A Kiwi who wishes to remain anonymous (of course) sent me this link to an announcement of a meeting of three Royal (Scientific) Societies: those of New Zealand, Australia, and Canada. The screenshot below also links to two other short documents, a communiqué and a statement by the Presidents of all three Societies.
The object is severalfold: to eliminate “structural racism” and inequities in science, to tout “indigenous knowledge systems” as not only different and distinct from normal science, but as having contributed valuable knowledge to science in unique indigenous ways, and to assert that indigenous people have a right to “maintain, protect, and develop indigenous knowledge systems, intellectual property, and data.”
Click below (or above) to access the three statements.
The things I agree with are these:
a.) Members of ethnic minorities have surely been discriminated against in the past, and have had difficulty entering into modern (sometimes called “Western”) science
b.) There should be outreach, expanding opportunities for anyone who wants to do science to have a chance to participate
c.) “Indigenous knowledge”, insofar as it tells us something true about the universe, is indeed a part of modern science and should be considered thus
d.) Any research done using the resources of indigenous people should be done with their permission, collaboration, and full participation
The things I question are these:
a.) Whether structural racism—meaning formalized practices or policies—are still in place preventing minorities in all three countries from doing science. Other words are “bias” or “bigotry”. In the U.S., universities are bending over backwards to recruit minorities, and I can’t think of an example of formalized bias, though of course some non-minority scientists will be bigoted (I’ve also not seen many of them).
b.) The extent to which indigenous knowledge has contributed to modern science. It’s telling that, as in nearly all such documents, these three tout this knowledge as invaluable, but don’t provide a single example of the kind of advances that indigenous knowledge have promoted.
And the things I take issue with are these:
a.) Indigenous knowledge is a form of “knowledge” separate and distinct from that produced by modern science. As I’ve argued repeatedly, many forms of indigenous knowledge involve things that are nonscientific in the modern sense. For example, Mātauranga Māori (“MM”)from New Zeland is described by Wikipedia this way:
Mātauranga (literally Māori knowledge) is a modern term for the traditional knowledge of the Māori people of New Zealand Māori traditional knowledge is multi-disciplinary and holistic, and there is considerable overlap between concepts. It includes environmental stewardship and economic development, with the purpose of preserving Māori culture and improving the quality of life of the Māori people over time.
MM includes not only practical knowledge, like how to catch eels or harvest mussels, but also superstition, word of mouth, tradition, religion, and codes of behavior. Some of it is knowledge in the “justified true belief” sense, but a lot of it is not. Those who know more about Australian and Canadian indigenous “ways of knowing” can weigh in here. And none of this comports with modern science in terms of using pervasive doubt, hypothesis testing, experiments, statistics, and the whole armamentarium that is the toolkit of modern science, which stopped being “Western” a long time ago. Modern science is practiced pretty much the same way the world over.
b). While indigenous people can surely design experiments and publish their data, they do not have control over it in the sense of not allowing other people to use it, or refusing to give the primary data behind anything that’s published. While the present document doesn’t say this explicitly, it implies it, and other indigenous people in New Zealand have more explicitly that data are proprietary.
Here are a few quotes from the three documents linked above (direct quotes are indented; my own comments are flush left):
A description of the meeting:
Over 3 days of keynote speeches, wānanga, cultural activities, and panel discussions, top Māori and Pasifika thought-leaders engaged with First Nations experts from Canada and Australia, including Fellows from five of Australia’s learned academies.
Key themes included the need to dismantle academic barriers and inequities for Indigenous students and researchers, share decision-making about research practices and priorities, and shape research agendas to focus on Indigenous knowledges and address challenges that are important to Indigenous Peoples.
Indigenous scholars and knowledge-holders talked about their experiences in academia, and presented research ranging from the study of Indigenous histories, cultures, knowledges, and languages to environmental management and traditional legal systems.
