Unexpected connections

[rebeccmeister]

The speaker for the first evening plenary of this conference was a person named Jessica Hernandez, and centered on connections between Western scientific understanding and indigenous science/ways of knowing. It was quite interesting with respect to some of the questions I've mentioned here in the past, about frameworks for teaching about Biology, but it's going to take me a little while to digest and articulate what I might do differently in light of what I heard about from the talk (the main element that stuck with me was an alternate presentation of the context of Western science among other factors that affect how we think about and interact with the world around us and more broadly - a spiderweb analogy). Anyway, this is a complex topic to talk about in the midst of current culture wars.

But there was another element of the talk that caught my attention: Hernandez began the talk by talking about her father, who survived what she described as a genocide that occurred during the civil war in El Salvador. I'm not sure I'd heard the Salvadoran civil war described in those terms before, but now it seems to me I should probably spend more time learning more (I think it's this?). What I DO know is that her father is from the part of El Salvador that I got to visit in 1995, where a lot of people wound up fleeing to Guatemala to avoid violent conflict during more intense phases of the war, and where resettlement after the war posed a new series of challenges for everyone.

At the end of the talk, an audience member asked an interesting question: (this is a scientific meeting, so the audience is full of people who identify as scientists) as scientists, we're generally highly aware of how climate change is displacing people in greater numbers and in newer ways than in the past. How will this displacement from traditional homelands affect this context of indigenous thinking and ways of knowing?

This is obviously a hard question without a simple answer; I'm only going to kind of obliquely talk about it. One other element of indigenous science that Hernandez commented on was how, for a while, people were adopting the terminology of "Traditional Ecological Knowledge" as a way of acknowledging indigenous contributions to scientific understanding. However, she noted that the phrasing has caused some people to hyperfixate on the word "Traditional," which pushes a particular and problematic historical view on indigenous understanding. In contrast, indigenous cultures across the globe are living cultures that change through time and in response to changes in the world, and there are tons of examples of that. So she is now using the term "indigenous science" to characterize ways of knowing things about how the world works based on deep/long-term observation and relational thinking. This can therefore include more long-term insights from long-term observation, but also respect the experiences and perspectives of people who relocate/are relocated.

I have a feeling that people who like to keep science in a tidy box will find lots of things to quibble over in all of this. (and I won't claim to have done the best possible job of characterizing what I heard about, in any case!).

My main personal takeaway, especially as someone who has moved around a lot, is that I need to be more deliberate about learning more about the immediate environment around where I live and work, because for all the cases where Western science focuses on generalizability on a global scale, it's connections to the local landscape that are the most powerful for individual learning and lived experience. And that's important for me both as an individual and as a teacher.

Comments

[threemeninaboat]

Terror Camp has a lot of these conversations so they are not new to me; you may want to attend next year if you find them interesting!

[twoeleven]

It's a messy box with things spilling out of it, and they're not quibbles! :)

But I'm glad you had fun.

[twoeleven]

Now that I have a bit more time, lemme say more.

Science, as is currently practiced, consists of falsifiable claims considered tentatively right, tentatively right in some cases, or wrong. What we mean by that is pretty messy, and bits hang out the box of what's otherwise a clean definition.

I think there's an unfortunate tendency to replace the old bias against indigenous¹ cultures as backwards primitives who need to be civilized, with a new bias in favor of treating everything they say as true, due to some woo involving them being closer to nature than we are. You'll have to pardon me if I don't agree with merely changing biases about people different than us.

I suspect their knowledge of the natural world is much like ours: things which are essentially true (or at least not shown to be false), things which are mostly true, but have some exceptions, which may not be recognized; things which are mostly false, but have some utility anyway²; and things which are essentially false. And they probably have a lot of things they haven't thought of, even though they could, in principle, find out about them.

So, it ain't indigenous "science" until it passes the same tests as our science. That's my hill, and I'll defend it until somebody comes up with a better way of making sense of the universe.

1: I'm sceptical of the term indigenous. It's true in a very few cases, such as the Australian Aborigines of the southwestern corner of that continent. They appear to have been the first settlers to that area, and have been largely isolated otherwise. In most cases, it appears to mean, "the people who were there when the stupid and evil Europeans arrived", regardless of how recently they themselves arrived there, and how recently their culture had undergone major changes.

Migration, conflict, and cultural evolution appear to be constants of human existance in Eurasia. Why would they be any different in the Americas?

2: Cautionary tales, for example. The warnings are often exaggerated, because we fear loss more than we hope for gain.

[asakiyume]

I love your last paragraph so much; it's something I instantly resonate with. It's definitely something I always aim for too: from getting a sense of the lay of the land to learning what people call various things and how they do stuff (meaning: how do they get places? When and what do they eat? etc.)

[ranunculus]

In my life and relationship to the land the disharmony between "science", observation and traditional knowledge has been a longstanding theme. My parents moved to the Ranch in 1958 when they were around 40. They saw themselves as scientifically trained people who could research their way into "best care" practices for the land. One of those "best practices" was better living through the use of chemicals like DDT. They really did try to do their best, but they had missed out on 40 years of observation. They sought out people who could "educate" them, but almost all of those people were white. There was no tradition of getting indigenous knowledge, and lots of the local Native Americans were actively hostile. As a result my parents got certain things wrong. For all their talk about being "stewards" of the land, they saw it as a commodity. I don't think that one can see land as a commodity and also think of it as a living, changing, partner in life. A partner that needs mindful care to produce those things needed for our sustenance. If you only perch on a piece of land for a while, before flying away to a different place, then putting in time and effort to observe it seems like wasted time. Just like putting in hard work to improve the land seems as if it is of no value. The rationalization is that you might as well just take what you can and leave. Taking and leaving is what Western Culture has done in spades. We have lost any sense that working -with- the land is of value.
As a child I was intensely interested in learning how to use the products of the land and how to care for those resources. There were very few opportunities to learn much. So I made it up. I watched what happened year on year, tried various things and came up with solutions. One of them is to absolutely ignore the rules saying never to put brush into any form of water way. On the contrary, especially in erosion areas, pack that sucker full of brush and it will not only stop the erosion, it will begin to heal the damage by catching and depositing sediment. Drop trees in creeks, it will only help.
I did grow up with the "back to nature" hippie movements, some of which have produced lasting change. There have been voices calling out for us to see the world as Gaia, but it is only recently, say in the last 20 years, that indigenous practices and ways of thinking have begun to be valued enough that a conversation has started. Perhaps this time it will have more traction.
I feel like this has been a very clumsy attempt to talk about a very complex subject.

[rebeccmeister]

Thank you so much for this. Maybe this conversation just inherently feels clumsy!

I think you have definitely outlined a lot of the longstanding harms tied to Western science. I really wanted to ask this speaker for her thoughts on the academic traditions that emphasize moving around a lot, and what could be done to change that standard (there's a view that persisting at the same institution results in "academic inbreeding," and while that view is not wrong, it isn't right, either; there's tension present).

I also absolutely agree with you about the importance of making a long-term commitment to land, and also observing it rather than applying prescriptive ideas unthinkingly. A hard part of that for me is having only had limited personal opportunities to have agency in that regard - e.g. the land along the Hudson River where I row is largely public land, my house is rented, and as with so many Americans I've been itinerant due to my career. My mom is definitely thinking a lot about her commitments to the small parcel of land around the house where we grew up, which developers would love to buy but would quickly destroy at the cost of decades of soil restoration and tree stewardship.