More touting of indigenous knowledge as coequal with modern science

Once again we have an article about how science could be improved if only it incorporated indigenous “ways of knowing”—the “braiding of knowledge” referred to in the Guardian article below (click to read).  I often see another metaphor used to express the same thing: “two-eyed seeing”, with one eye seeing the way indigenous people do, and the other way modern science does. (I won’t use the term “Western science,” often used to denigrate it.) The implication is that modern science is half blind without indigenous knowledge.

And once again we see five things. The first is that indigenous knowledge is local knowledge, usually about how to grow food or harvest other things that enhance the lives of locals.

Second, indigenous “ways of knowing” are not science in the modern sense—the sense that involves hypothesis testing, doubt, controlled experiments, blind testing statistics, data analysis, and mathematics.  Indigenous “science” does not avail itself of these essential items in the toolkit of science.  Rather, it usually involves using trial and error (mainly about food), and if something works, it becomes “knowledge”. Such knowledge—like how to build the “clam gardens” copiously mentioned in the article below—may be true and may indeed be “knowledge” conceived of as “justified true belief”, but justification usually doesn’t involve replication.

Third, the “braiding” is asymmetrical: modern science can contribute much more to indigeous practices than the other way around. How to build clam gardens or harvest sweetgrass is, after all, not something that’s widely applicable, while principles of genetics, quantum mechanics, chemistry, and so on, are universal, and science can do a lot to help indigenous people with issues like medicine, probably the most important area of asymmetry.  We do not often adopt indigenous medical practices, but the other way around is pervasive, because modern medicine, based largely on science, works..

Fourth, examples of indigenous knowledge that are given in the article are few. These article are usually a lot more about people touting “other ways of knowing”, and calling attention to the past oppression of indigenous people, than they are about the expansion of human knowledge.

Finally, the article completely neglects examples of the damage done to the environment by indigeous people, and these examples are not rare. They cannot be mentioned because what indigenous people do must be uniformly regarded as good. But they are not, as the date below the fold show.

Click below to read; the author is Leila Nargi.

Examples of indigenous knowledge. I would be remiss if I neglected the “ways of knowing” that the article says should be braided with modern science. There are not many, but this list is pretty exhaustive from the article. Excerpts from it are indented, and my comments are flush left.

Clam gardens:

Beginning at least 4,000 years ago, Native communities built clam gardens into the intertidal zone from Washington state through coastal British Columbia, and into south-east Alaska. They are a unique form of mariculture that provide harvestable habitat for an array of tasty ocean creatures like butter clams – collected “in great numbers, then smoked and dried and stored and traded”, Hatch said. But they also yielded red rock crab, basket cockles, sea cucumbers, limpets, sea snails and seaweeds in a veritable smorgasbord for humans and marine mammals, such as otters.

These gardens change where sediment moves and may protect against increasing shoreline erosion; studies also show that clam productivity and populations are higher inside gardens than outside them.

Yes, this is an advance in growing clams, and may have other salubrious environmental effects, though they aren’t documented. At any rate, stemming erosion would be limited because clam gardens are restricted in size.

Sweetgrass harvesting:

Still, the necessity of “proving” the validity of longstanding Indigenous practices can frustrate. Suzanne Greenlaw, a citizen of the Houlton Band of Maliseet Indians, is an ecologist at the Schoodic Institute, a non-profit of the National Park Service (NPS) that supports Wabanaki-led research. She participated in a 2016 study to understand how sweet grass, which grows in salt marshes, rebounds after harvesting. The study was part of a Wabanaki bid to re-establish the right to gather sweet grass from NPS land. Though the Wabanaki have made baskets from sweet grass for centuries, they have been cut off from ancestral marshes in Maine’s Acadia national park for at least 100 years.