Indigenous scholars and knowledge-holders have championed and led education and research by, with, and for Indigenous communities, and have revitalised interest and awareness in traditional knowledges through language, cultural activities, and creative arts. Their work has explored and built on Indigenous knowledge systems to generate new insights and innovations – such as research methodologies and ethical frameworks based on traditional worldviews and values.
The advances touted for indigenous knowledge (note the absence of examples and yet the assertion that indigenous knowledge systems are separate and distinct “ways of knowing”). Bolding is mine:
The Taikura Summit has continued and built on those exchanges, and we have now learned of the achievements and experiences of hundreds of Indigenous scholars and knowledge-holders.
We have heard more about their journeys and achievements, and some of the myriad ways in which they are advancing understanding, particularly in the study of Indigenous histories, cultures, knowledges, and languages. These scholars and knowledge-holders have shown intellectual leadership by practising and advocating for research and education by, with, and for Indigenous communities. They have revitalised interest and awareness in Indigenous knowledge systems by connecting people through cultural activities, creative arts, and languages.
Indigenous scholars and knowledge-holders have pioneered research practices, methodologies, and ethical frameworks, grounded in traditional worldviews and values, that uplift different ways of looking at challenges and have reshaped research practices across disciplines. Their work has shown that Indigenous knowledge systems are not simply historical artefacts, but living bodies of understanding that continue to evolve and to generate new insights.
From the Communiqué (bolding mine):
The Summit recognises that Indigenous Peoples are the rightful leaders, authorities, and stewards of research concerning their communities, territories, and knowledges. Indigenous research is grounded in distinct systems of knowledge, practice, and ethics that have sustained societies and ecosystems for millennia. These knowledge systems, sciences and artistic forms constitute rigorous and essential ways of knowing and understanding the world. They are not supplementary to other science methodologies. They have their own integrity and value.
Note the clear statement that indigenous knowledge systems are “rigorous and essential ways of knowing and understanding the world” and “are not supplementary to other science methodologies.” This says that indigenous ways of knowing cannot simply fuse with science into a general understanding of the universe. But indigenous ways of knowing, insofar as they incorporate anecdotal or observational evidence, are already fuse-able with modern science. It’s all part of understanding our universe.
Finally, also from the Commuiqué:
We acknowledge the enduring impacts of research practices that have marginalised, misrepresented, or appropriated Indigenous knowledge. Correcting these legacies requires fundamental transformation within institutes of higher learning and learned academies. This includes:
• addressing structural racism and inequities, including for Indigenous people with diverse sexual orientations or gender identities,
• affirming the sovereign right of Indigenous Peoples to determine their own research priorities, methodologies, and outcomes, and
• enabling Indigenous Peoples to maintain, protect, and develop Indigenous knowledge systems, intellectual property, and data.
This part involves questionable assertions, such as that about structural racism, as well as an implication—and I may be wrong here—that the products of indigenous science belong to the indigenous people. But one thing is for sure, nobody can control the outcome of their “research methodologies”, for you don’t do research if you already have determined its outcome.
So Canada and Australia have bought into the “other ways of knowing” mentality that’s long pervaded New Zealand.
I’ll give a few quotes from my anonymous Kiwi correspondent:
I think these statements have thrown science under the bus in all three countries. If our RSTA [Royal Society of New Zealand] still retained any credibility it’s lost it now. How can you make a blanket statement about indigenous knowledge being as rigorous as other “ways of understanding” when it spans everything from empirically verifiable knowledge to superstition? This legitimises any form of quackery or snake oil provided it’s sold under a banner of cultural authority – there are no standards of universal evidence.
I’m hoping that this will lead to change in RSTA, but Canada and Australia now have the same problem! All three scientific associations have abandoned their statutory claim to leadership and responsibility for global and universalist science.. . . It is appalling. Probably the worst thing for me is that it says to indigenous people that they have to choose between their culture and science. That we’ve got here is because relativist ideology has been used as a Trojan Horse to smuggle non-science into science. I see no difference between this and the separation between religion and science. Religion is also culture, and biblical creationism can equally be portrayed as a “way of understanding”. What’s lost is the epistemological distinctiveness of science.
