I’ve spent a lot of time pushed many electrons going after the fallacy in New Zealand that indigenous “ways of knowing”—in this case from the Māori—are just as valid as so-called “Western ways of knowing,” which is what Kiwi progressives call “science”. You can see my pieces here, but there are many.
This sacralization of the oppressed, whereby the beliefs of minorities are given extra credibility, has now spread to Canada, a pretty woke place. Lawrence Krauss, who now lives in British Columbia, was astonished and depressed to find indigenous (Native American) superstitions treated as science in the secondary-school curriculum.
You can read his lament by clicking the screenshot below, or find the article archived here.
Quotes from Krauss’s piece are indented, and my comments are flush left. This battle apparently needs to be fought in every country where science, which is not “Western” but worldwide, has been diluted via the efforts of “progressives” who think they’re doing a good thing. They’re not: they are impeding the education of kids by conflating superstitions and established science.
Check out the links in the first paragraph:
I now live in British Columbia (B.C.). A colleague recently forwarded me the current B.C. high school science curriculum for grades nine and twelve. It includes an embarrassing amalgam of religious gobbledygook and anti-science rhetoric. It is an insult to school children in B.C. and does a disservice to the students of the province at a time when understanding the nature and process of science is becoming increasingly important to their competitive prospects in a world dominated by technology.
You may wonder how religious fundamentalism could so effectively creep into the curriculum in a progressive place like British Columbia. The answer is simple. The religious nonsense being inserted into the curriculum has nothing to do with Christian fundamentalism; rather, it is Indigenous religious nonsense. And in the current climate, Indigenous “knowledge” is held to a different standard from scientific knowledge—or, rather, to no standard at all.
. . . In the B.C. science curriculum for grade nine, this agenda is explicit. Students are expected to: “Apply First Peoples’ perspectives and knowledge, other ways of knowing, and local knowledge as sources of information.” “Ways of knowing” are defined as “the various beliefs about the nature of knowledge that people have; they can include, but are not limited to, Aboriginal, gender-related, subject/discipline specific, cultural, embodied and intuitive beliefs about knowledge.”
Here’s one example of how indigenous knowledge dilutes superstition. Like me and many others, Krauss has no problem in teaching this stuff as “social science or history”, but bridles at equating it with science:
For example, lesson three of the “BC Grade 9 Student Notes and Problems Workbook,” contains a section entitled “The Universe: Aboriginal Perspectives.” Over the course of two pages, the creation myths of various aboriginal peoples are described in detail, as “beautifully descriptive legends depicting the relationship between Earth and various celestial bodies.” Such subjects as the creation of the universe by a raven; the presence of water everywhere on Earth except on Vancouver Island; the eternal efforts of the Moon to get some of that water to drink; how and why a divine son and daughter team set out to make the Sun traverse the sky, while ensuring that it seems to stop in the middle of the day; how one of the jealous siblings turned into the Moon; how lunar eclipses occur when the spirit of Ling Cod tries to swallow the Moon; how one constellation of stars is the remnants of a giant bird that flew up from Earth; and how the celestial raven eventually released the Moon, stars, and Sun from boxes, in that order. These are quaint myths, and one can imagine how a reasonable science book might describe how we overcame these prehistoric notions to arrive at our modern understanding via the process of science. Instead, the conclusion at the end of this chapter reads, “These stories parallel the Big Bang Theory.”
The only answer to that is, “No they don’t.” Krauss continues:
As if the insults to the process of science reflected in these curricular statements weren’t bad enough, when the workbook actually discusses science, it gets it all wrong. For example, the book states that, “Indications are that all galaxies are moving away from a central core area. Thus, the universe is said to be expanding.” In fact, the central premise of the Big Bang picture of our expanding universe is that there is simply no centre to the universe. The Universe is uniformly expanding but not from a single central point, but from everywhere. Elsewhere, the process that describes the power generation in stars is listed three times as nuclear fission. This is the opposite of the actual process, nuclear fusion, which explains how light nuclei combine to form heavier nuclei.
This is not surprising, for the people who tout indigenous knowledge as coequal with modern science often are not conversant with modern science. This is also true in New Zealand: advocates for native people simply look for parallels that can be used to say, “Look—indigenous people had a parallel but equally correct way of understanding the universe.” And the answer to that, too, is “No they didn’t.
