(Editor's note: The Ramble is pleased to present another blog-posting by Ranger Bob, a retired ranger with the National Park Service and an old friend of this blogger. Bob's posting is a thoughtful look at the nature of science. Enjoy!)
Some ancient indigenous peoples got along pretty well with the universe. They looked at the night sky and saw shapes, made up stories that gave them answers about nature and natural events, felt some control because praying to some god might keep them from being struck by lightning, fed themselves and raised a family. They also worked out a lot of practical things like celestial navigation, crop irrigation, landscape modification, weaponry, natural medicines etc. They created cultures. That is not to say that all ancient indigenous peoples knew about all of those things nor that all of their cultures were equal. There was a lot of diversity in the knowledge base. Still, they all functioned in their own way. That is admirable. Some of their descendants still do. It’s easy to oversimplify and overgeneralize. They didn’t all do well, they weren’t all successful, it was certainly a tough world.
Some of them did much better than we generally give them credit for. Let me quote from a geographer, William M. Denevan of the University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI, in his work, “The Pristine Myth”:
“The myth persists that in 1492 the Americas were a sparsely populated wilderness, - a world of barely perceptible human disturbance. - There is substantial evidence, however, that the Native American landscape of the early sixteenth century was a humanized landscape almost everywhere. Populations were large. Forest composition had been modified, grasslands had been created, wildlife disrupted, and erosion was severe in places. Earthworks, roads, fields, and settlements were ubiquitous. With Indian depopulation in the wake of Old-World disease, the environment recovered in many areas. A good argument can be made that the human presence was less visible in 1750 than it was in 1492.”
It would be difficult to create a list of all ancient indigenous peoples. I’m not just talking about the Native Americans. I find it difficult to even define the word indigenous. A quick Google search came up with this, “originating or occurring naturally in a particular place; native”. You could say the first people to occupy any given area (and their descendants) are the indigenous people. How specific do you want to get? With either of those definitions, the Hopi Native Americans will probably argue that the Navajo are occupying Hopi land and are thus, not indigenous. Let me try to define it as the peoples who were anyplace before somebody else moved in and took over. It seems complicated to me to try to decide where to draw lines.
Who is indigenous to Europe and to Asia? I would feel comfortable saying that Neanderthals were indigenous to Europe as no one seems to have preceded them. Were Cro-Magnon people colonizers or did they find a vacant plot of land to settle, only to peacefully absorb their neighbors? Google indigenous peoples of Europe and pick one of the many answers that sounds best to you or flip a coin. I think the Denisovans were indigenous to Asia, but I don’t think anyone is certain of the connection between them and modern Asians. I tried to look that up and found an article with seven different indigenous groups, none of which I had ever heard of before. Asia is quite diverse and large so trying to look for a single Asian group that settled everything from Afghanistan to India to Mongolia is impossible. The simple and popular definition seems to have something to do with Europeans colonizing anywhere but Europe. I’m sure my definition will be unsatisfactory, but we can generally agree that Hawaiians who were pre-sugar cane (and their descendants) were/are indigenous and that neither the French nor the Americans changed who the indigenous peoples of current day Vietnam are. I don’t care so much about who is truly indigenous as how we try to find value in their cultures.
A few years ago, I heard the term “ways of knowing”, and I tried to figure out what it meant. I’m not talking about religious Gnosticism or even “revealed knowledge” as those are not ways of knowing, they’re ways of believing. I’m talking about knowing things about nature and real life. Indigenous peoples who lived in forests knew that tree squirrels climbed trees. That was a result of repetitive observation. Other indigenous peoples learned how to look at the night sky and navigate across the ocean. It was an observation plus trial-and-error system that they honed into a sophisticated method. On the “error“ side, some of them probably failed to pass on their incorrect knowledge as they were never heard from again. That is not the scientific method, or is it?
The simplistic way of describing the scientific method might be that one makes an observation(s), come up with an idea what might cause the observed phenomenon to happen (hypothesis), makes more observations or experiments (gathers data), arrives at a description that covers the probable solution (theory), passes it on to peers for use, approval, or rejection (publication). Hey, I said it was simplistic. The scientific method is basically a procedure.