The point is not that indigenous knowledge is all myth and superstition. It’s not. But if the products of different “ways of understanding” are only legitimately viewed through their own “cultural” lens then everything devolves into a political battle – a Foucauldian universe. I think at its heart this is activist politics, and so-called science leaders have fallen for it.
Korenizatsyia
Emphasis added :
“🚩TRANSFORMATION🚩 is the red thread running through all the Sustainable Development Goals, the United Nations’ agenda for responding to global challenges facing humanity and the planet. Setting our world on a more sustainable course requires radical shifts in current development paradigms that are exacerbating inequalities and imperilling our common future.”
Parr, et. al.
“Knowledge-driven actions: transforming higher education for global sustainability”
2022
UNESCO
https://doi.org/10.54675/YBTV1653
A significant proportion of the NZ Royal Society are not scientists. They are academics from non-science fields. And they have infested all its fundamental being with their woke/ progressive groupthink. It was no longer STEM subjects. It had to be STEAM where Arts took the precedence. When the current government stopped that and the funding for non-science research, it became STEMM, where the M was Matauranga Maori. There were some ridiculous grants given for “academics” to study off-the-wall things like playing whale songs to kauri trees to stop disease.
https://www.taxpayers.org.nz/whalesong_trees
These stupid Society decisions have been why the organisation has become a punchline for jokes as it stumbles into irrelevance.
The government is killing the basis of non-STEM grants – throttling the lifeblood of those academics. It knows it won’t lose votes upsetting university staff and the grifters.
Absolutely. I opposed the 2010 amalgamation into the RSNZ of the ‘social sciences and humanities’ fluff (as they were then; and are much worse now) because it was obvious that the rot would be quick and deep – as has been the case.
I have reluctantly remained a professional member of the RSNZ in the fading and unfulfilled hope that a government with some critical thinking expertise might excise the festering sores and return the focus to science.
However, this and related BS is the final straw. I won’t be renewing, even though there’s a 75% discount for us retired folk. I’d rather spend that $45 on real science and support those doing useful work by buying an extra book or two.
“A significant proportion of the NZ Royal Society are not scientists. They are academics from non-science fields.”
So what Gore Vidal would have called “scholar-squirrels”. Academia is inundated with mediocrities that are too lazy or untalented to do rigorous academic work or make original contributions. I mean, that stuff is hard! But they must justify their existence, so this is what they pass off as academic output.
When you add mud to water…you don’t get clean mud, just muddy water…
One makes a mistake if one—in the face of charges of “structural racism”—looks to institutions in search of actual racist policies and practices. The new Marxism has replaced Class with Race (and Gender), and now the entire Bourgeois Cultural Superstructure that is a direct result of Capitalism, is, by definition, racist. The fact that Science (“Bourgeois Science”) is part of this means that all the institutions and practices of Science are a priori racist (and transphobic).
Verbiage like this is familiar enough in Canada. 2023 news report about Concordia U. in Montreal tells the following.
” When Concordia released its Indigenous Directions Action Plan in 2019, the university made a commitment to recognize and integrate Indigenous ways of knowing in its curriculum and pedagogy.
As outlined in recommended action 2.1, the aim is to develop a university-wide plan that seeks to introduce Indigenous perspectives in the curriculum, as well as offer training to help faculty teach Indigenous subjects and facilitate respectful classroom discussions.
Concordia has now taken a critical step forward in that commitment with the launch of a five-year plan to decolonize and Indigenize the university’s curriculum and pedagogy. “
I unhappily await further developments in the indigenisation / decolonisation of mathematics (the original ‘M’). Mathematical knowledge is strenuously universal and non-relative. I believe no ideological assault can prevail against that, but I am not immune to wishful thinking. Dr Mac gave a Canadian example a few months ago; I’m not aware of similar Australian or New Zealand examples. O tempora, o mores!¹.
