensive in this context, but here goes:
https://www.reddit.com/r/TheFarSide/comments/1hg1uyy/early_chemists_describe_the_first_dirt_molecule/
I really miss The Far Side.
Well, in that case, let’s go back to the “indigenous” elements of earth, fire, air, and water.
Any construct we make of the natural world is going to reflect cultural practices and traditions. Indigenous constructs—which I do study under the rubric of ethnobiology, for example—reinforce cultural ideas of how the universe is organized and works. They are essential to maintaining cultural integrity.
But modern science has another goal. Knowing that inheritance is based on the molecular biology of our DNA rather than on the “blood” that is transmitted through the family tree is much more practical and useful.
“ Regarding palladium, he points out there is little to no value in an Indigenous student learning about an element named after an asteroid, which in turn was named after a Greek goddess.”
And back in the days of apartheid a South African government minister asked, rhetorically, “What is the point of teaching a Bantu child mathematics?”
Racism comes in many guises.
Quite. How anyone could not see that as insulting is beyond me.
If I, a non-indigenous, non-Greek pupil, had known that palladium was named after an asteroid named after a Greek goddess, I would have become a chemist. Obviously!
It assumes that no indigenous person will ever become a scientist. Thus a half-baked system of “science” must be invented by “allies.”
The whole thing is very condescending.
Yes, it struck me as yet another version of the Little People argument: “Well, these (insert racial epithet of choice) aren’t really capable of learning real science, so we’ll let them make up stuff from the children’s stories they learned when they were little, and that will be good enough.”
The same argument, phrased more incisively (as always) is given by Sastra, in comment #20 below.
I also read that article and tried to find some silver lining.
Translating a periodic table to a new language makes sense and there are people who work on localizing the names of new elements to various languages. Or on nomenclature for new classes of compounds. I find nomenclature boring but there are many people in chemistry who revel in systematization. Though I must also admit that I find the nomenclature in my native language more logical than the English one: the oxidation numbers of sulfur and phosphorus in sulfuric and phosphoric acids are different while in my language the suffix specifies the exact value of the oxidation number, not just whether it is the most common one for the element.
So experimenting with different languages or with different scripts may result in some insight. Or a new form of a periodic table – some people try to figure out if there is not a better visualization of the periodic table and there are various ideas including some spiraling ones.
See here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Types_of_periodic_tables
Though I think there are better places to start than native Australian languages, for example some areas of abstract mathematics, computer science and such.
But even if the elements are named haphazardly now, I don’t think people would accept renaming attempts even if based on some logical structure, especially when it comes to elements with ancient names such as gold or iron. Imagine extending those temporary names for superheavy elements like Ununoctium (Uuo) – element 118 to all known elements: Hydrogen (H) becomes Unium (U), Helium (He) becomes Bium (B)…
Of course, the authors don’t want just translation, they want cultural connection which may be futile, especially for a culture that wasn’t much chemically inclined even if the article tries to find some examples (but those are common in many cultures).
Working as a doctor in remote parts of Australia, I am impressed with the local knowledge and skills of indigenous people in terms of their ability to survive and thrive in a harsh climate and successfully hunt wildlife (try catching a goanna with your bare hands).
But indigenous “ways of knowing” sometimes leads to poor compliance with public health and medical advice and unnecessary health problems. Not an exclusively indigenous trait, but indicative of the failure of folk knowledge.
A few weeks ago I did stumble across a useful variant of the periodic table: https://kottke.org/24/04/can-i-lick-it-yes-you-can
Nice!
Here’s an even better one: The Periodic Table of Irrational Nonsense, particularly useful in the context of this whole thread.
That’s funny.
It’s fairly transparent from the quotes given that aboriginals had zero interest in creating this alternative periodic table, and would never have had reason to think of it in the first place, until the eager Professor Masters thrust the idea upon them. And of course he interprets their not absolutely rejecting the idea as keen enthusiasm. No doubt the elders are happy to indulge his little fantasy project, just as any group of old people would be flattered by someone taking a fawning interest in anything they say.