Non-Indigenous researchers planned to conduct an environmental assessment to gauge how well plants regrew after picking, choosing sweet grass plots that had no connection to those once used by the community. This led to a comparison study in which Wabanaki practitioners demonstrated their superior understanding of how and where to harvest for the greatest ecological benefit. (They may reclaim harvest rights later this year.)

Notice that modern science will be used to verify whether the way sweetgrass is harvested affects future harvests.  But that is not indigenous knowledge; rather, it’s an in-progress attempt to verify that knowledge, with the goal of helping indigenous people who have lost their right to harvest regain their rights.

Other stuff:

More Indigenous people – Robin Wall Kimmerer, author of Braiding Sweetgrass, is a notable example – are entering academia and changing it from the inside, while some tribal nations have hired their own scientists. Non-Native institutions are seeking to undo their erasure of Indigenous cultures; the Brooklyn Botanic Garden has started to include labeling that highlights Lenape names and uses for food plants like persimmons. International environmental organizations also increasingly recognize the importance of including Indigenous voices in discussions around the climate crisis. Since 2022, there’s even been federal funding to study ways to combine Indigenous and western sciences, so each part remains distinct while being strengthened by the other.

Note that labeling plants with indigenous names is an exercise in linguistics and anthropology, not a “way of knowing”. And while indigenous people should not be excluded from discussions about practices that may affect their lives, that too is not “knowledge’ but inclusion.

More:

In fact, there are many proven correlations between Indigenous-managed food systems and ecological health. Researchers at Simon Fraser University have found that when Indigenous groups in British Columbia tended forest gardens, they not only produced an impressive biodiversity of food plants – from crabapple and hazelnut and wild plum to wild rice and cranberries – they also improved forest health.

Whyte, the University of Michigan professor, works with the Sault Ste Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians in Michigan – one of many Native nations that used prescribed burns to boost populations of sharp-tailed grouse, snowshoe hare and deer, all of which declined after the federal government’s 1911 burning ban. Collaborating with US Forest Service researchers, they conducted more than 20 ecology surveys and other projects that proved their case for fire, in the interest of establishing a co-management plan that would allow them to reintroduce this tool.

The first part is absolutely expected: if you deliberately plant diverse plants to get fruits and nuts, and compare the biodiversity with that of native forests, yes, you’ll get a more diverse “ecosystem”. If you see that as a “healihier” ecosystem because it has more ethnobotanical assets, yes, that is also true.  But surely the author doesn’t mean to imply that all North American forest should be turned into “forest gardens” for growing food.

As for controlled burning, yes, that can be useful in replacing natural burns that are no longer permitted, but in the past burns set by indigenous people could become uncontrolled.  This was particularly dire in New Zealand, where 40% of native forest (30-35% of the total land area) was burned by Māori people within 200 years of their arrival on the two main islands in the 13th century. (There were of course no non-Polynesian “colonists” then.) See below the fold for more data.

All in all, it’s not an impressive record, and hardly one that enriches modern science. Indeed, modern science is making a large contribution to indigenous people than the other way around. Despite that,

Indigenous knowledge is sacralized and, the article implies, should be considered coequal with modern science.  Some quotes:

Rather than dismissing Indigenous knowledge, more western scientists are discovering its viability for themselves and adjusting their research goals to embrace it.

That represents a “massive shift”, according to Kyle Whyte, a professor of environmental justice at the University of Michigan and a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. Historically, western scientists have considered themselves rigorous and empirical, while they have classified traditional Native thought as mythic, religious or plain made-up, he said.

It’s not false to say that a great deal of “traditional Native thought”, construed as “ways of knowing”, is indeed mythic, religious, or plain made-up.  But some of it is not, and insofar as this knowledge can be verified by modern science, that part is indeed “knowledge”.

Western science favors distinct disciplines – ecology, biology, geology and Supernant’s specialty, archaeology. But Indigenous knowledge considers “the earth and the water and the air and the plants and the animals as deeply interdependent and interconnected; to understand one is to understand all. And that has a lot to teach western science,” Supernant said of the importance of braiding these systems.