The damage done to children’s education, and to science itself, are obvious, but summed up by Krauss at the end:
The understanding of the modern world is based on science and that understanding was built up, often at great cost, by overcoming myth and superstition. It is a giant leap backwards to cater to such superstitions in a misguided attempt to somehow pay back Indigenous peoples for historical wrongs. Students today had nothing to do with the sins of the past, and we owe it to them to teach them the best possible science we can. That means separating religious myths from science, and in the process actually trying to get the science straight. The B.C. science curriculum is a disgrace on both counts.
Amen. I suspect the only reason this tactic hasn’t spread to Europe is that they have—with the exception of the Sámi of Scandinavia—almost no indigenous people to sacralize. But India has plenty, and already science is being diluted there by Hindu “ways of knowing”, including the government’s establishment of institutes tasked with revealing the scientific wonders of cows and their urine, dung, and milk. When I visited India on a lecture tour, I spent a long time listening to credible scientists beef about (sorry for the pun) the stupidity of the government’s dilution of science. Their complaint? “Where’s the beef?”, for despite a big government expenditure, there was little to show. That’s what happens when “scientists” are more or less ordered to come up with results wanted by others.
This notion of “Western science” really burns my onions.
Archimedes’s discussion on buoyancy doesn’t apply in Nigeria? The temperature at which water freezes is different in Thailand? Newton’s law of gravitation has no place in Egypt?
I guess these wonders will never cease.
Yes, I hate that phrase too. The beauty of science is its universality, and the history of science shows contributions from many different cultures outside of Europe, particularly the Arabic countries and India (though maybe these are now re-defined as “western”…).
I already have long-standing trouble with depression. The fact that these retrograde trends are happening in so many places makes me feel closer to full despair than does even the corruption and war and everything else negative that is always going on in the world.
Maybe some of this phenomenon is due to K-12 science education generally conveying the findings of science as if they are just DECLARED by scientists and are “just so”, rather than teaching how these things were learned and why they are recognized as (provisionally) true by scientists. But I don’t think this can be the whole explanation.
It’s maddening.
I’m thinking that religious “thinking” everywhere these days has more to do with a dearth of meaning and belonging than anything else. The myths legends and stories are just too meaningful to give up. We need new ones that incorporate the hard-won facts of science to win over the masses. But I wonder if that’s possible?
Maybe the film Idiocracy really does have it right.
It isn’t really religious, Jerry. The aboriginals don’t literally believe any of that. Almost all of them converted to Christianity three centuries ago, although observance has dwindled away as it has everywhere. This is all activist identity-group power politics.
We’re just afraid of them. You can smell the fear on the wind. The country is long and narrow in terms of human settlement, and it’s not beads on a string, it’s dots in a vastness. All our linear infrastructure: roads, railways, pipelines, electricity transmission corridors, cellular networks, goes through vulnerable unpopulated and thinly policed areas. (The more robust and healthier economic connections are north and south between each province and the United States.) We are coming to the realization that this umbilical cord exists on the sufferance of a few score thousand of aboriginal inhabitants in these remote areas who could sabotage it at will and never get caught. Even in populated areas like southern Ontario, the police refuse to enforce Court injunctions against blockaders, citing credible threats of violence against power plants and the electrical grid. So the blockaders eventually get what they want to make them go away. And the Supreme Court is firmly on their side. The whole country is a Strait of Hormuz where we have not even the faintest will or ability to use military action to keep it open if it is ever contested. And the world would never even notice.
The principal Dane-geld we pay is money, of course, but teaching schoolchildren (using land acknowledgments and pseudo-science) to accept this as the just and normal state of affairs as they grow up is important so they don’t get the idea to rock the boat. Someone might get hurt. Lawrence Krauss’s plea that it’s not fair to inflict nonsense on children who had nothing to do with past wrongs will fall on deaf ears. For social peace we need children to be bamboozled.
Leslie is unfortunately correct about fear, money, and acquiescence.
Of course both the scientific and Coast Salish views are well known to be wrong. It was shown long ago that the moon (whose proper name is Isil) was created from the last flower of Telperion and was made first and rose into the sky before the Sun (whose proper name is Anar) was created from the last fruit of Laurelin. And it’s obvious that they are steered through the heavens by the two Maiar called Tilion and Arien.