(Unlike science, mathematics research does not a large pot money that arouses envy. But IMO it has major “equty” issues that make it a target.)
. . . . .
¹ Latin for “Get off my lawn!”
All these meetings and workshops about indigenous this or that are just giant talkfests, taxpayer funded of course, that never advance anything. One can guess everything that’s being said. Millions of dollars will be poured into so-called scholarship that basically is Caveman Studies. Somebody should start The Journal of Caveman Studies or Stone Age Insights….
Somebody should start The Journal of Caveman Studies or Stone Age Insights….
Brilliant! 😂
My first submission…
“Lightning…Just a Discharge of Electricity, or is Ugg the Thunder God Really Angry?
Neolithic is as Neolithic does.
And Ugg the sky god would be unacceptable, being a cis-het male-Chauvinist.
Yup it looks like Australia is also infested with the clap trap. They received half a million in funding for this research grant.
We maybe better at this nonsense than other countries since we have expanded it to space exploration.
https://x.com/FairAusADV/status/1994556627417247905?s=20
Wow, that is hilarious.
Yikes, that has to be the most confused, pointless and derisible ‘academic’ initiative I’ve ever seen. No wonder she’s looking pleased with herself – she’s been given half a million dollars to prance around the country, waving her hands, looking important, while talking absolute crap.
A bit of NZ history which some would like to forget:
Around 1999 to early 2000s, there was a group, the Humanities Academy (or some such name), specifically set up for humanities folk to get into RSNZ via a backdoor without any vetting by those scientists who were already in RSNZ. There was to be a merger of the two groups — RSNZ and this humanities group — hence, avoiding the usual vetting. Many of the humanities folk who got in this way would never have been admitted otherwise, but due to this particular set up they are the longest serving of all the humanities fellows, some quite high up in the RSNZ.
For years, people in NZ spoke of the ‘real’ fellows and the pseudo-fellows, but over the decades this distinction dropped out of use. I’m old enough to remember how a colleague (of worse than mediocre talent, but nevertheless a full professor) went up and down the hallway knocking on people’s doors telling them they needed to hurry to join this humanities academy because of the planned merger and that this path would soon close because of the strict vetting demanded by the scientists. Some eschewed the backdoor. Others signed on quickly on the understanding that the larger the group, the larger their representation within RSNZ.
DrBrydon’s ‘Bourgeois Science’ is a great label! It could catch on!
I’ve just looked up the Royal Society of Canada. Interestingly, the inclusion of humanities dates back to its founding in 1882, following the French model of the Institut de France. But it seems damage from the current insanity has been to a certain extent contained by the fact that its members are divided into three ‘Academies’, one of arts and humanities, one of social sciences, and one of science (with anglophone and francophone divisions of each). I don’t know which Academy the Canadian participants in this event belonged to, but I suspect it wasn’t the science one.
This is part of the larger “De-colonize” the academy movement. Within that context, consider:
“…assert that indigenous people have a right to “maintain, protect, and develop indigenous knowledge systems, intellectual property, and data.”
Aren’t concepts like “Rights” and “Intellectual property” products of the Enlightenment? Sounds like selective de-colonization to me.
What is this? I can understand indigenous people wanting to do research on topics that are specifically significant to them, sure, but a right to determine their methodologies — and outcomes??
This doesn’t seem to comport well with science, or even sit comfortably together on a couch eating snacks.
This sentence makes it seem like research is now playtime…like what you would see in nursery school.
Absolutely, if Indigenous mythology says that the Indigenous Peoples have always inhabited that land, since time immemorial, then they have a right to insist that science must affirm their belief, and that it not get all uncouth and colonial and cis-het capitalist and say that actually their ancestors migrated there fifteen thousand years ago.
On the contrary, determining the outcome of research in advance of the actual research is the defining element, the secret sauce, of woke scholarship. It thus appears that indigenous Ways of Knowing are indeed homologous to the woke Way of Knowing. We should have known….