Notice the inaccurate term “Western science”.  And insofar as a system is dependent on other things, modern science has to deal with it. But, as my advisor Dick Lewontin said in an essay called “A reasonable skepticism“:

But this holistic world view is untenable. It is simply another form of mysticism and does not make it possible to manipulate the world for our own benefit. An obscurantist holism has been tried and it has failed. The world is not one huge organism that regulates itself to some good end as the believers in the Gaia hypothesis believe. While in some theoretical sense “the trembling of a flower is felt on the farthest star,” in practice my gardening has no effect on the orbit of Neptune because the force of gravitation is extremely weak and falls off very rapidly with distance. So there is clearly truth in the belief that the world can be broken up into independent parts. But that is not a universal direction for the study of all nature. A lot of nature, as we shall see, cannot be broken up into independent parts to be studied in isolation, and it is pure ideology to suppose that it can.

It is common to say that indigenous knowledge is superior to modern science because the former is more “holistic”.  Lewontin shows the fallacy of that claim.

Here’s another common claim you encounter in this kind of literature:

As opportunities for western and Indigenous collaborations multiply, it’s critical that Indigenous people maintain control over any knowledge gleaned and how it’s used, especially in light of western scientists’ historic penchant for extracting information that suited their own purposes and dismissing the rest. “Western science can help, as long as Native people are still decision makers. . . ” [quote from Suzanne Greenlaw, a Native American ecologist]

If this means anything beyond the way that published data is treated in modern science, then it is an unwarranted privilege. When science is published it becomes the property of humanity, and by and large those who produced the knowledge have no control about how it’s used—nor should they. If other people want to use what you’ve published for their own purposes, well, that’s the way science works. Indigenous people should have no more control over any knowledge they make public than should anybody else.

Below we see the implication that indigenous knowledge should be considered coequal with modern science (the quote is from Kisha Supernant “Métis and Papaschase and the director of the University of Alberta’s Institute of Prairie and Indigenous Archaeology”):

What constitutes progress when it comes to braiding western and Indigenous science depends on whom you ask. “If the burden of proof remains on Indigenous communities to demonstrate, using western scientific methods, that their knowledge … is valid, I think we’re not at the place we need to be,” Supernant said. “It is difficult to braid two things together when they’re not given equal weight in the braid.”

Well, I’d say that given the toolkit that’s constitutes modern science and is used to establish “knowledge,” then yes, indigenous people should have to demonstrate that their knowledge really is knowledge in the modern sense before it’s used.  When the Māori want to play whale songs to infected kauri trees because whales and kauri trees were once seen as brothers, then they should have to demonstrate the phylogenetic affinity of trees and cetaceans as well as the efficacy of whale songs. (This is a real case based on mytic lore.)

Finally, the bit below strikes me as rather patronizing, treating Indigenous people like children. (“Whyte” is a “professor of environmental justice at the University of Michigan and a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation.”)

Whyte is encouraged that the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), which seeks to provide scientific evidence to inform government decision-making, included a chapter on Indigenous knowledge in its latest global assessment. But he sees plenty of opportunity for improvements to braiding. For starters, “Indigenous people need to be involved at the earliest stages of research,” he said. And that means western scientists “need to get into the habit of approaching potential [Indigenous] partners and saying ‘I’m interested in water. Are you interested in water?’ before any research questions have been created. Let’s just get excited together about the topic, and plan from the beginning.”

If they plan experiments on indigenous land, or experiments that affect indigenous people, then yes, there should be consultation.  But “getting excited together” before any research questions have been formulated is not the way that science works, nor should it.  Science is not an endeavor that involves research equity, and creating such equity must be an extracurricular activity. The job of science is to understand the Universe, not to create social justice or spread an ideology.

h/t Ron, Ginger K

Click “continue reading” to see what we know about the damage indigenous North Americans did to the environment. It gives the answer to a question I asked Grok.