/nerd
Excellent Canadian-American David Frum writes wealth transfers to the indigenous in Canada cost more money than is given to the entire military! – above and beyond “normal” social security spending.
Having grown up in Australia and NZ I often wonder which Anglosphere country is more in the thrall of “indigenous knowledge” and other woke nonsense.
I can never decide…
D.A.
NYC
At the moment Canada seems to be the worst, although NZ sounds grim too.
“Wealth transfers to the indigenous in Canada cost more money than is given to the entire military.”
$12 million to not excavate the Kamloops apple orchard where (thank goodness!) there is not a mass grave containing 215 murdered indigenous children. [And this is my opportunity to again thank Leslie for setting me straight about that awful mythology.]
Can confirm that things are bad in BC.
I wasn’t familiar with the school situation but it doesn’t surprise me a bit.
Wow. If it were me, I’d get out. Jacinda Arden did.
You describe the fear of economic consequences governing behavior. But there is also another fear—that of physically violent consequences governing the behavior of western governments in addressing social issues, such as the British government’s failure to address the “grooming gangs” victimizing women.
It seems to me that fear, whether of physical violence, economic sanctions, or simply being branded racist, sexist, or some other term stigmatizing for life is one of the largest factors governing many Western societies these days.
What it should have said is: “These stories parallel the stories in the Book of Genesis”.
This is a familiar Canadian story by now. For example, see:
https://teachers-ab.libguides.com/foundationalknowledge/science
[Excerpts: “Coyote Science: Science Lessons
Coyote Science takes students on a culturally rich adventure into the wonder of Indigenous science. On this page are science lessons for elementary science topics.
Knowing Home: Braiding Indigenous Science with Western Science, Book 1. This free e-book attempts to capture the creative vision of Indigenous scientific knowledge and technology that is derived from an ecology of a home place.”]
This stuff has undoubtedly been inserted into Canadian education by a few indigenous grifters, and a larger number of white, Progressive, School of Ed careerist ignoramuses, busily “decolonizing” everything they can get their hands on.
At the risk of overcommenting, let me suggest that Leslie may be a bit too alarmist. Maybe the “identity group power politics” has mostly to do with white, woke-Progressives in the Schools of Ed and in the education establishment, as they push their careers by the gimmick of “decolonializing”.
I don’t know how accurate this diagnosis is. But if it has some truth, then publicizing these idiocies (as WEIT does) is
a valuable step in the direction of therapy. Let us call this
subjecting the ed system to a decolonialoscopy.
Be wary of any texts that include the requisite “weaving” (New Zealand) or “braiding” (Canada). The bottom line is that many academics, teachers and others simply choose less challenging topics. All part of the Race to the Bottom in Education. And Academic Managers (Deans etc) reward the Bottom Feeders.
Maybe the terms “weaving” and “braiding” — which evoke soothing images of groups of peaceful women harmonizing many-colored strands of cloth into a comfy quilt — could be replaced with the words “inserting” and “invading.” Doesn’t sound quite so benign anymore.
One of the characteristics of fundamentalist religions is the way they forbid criticism or critique. “The celestial raven released the moon, stars, and sun from boxes.” Where do you even start with that when it’s in a science text? Let’s call it “fundamentalist indigenous religion” and see where that takes it.
Who put the moon, stars, and sun in those boxes?
Bookmarked under “stupidity”.
Leslie, how do woke Canadians reconcile “only a few score thousand indigenous people have any right to live here” with welcoming the inward migration of millions who have no link to Canadian land at all? Related question: what do the indigenous Canadians think of mass immigration?
Exactly. The same people who claim that they themselves and others are living on stolen land are the same ones who are for open borders.
Simple: the millions of asylum seekers and undocumented immigrants will be taught to chant land acknowledgements, along with the rest of us.
More likely, once the whites are minority, these lofty concepts will simply fall by the wayside. The new Fearless Leader(ship) will have ideas better suited for the majority worldview. Everyone else will have to adapt – or leave. There will be peace, order, and good government, just as promised.
That’s two excellent questions, Coel. I’ve been struggling with answering in 400 words (and no this is not a plea for an exemption!)