Imagine some pre-stone age guy who cuts his foot on the sharp edge of a piece of fractured chert. He picks it up, say a few bad words (or grunts), and throws it down. It lands on another rock in such a way that it cleaves off a flake with fractures on both sides, creating a really sharp edge. Standing at the intersection of the pre-stone age and stone age, that ancient indigenous person gets an idea and begins fiddling with shaping pieces of rock by using one rock against another. By trial and error, he realizes that some rocks work great, and some don’t, he discovers that the angle of the force required to produce a flake produces different results, the process is repeatable, and then he shows it off to another guy who needs a shave. Eventually, they are both clean shaven. We could call that science if we think of science broadly. However, not every piece of indigenous knowledge (IK) is science.
I like to listen to a certain science themed radio program. One day, the host interviewed someone who wanted scientists to integrate IK into their research. As an example, they spoke of ancient indigenous observations of constellations in the sky. The interviewee did not seem to be talking about using star combinations and their apparent movements in the sky to find spatial directions, but they seemed to think that looking at a star cluster and imagining a meaningful shape was scientific. I heard someone shout, “astrology is not science”. I recognized that voice. It was mine. I think the most charitable thing I can say about the entire discussion is that it wasn’t well presented. If the interviewees had a point, they didn’t make it except to appeal to their objection that their ancestors were treated poorly and their culture was frequently denigrated. To be fair, looking at patterns of stars in the sky and making up mythological identity stories is not exactly astrology but that’s what I blurted out. In another program, a different proponent of IK suggested an example of integrating IK and science was in eliminating invasive species. The idea involved speaking spiritually with the invasive plants and asking how they felt about the elimination policy. Let me pause a moment to recover as my eyes cross each time I read that sentence. It is not science nor is it equal to science!
I watched a documentary about ancient tracks that were discovered in White Sands National Park. The fossilized tracks were made by both now-extinct ice age mammals and humans. The discovery was dated to at least 23,000 years ago, significantly further back than had been previously thought. One of the interviewees was an indigenous American who was an archeologist. He was pleased to find out that the data seemed to agree with the IK conclusion that indigenous peoples have been here from time immemorial. He specifically used that term which can be defined as “time in the past that was so long ago that people have no knowledge or memory of it” but that’s not science. He seemed annoyed that scientists have not made that assumption. I think we already knew that no one remembers when or who first walked along the shores of the ice age lake that was later to become desert sand. I also think we all knew that new archeological discoveries could push back the “indigenous timeline”. Then the host asked when and how he thought the first peoples had arrived in North America. He said he suspected they arrived by shore-hopping along the Pacific coast in small boats (a hypothesis) but that there needed to be more data collected to determine that and when it may have happened (to arrive at a theory). I saw that as an admission that it was science that would make those determinations, not IK. I also note that it was science that provided the data that determined the timeline as we know it so far, cultural beliefs did not.
I suspect that some of the sensitivity about the “we’ve always been here" argument is from archeological claims on human fossil skeletal remains. For instance, the Kennewick Man controversy, in which remains were found of a Paleoamerican human which seemed to predate the local indigenous peoples. Both the scientific community and the indigenous community claimed the remains. The controversy continued until DNA technology progressed enough to show a close relationship to the locals. So, I see that sentiment as being a justification to presume that ancient remains are related to the extant indigenous peoples. OK, I’ll go along with that, but if future DNA examinations prove that a yet to be discovered set of remains is not related to the extant group, we go with the science.
“Since the early 2000s, New Zealand has been incorporating into science a body of knowledge originating from Māori culture, known as mātauranga Māori. This is part of a broader effort by the government to fulfill its promises in the Treaty of Waitangi, an agreement between Māori and British settlers to honor Māori rights.” I understand that this New Zealand effort includes kindergarten through advanced science degrees. When knowledge gleaned from observation or trial and error helps us understand modern science, we can be fine with that. I can imagine using some of that on the first day of a basic science class to clarify the concept of the scientific method. But when you use mythology, philosophy, legend, and creationism, you’re not in science any longer nor is it equal to science? Some believe the Māori creation myth is a description of the Big Bang cosmological theory. It starts with nothing, progresses to feelings and thought, has a period of godly union in darkness, and then the separation of those gods which would be the equivalent to expansion of the universe (a big bang). Did they use the scientific method, even broadly construed, to determine this? No, you can’t arrive at this myth without the gods who created it. I don’t see how those are equivalent to each other. Here we clearly have myth and science, not indigenous science being trod upon by colonial science. Myths belong in anthropology classes but not science classes.
What if this educational concept spreads to North American indigenous ways of knowing. Will Arizona schools teach the ways of knowing of Hopi, Navajo, Tohono O’odham Nation, