I’ve written a lot about the controversy in New Zealand involving whether the indigenous “way of knowing,” Mātauranga Māori (MM), is equivalent to modern science (often called “Western science”) and, as many maintain, should be taught alongside modern in science classes (see all my posts here).
As I’ve noted, because MM does have elements of empirical truth in it, like information (established by trial and error) about how to catch eels, when berries are ripe, and so on, it is characterized as a “way of knowing”.
But because MM also incorporates elements of religion, ethics, mythology, legend, vitalism, and even outright falsehoods, it is not equivalent to modern science. One example is the unsubstantiated claim that the Polynesians (ancestors of the Māori) discovered Antarctica in the seventh century, and that a microbial infection of New Zealand’s kauri trees might be cured by playing whale songs to the trees and rubbing them with whale oil and pulverized whale bones (the myth here is that the kauri and whales were once “brothers” but then became separated; the trees are dying because they’ve lost their brothers).
And the empirical content of MM is, as Quillette’s Iona Italia says in her excellent interview video (below) with evolutionary ecologist Kendall Clements of the University of Auckland, consists solely of “intimate local knowledge,” lacking elements of modern science (hypothesis testing, pervasive doubt, theory, the use of mathematics, attempts to explain why things are as they are). Teaching MM as equivalent to modern science, then, is not only misguided, but also inimical to the education of New Zealanders, including Māori students themselves.
Kendall was one of the signers of the infamous 2021 Listener Letter: (see the text here), a letter rejected from New Zealand scientific journals before it was accepted in a magazine called “The Listener”. It made exactly the points I’ve reprised above, but it wasn’t received well. Many Kiwis, including Māori themselves, totally rejected the authors’ thesis, saying that modern science was an instrument of colonialism and should be balanced with “local science”.
But promoting MM as equal to science, it seems, was a way of sacralizing the indigenous Māori—a form of “affirmative education” that, in the end, will mis-educate students and erode science teaching in New Zealand. While teaching what’s in MM can be useful in sociology or anthropology classes (a point made by the Listener authors), it does not belong in science classes. Nevertheless, all university students in New Zealand, including science students, will be compelled to take courses that, at the least, do not show that MM is NOT science. The controversy is simply ignored. And the authors of the Listener letter have been largely demonized, with some of them losing professional perquisites, like the right to teach certain classes.
The interview below, though it’s nearly 90 minutes long, is in my view the best existing discussion and critique of the idea that MM should be seen as a “way of knowing” equivalent to modern science. I’d recommend listening to it if you have any interest not only in New Zealand in particular, but in how indigenous “ways of knowing” are diluting science in general. After all, the same clash is happening elsewhere, including South Africa and Canada. And in all of these places modern science is denigrated as being a tool of white colonialism.
Here are the YouTube notes:
Should mythology be taught alongside the scientific method in science class?
In this provocative episode, host Iona Italia speaks with Kendall Clements, a biology professor at the University of Auckland, about the ideological push to equate Mātauranga Māori—traditional Māori knowledge—with science in New Zealand classrooms and universities. Clements recounts the academic backlash he faced after defending science in a now-famous letter to The Listener magazine.
Together, they explore the difference between cultural knowledge and scientific epistemology, the dangers of politicising education, and the importance of institutional neutrality. This wide-ranging conversation touches on Karl Popper, the meaning of academic freedom, and why placing belief systems above critique risks eroding both science and tradition.
Both Kendall and Iona are informed and eloquent, so have a listen:
When ID people (Kitzmuller) said the scientific method was too strict they were lliterally called fascists by the far left. Opposition to Indigenous loosening of the scientific method, well that’s fascism also to the far left. The far left is incoherent.
I listened to this interview yesterday: I like Iona and am familiar with Kenndal and like him also. He does a good job in his advocacy and I’ll bet has paid a very real price in his social, professional and private life. NZ, and its elites, are a small pond – there’s no escape for him and his position is unpopular but worthy. THAT is bravery.
I am also addicted to the topic – a venn diagram of my many almost autistic obsessions – and as a former NZ resident.
I’d recommend the interview.
Props to PCC(E) who has done more outside NZ than anybody to bring large and elite attention to it.
This is important not just b/c NZ is a lovely country being ruined on many levels, but it is also a bellwether for this type of nonsense that must be stemmed or stopped in other places (the entire Anglosphere).
It is also “saleable” as an intellectual culture war battle.
Keep up the good work.
D.A.
NYC
Nicely put. Agree 100%.
So let me get this straight. Ancient Hebrew creation myths and other fake history and mythology espoused by Christian fundamentalists are rightly rejected as history or science, but Maori myths are special and count as knowledge? How does this work in Canada or the US? There are no similarities and indeed many contradictions between the creation myths and oral histories of the Huron, Cree, Kwakiutl, Ojibwa, Inuit, etc. Which indigenous lore counts as “knowledge”?