#1: Woke Canadians are just good at keeping several incoherent ideas in their heads simultaneously, like “Queers for Palestine”, in order to be recognized as belonging to the correct tribe. Progressives like Indians and they like immigrants, so we’re good.
#2: Indigenous advocates style themselves as citizens of independent sovereign nations that were never subsumed into the Canadian state (which may not even exist, being illegitimate because “colonial”.) Consequently, the organized indigenous voice treats Canada as a shaky foreign country that 633 Indian nations are locked in a struggle against. (Canada’s government even encourages this for perverse reasons, even styling what used to be 633 Crown Indian Reserves as “First Nations”. Many of these are only a few square miles and have populations of a few dozen people, but the chiefs — each of these “nations” has a Chief whose duties amount to that of a township reeve — claim jurisdiction, title, and sovereignty over vast swathes of “traditional” territory outside the Reserves proper including the downtowns of several large cities, including Vancouver, Montreal, and even Ottawa, Canada’s capital.
The social dysfunction, addiction, violence, and poverty in the midst of oceans of cash on the Reserves is well documented. My point here is that the Chiefs (and various traditional “elders” — cronies) have little interest in the domestic policies of foreign Canada. They concentrate exclusively on 1) foreign aid (“nation-to-nation” welfare funding from the Canadian taxpayer), 2) extracting rents from investors proposing to build projects on “their” vast traditional land, which actually belongs to the Crown (maybe not in British Columbia!) but which they insist they have a veto over, and 3) pursuing claims in Court against Canada for said land.
So even though they are all Canadian citizens eligible to vote in Canadian elections their spokes(wo)men don’t much care what Canada does about immigration or anything else domestically as long as the money keeps flowing. The more radical of the “1492LandBack” movement imagine that someday all the foreign settlers regardless of where they were born will be ethically cleansed anyway, leaving space for the idyllic existence enjoyed by the original inhabitants before 1604.
That’s the bare bones of it.
Since I never encounter, as far as I know, people who profess indigenous knowledge to be equal with ‘Western’ science, I’ve never had the opportunity to directly ask such people what would happen if they subtracted the products of Western science and technology from their homes, clothes, food, transport and telecommunications.
To adapt Camille Paglia: if it had been left to indigenous knowledge, we would still be living in grass huts.
I know what you mean, but most people in Europe are indigenous (though that could change).
But Europeans are never indigenous anywhere. They are
defined as settler-colonial, heteronormative carriers of systemic racism, implicit bias, patriarchy, and other offenses. “Western”
science is, of course, worse, lacking the Indigenous ecological harmony of the sumac, the sweat lodge, and the grass hut.
No one anywhere is truly indigenous. We all came from middle Africa. The funny part is you tell it to an indigenous person and they won’t believe that.
How much of this is a genuine attempt to be inclusive (put aside the bad science), and how much of it is condescending head-patting designed to shut up the loud-mouthed progressive guilt machine?
Can anyone give an example of a respectable intellectual who actually argues in favor of this or similar absurdities of wokeism, for example, the claim that there are no differences whatsoever between transgender women and biological women?
Announcers and presenters on NPR (can they be “respectable intellectuals”?) quite routinely refer to “trans girls”—who are mythological creatures in the category of mermaids, selkies, hippogriffs, manticores, the Scottish Water Horse, and the Icthyocentaur.
Are there any valuable indigenous lessons to be learned from human sacrifice and heart extraction?
I wonder
If astrology is now a respectable alternative to astronomy?
If alchemy is now a respectable alternative to chemistry?
By”respectable”, I mean in the minds of woke education professionals and their supporters.
One can find similar examples for all of the basic sciences, I suppose. Though I used to doubt if the applied sciences, such as medicine and engineering, would ever be affected, it seems that that is not correct. There are people who patronise aromatherapy practitioners and crystal healers can find customers as well. Pop-culture “Kabbala” (which is to actual Kabbala as astrology is to astronomy) can always find adherents among celebrities.
Selling snake oil will always be a way of making a living, even as it may be a bit more difficult than selling shares in the Brooklyn Bridge or the Great Wall of China.
As I wrote in the National Post this week, Indigenous Knowledge is guiding everything from hunting to nuclear regulation. And it’s a concept non-Indigenous are incapable of knowing.
https://publiclanduse.ca/news/indigenous-ways-of-knowing-you-wouldnt-understand-warren-mirko/