Why not? Western scientists who study the effects of puberty blockers and cross sex hormones certainly feel entitled to their own outcomes.
I had a long talk with a Native American guy about “other ways of knowing.” He was very bright and knowledgeable and it was a friendly and pleasant conversation. All the examples he gave (most of which involved botanical treatments of sickness and injury) followed what I would consider a very normal “way of knowing.” His people were observant and open to experimentation. They determined that a variety of poultices applied to wounds apparently prevented infection and other preparations could be consumed to bring down fevers. They may not have had lab facilities to conduct double blind experiments and I am sure that confirmation bias interfered with the process, but they were conducting experiments and reaching conclusions that helped people. Good for them. But it shouldn’t be classed as something distinct from the traditional “Western” way of looking at the world and something we could all benefit from if we would just be open to it. Like most people through most of history, they were engaged with their surroundings and managed to figure stuff out. It wasn’t magic.
I’m skeptical.
How do you know “his people” knew about poultices and willow bark? He, or his parents, could have read about those traditional remedies in books written by westerners who saw them being used by neolithic peoples elsewhere in the world (New and Old) and just assumed, or his parents told him, that “his people” knew about them, too. This is the problem with oral histories. You don’t know how much was orally transmitted faithfully over hundreds of generations since the beginning of time, how much was borrowed from other tribes during trade and conquest because it sounded good, and how much was read in a western library or looked up on Google AI. Jacques Cartier’s 1534-5 account of aboriginal treatment of scurvy has credence because he observed it and wrote it down. Yet even there the natives seem not to have understood it as “medicine” in the way Cartier did. Even though they were familiar with scurvy they allowed many of their own to sicken and die that winter before any of them took the cure.
And of course we know now that poultices containing green molds “ought” to cure infection, just because we know that penicillin does cure infection when taken in the large doses brewed up industrially. Sure enough, oral traditional knowledge “knew” that all along. Absent contemporaneous written observations with appropriate controls, who can argue?
What makes this not science is that the practitioners can state the results and then, for all we know, create the myth that proves they knew it before anyone else did, as Jon Gallant notes above.
James Lind’s truly scientific clinical trial of citrus juice to treat scurvy didn’t have any lab facilities either. He just recognized the need to systematically control the various nostrums then fashionable for treating all manner of sailor ailments so that he got a valid comparison between citrus and anything else. Scurvy cured. He published it for the Admiralty so that other sailors need not perish. Not only did he lack a laboratory but he did the trial on board a Royal Navy warship on station in the open ocean engaged in arduous and prolonged blockade duty, which is why the sailors were getting scurvy. Not in a comfortable forest camp ashore.
Interesting. Not sure that the Royal Society in Canada really carries as much weight as it’s name might imply.
My fundamental issue with the whole “western” vs “other” science schism is that there isn’t really a difference. Indeed, I would argue that the whole question is moot. There are only two ways of understanding the world around us – belief is one and science or inquiry is the other. Scientists are the ones who watch a magician and say, “Hmmm… how did they do that?”. Beliefs simply accept that there are things unknowable and we just have to believe that they are magical.
But no matter where you are in the world, the process of “knowing” (of “science”) is the same. It starts with an observation or many observations, results in an explanation, leads to experimentation to validate the explanation, and is declared a fact. These are the steps that any and every child takes grouping up. And they are the basis of scientific inquiry. An example I give to my class is “Would you like some rutabaga and coconut ice cream?” – science would have us say “Let’s try it” and after a few tastes (experiments) we can draw a conclusion. Belief, on the other hand, would simply tell us it tastes good or bad without trying the experiment.
Our ancestors – the one’s who survived to give rise to us – approached the world in the same way. Try something, see if it works great, if it doesn’t modify the approach and try again. This is true of all people everywhere (and, for that matter, all primates and a few other species).