Yes, the different and contradictory ways of knowing of indigenous people from different groups is in strong contrast with science, which is pretty uniform in what it maintains in many countries. That means that the different ways of knowing cannot all be true In that sense they are like religions.
The same is happening in Canada. And in British Columbia the leftist government is giving large parts of the province away to native tribes, and giving them the right to reject pipelines and other developments.
There seems to be a feeling that the indigenous have some sort of magical powers and “ways of knowing” and we must believe everything that they say and follow their wishes, oh…and give them lots of money, land and power.
But they are just humans like the rest of us. The bands should have no more power than any other groups. The chiefs are basically just small town mayors. Wearing eagle feathers and other fancy regalia doesn’t cause them to have magic power and knowledge.
It’s terrible. Nice to see you here!
It’s just fear, Lesley. Canada has not the state capacity to exert dominion over the vast expanse of almost empty country where all our infrastructure runs. Even densely populated southern Ontario, the southern third of the “arrowhead” that hugs Lakes Erie and Ontario runs on indigenous sufferance, and Dane-geld. No one is going to take away the intimidation power of these 633 bogusly sovereign nations summing to 400,000 people who are economically totally dependent on Canadian charity but still determined to take “their” land “back.” They have large contingents of poorly educated idle young men with few prospects in the productive economy, no mortgages or rent to pay, and lots of guaranteed taxpayer money to feed them with, all the sine qua non for rebellion. Once you’ve ceded power, which we did in dangling a veto in front of the chiefs, you can never get it back except by a credible threat of violence, which Canada has not the stomach to do. Kind of rum, though, for a rocks-and-trees economy to concede to a group of 633 chiefs the authority to tell us what we may do with our rocks and trees.
The ways of knowing and the genocide nonsense are just propaganda to demoralize immigrant schoolchildren and keep their parents back-footed while they agitate instead for Khalistan, Palestine, and the Chinese Communist Party.
I think the reason we hear less about indigenous inroads into science in Canada is that there are very few indigenous people in STEM. (The successful ones are those of mixed parentage who escaped the Reserve culture and want nothing to do with it.) Fetal alcohol syndrome, early adolescent drug use, and hair-curling violence take a terrible toll. The few who have managed to complete secondary schooling with actual high-school subjects and not just stargazing woo and canoe-building craft skills go into law —special aboriginal law programs abound — because that’s where the activist juice is. They don’t need science.
I don’t think Canada has a clue how to get out of this corner we have painted ourselves into.
Are there any good-quality research results on why this is happening? It’s not simply White Guilt — I lived through years of that in Boston, and this new thing seems very different. Is it mainly an attempt at short term “social stability”, this time based on post-truth BS about special knowledge(s)? If so, and if the Western (majority) populations really believe it, then IMO we are in deep trouble.
In Canada, Prof. Frances Widdowson, ex of Calgary’s Mount Royal University, is your go-to gal (sorry, Frances, I am always alert to alliteration) for scholarly treatment of this phenomenon. A (Marxist) professor of political science, she has written several books on indigenization and decolonization, all of which you should read. She also assembled voluminous material into her successful appeal against her 2021 firing from her University (“the Woke Academy”) where she was a tenured professor. (Disclosure: I donated money to that appeal.) She has also contributed a chapter to the recent Grave Error, a multi-author book setting the record straight about the mass-graves-of-murdered-children hoax at the site of the old Kamloops Residential School that convulsed the country for several months in 2022 just as we were emerging from pandemic delirium.
To sample the health of free speech among Canadian university students, see here about an invitation Frances got to speak at Wilfred Laurier U in Waterloo:
https://www.reddit.com/r/wlu/comments/1ge7isq/residential_school_denialist_really/
Hymie Rubenstein, emeritus professor of anthropology at University of Manitoba, writes a good Substack where he has written and collected many articles about the aftermath of the “knowing” that led to the “discovery” of the “mass grave” and dozens of churches burned in arson. Bruce Pardy, law professor at Queens University has insights into the Constitutional peculiarities of the relationship between aboriginals (who don’t now think of themselves as Canadians — the expression, “Native Canadians” never caught on here) and the Crown.
I would suggest that you centre your reading around the 2015 Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission into Canada’s Indian Residential Schools. You’re obviously not going to read all five volumes of unsworn, unexamined, unedited, unindexed, often hearsay raconteuring from “survivors” but the editors and authors of From Truth Comes Reconciliation did, and came to more nuanced conclusions than the motivated Summary volume which is all most people have read. The reason this is important is that the report of the TRC was the totemic, profoundly demoralizing event that I believe explains why this is happening in Canada now. If your government and fellow countrymen were carrying out genocide to this very day, as the Parliament of Canada unanimously endorsed, would you not want to just give your country back to its original inhabitants and let them decide what justice they wanted to dispense to you? Well, I wouldn’t — Hell no! — , but a lot of Canadians seem to think they do. And when the thugs do seize privately owned land, it turns out there’s not a lot Canadians can do about it.