What emphatically does not seem to be occurring in Professor Masters’s career is the teaching of, or research into, chemistry.
https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/classical_periodic_table.png
Jesus where do I start?
Here is good: “uranium… called sickness rocks because they were aware that mishandling them could cause illness.”
I doubted this immediately and you clarified it a bit later. I mean…
haha How did they enrich it? I suppose they could have waited the tens of thousands of years until U. turns into lead and gave them lead poisoning…. I mean, they had the time.
This is the worst, most condescending thing I have ever read. And remember, I’ve read all the hilarious and depressing Maori science posts and for my own writing I regularly read the outputs of “Palestine”.
But this takes the cake, the candles and the digeridoo!
D.A.
NYC
(born Melbourne, Australia, 1971) mate!
Nobody of any intelligence or ambition is going to want to study science in New Zealand if this keeps up.
But some of the Aussies fleeing this nonsense might migrate to NZ, which at least has a somewhat different local nonsense. I believe some NZ chemistry teachers effectively pushed back against an indigenous non-science proposal for their field.
Ochre had been used for maybe several hundred thousand years around the world. Everyone used it.
Anyway, down here in New Zealand they’re doing the same to geological ages, binominal nonmacular and basic international standards in whatever.
Yes indeed, “a performative act to ape modern science but in a far less useful way”: how is this any different from a cargo cult? Calling John Frum….
If this proposal were a joke it would be funny; as it is, it’s tragic.
I think Prof Masters has spent far too much time out in the Australian sun. He should get a hat.
Hmmm, I propose a pseudo-element name based on some local translation of “sunium” (since “solarium” is already taken); we already have an actual element named for the moon.
This is an advanced Social Studies project for either a gifted high school student or an anthropology major. It would include a big colorful chart that gets extra credit. It isn’t science.
If there were a nefarious and racist plot to keep the indigenous students out of science, it’s hard to imagine something more effective than this. Flatter them; give them busywork; get them talking and swapping stories about whatever they want; make a big show of listening and being impressed; provide snacks. After all, there is “little to no value” in Indigenous students learning uncommon words or unfamiliar concepts. Keep them in their own lane.
Meanwhile, those who do the actual work get it done unimpeded.
Except, in these cases the point seems to be impeding the actual work.
Re flattering them, giving them busywork, getting them talking and swapping stories about whatever they want, making a big show of listening and being impressed, providing snacks — isn’t that the normal thrust of K-12 teaching these days?
By the time the victims of that (regardless of indigenety) reach university most of the damage has already been done, and it’s what they expect. So this rubbish project won’t dim anyone’s prospects (except the PI, who may become a laughingstock).
Saddest by far is that this self-serving deception does less than nothing to remedy the plight of many FN people today in Australia.
Life outcomes remain generally appalling in many locations [especially remote communities, now like Alice Springs!] because the relevant leaders in the FN “community” and government do not face reality, that the ancestral world is gone like it’s gone for all living people except in a memory dimension and they owe a responsibility to raise children with language, educational and social skills leaving them equipped to cope in the living modern world, with a loyalty to humanity first, not load them, handicap them with specious “knowledge”.
Ironically it’s fundamentally racist because they are being treated differently, raised differently because of their “race”.
By definition we all arrive in the world with our own racial, ethnic, language, cultural roots. And we’re all free to acknowledge this in our lives.
But in a real identity-neutral democracy we are equal before the rules, and one curriculum, one natural science.
“…. . . The meetings and conversations, which have already been under way for two years, have confirmed the project is worthwhile…”
Jesus Christ this is like an Entmoot in Lord of the Rings.
The best Periodic Table of all time can still be found in this resource:
https://www.amazon.com/Science-Made-Stupid-Tom-Weller/dp/0395366461 .
I would copy it here, except that my screenshot application fails to copy to this site.
The “Western” periodic chart should be seen as a distinctly Nazi idea. Notice the lack of elements (or a spectrum) between Hydrogen and Helium. They are supposedly, “distinct” elements much like the “distinct” races of Nazi ideology.