As to the notion that scientific knowledge belongs to its creator and they have the right to withhold that knowledge from others, well, that is how we got in this situation in the first place.
“Those who know more about Australian and Canadian indigenous “ways of knowing” can weigh in here.”
Fortunately there is no “Canadian indigenous way of knowing”. Before each had contact with Europeans, the Innu on the east coast and the Salish on the west coast could have had only the vaguest notion that diverse other people lived far away on the other side of an impassable mountain range, based only on rumours passed by trade. Had they met, their languages would have been mutually unintelligible. Their oral histories, mythologies, and cultures were vastly different from each other (hierarchies and wealth inequality among the Salish agriculturalists; extreme egalitarianism among the Innu hunter-gatherers). If they had met, the Salish would have enslaved the Innu if they could have caught them.
I think this extreme diversity of indigenous cultures is one of the weak barriers preventing Canada from experiencing a Matauranga Maori-style cultural revolution. In order to develop strong forms of indigenization, it’s helpful if only one indigenous way of knowing has to be installed in the bureaucracy and the cultural institutions. In Canada, they would have to pick one and not others. No one wants that responsibility or its consequences.
Yes, Mike, divide and rule. There’s a larger point. All the indigenous elite in Canada want is money, the universal cultural solvent. Ways of knowing specific to each tribal group are useful insofar that they can be ceremonially leveraged into title over large tracts of land (some already privately owned by you and me), in a specific local legal claim, which the settler economy can be extorted into paying vast sums of money to be permitted to use*, or in some cases forbidden to use altogether. The traditional knowledge discovered in these exercises is tailored to suit what our Supreme Court has ruled will be sufficient to prevail. It’s fundamentally a white process, not a native one, because the natives are using the King’s legal system to get what they want.
Most of the agitation to “indigenize” the school and university curriculum and teach two-eyed seeing etc. comes from settler-activists (not all of them white European, this being Canada) who have adopted the reconciliation agenda as their own career grift in the Omnicause. Those occupying sinecures in the entirely irrelevant Royal Society of Canada are the same crew who have taken over the leadership of the Canadian Medical Association and the professional certifying and licensing bodies.
The aboriginals don’t give a shit about any of this, partly because so few have attained the education where they would encounter in real life any member of a learned society. Show us the money.
(* The aboriginal title our own Court declared to exist in Richmond BC is thought to be worth $100 billion. If the landowners ponied up that much to get clear title back, essentially repurchasing their property from the Cowichans, each resident of the Cowichan Nation would get $12 million. The money would actually flow through the Chief and his crony elders to be distributed as he saw fit, as in the traditional way that salmon and slaves were distributed. Aboriginal title is collective, say our Courts. If you were on the outs in the band, you might not get any.
(If the Maori are hoping Matauranga-Maori will shake loose a few thousand tax dollars to play whale songs to sick trees, they need to up their game and dream bigger. The sky’s the limit.)
Exactly right. Nonetheless, diversity of First Nations cultures allows a variety of operators to parasitize a variety of academic institutions, each with their own Way of Gibberish. For example: “Cape Breton University has offered the online open course Learning from the Knowledge Keepers of Mi’kmaki, (also known as “Mi’kmaw Mondays”).” The quote comes from a compilation of these operations at: https://www.schulich.uwo.ca/edid/docs/14109+Brunette-Debassige+MappingApproaches.pdf . The extent of these things surprised even me.
From the “Methodology” section, authors’ racial certificates:
They cite Tuck and Yang (2012). Do the authors not realize that since none of them by self-admission are pure-blooded aboriginals they will all be purged from their decolonized universities, ethnically cleansed from decolonized Canada, and maybe pushed into the sea if what they advocate for ever comes to pass? Only Haque possibly has any right of return to her country of “origin” as the child of Pakistani citizens. The rest will have to take to boats as the refugees from South Vietnam did and hope the United States Navy and Coast Guard pluck them out of the sea.