The now ubiquitous land acknowledgements were not one of the 94 Calls to Action of the TRC. The practice seems to have sprung into existence on its own, perhaps aping the Americans as we are so wont to do. But the TRC Report gives them a special reverence such that to not sit respectfully through the incantation, or to question it, is an act of blasphemy. Just not done if there is someone present who can make life miserable for you, and if the local aboriginal activists find out, you’ll be labelled racist and ignorant. Americans would regard this as rude maybe, but not a taboo, and worthy of satire (like the one invoking Lockean labour theory at University of Washington.) In Canada, no dice. This is where, I think, indigeneity became a secular state religion. Mission accomplished.
So no, I don’t think Western majority populations believe in any of the special knowledge BS (although white purveyors of herbal nostrums are happy to trade on it.) What they do believe is that indigenous people are special generally (because legally they are.) No one dares cross them and IMO we are in deep trouble because of that.
Wow. Thank you for that. I had no idea the rot was that bad in today’s Canada. You have my sincere sympathy.
Lots to unpack in your assertions.
First off – we need to separate legal rights (esp. s.35 of the Constitution Act & case law), verses social/cultural traditions.
Secondly – we need to discuss the differences and synergies between observations/anecdotal info verses peer-reviewed data/science/inferences.
Third – we need to acknowledge differences between Treaty Rights & Aboriginal rights, and
Lastly – we need understand the imposition of the Indian Act and the subsequent roll-out of (mostly) federally-funded & supported Band Councils verses traditional governance models & traditional territories.
All of these points require considerable background & discussion.
The short version is that “TEK” (Traditional Ecological Knowledge) are observational experiences that are often intergenerational, sometimes codified into song/stories/dances; and are not dependent upon DNA, or the colour of one’s skin, or affiliation to any approved “Indian Band” list. The explanations of causal effects for observed phenonium are not always supported or based in reality; but the more intense & lengthy observations of these patterns are (i.e. intergenerational) – the better the explanations can be if they are challenged by testing the assumed causal processes. This has been rarely systematically investigated – and anyone can claim any level of authority by claiming they own or possess TEK due to any claim to any cultural background instead of experience.
TEK and what is now called “Western” science are different – but not exclusionary, and not contradictory – they are instead complementary.
Science is instead a reasonably rigid & dependable process of using observations to develop and use targeted methodologies to generate supporting data for hypotheses of causal explanations of observations.
One informs the other – or should.
TEK is a reasonable generator of hypotheses for empirical testing. Many years of observation deserves some respect, because it will sometimes be right.
It is not reasonable to used claimed TEK to supersede the scientific method or indeed any skeptical review, where faith is treated as unquestionable.
So you think that the view that whales and kauri trees were created as brothers and therefore oil and bones from the former can cure the blight caused ultimately by this separation? No scientist would even MAKE such a crazy hypothesis. And insofar as TEK involves invoking the supernatural, which it does when invoking things like stars and lunar cycles, yes, they are NOT complementary.
Thanks again Prof JC for highlighting this issue, I agree it was an excellent discussion.
In NZ we elected a supposedly centre-right government in November ’23, but some of their MPs are still charging ahead with incorporating spurious Treaty of Waitangi provisions into education and elsewhere. Sacralization of Maori culture has almost become the de-facto state religion, with any questioning of it tantamount to blasphemy. Anyone pointing out the fact that virtually all people identifying as Maori actually have mixed ancestry is often met with hostility and the usual accusations of racism. Prof Clements is indeed a brave man.
I do wonder if the fervour in support of Mātauranga includes an element of Cosplay. Lots of people dedicate sizable proportions of their attention to cosplay of fictional characters, or learn Klingon as part of Star Trek cosplay, or even find playing Dungeons and Dragons to be more satisfying than ‘real life’. And that’s before we even consider historical re-enactment activities.
Perhaps one difference with Mātauranga is that it has gained traction in ‘real life’ – this makes the cosplay more convincing. Not so much a way of knowing but more of a way of prioritising life.
Kendall’s willingness to speak out is critical to our fight to preserve the conceptual institutions of education and science. Possibly many of those who argue for equality between “other ways of knowing” and science are well meaning. But they cannot or will not see that they will do considerable damage. Possibly, others are involved in a power grab.
A related theme has to do with marketing folk remedies as equal to “Western Medicine”. No they are not!
See:
https://www.acc.co.nz/newsroom/stories/rongoa-maori-a-traditional-healing-choice-for-all
https://www.acc.co.nz/about-us/rongoa-maori-services
I meet and talk on a regular basis to cancer patients in Wellington and I know that the last thing they need is unverified folk therapies.
David Lillis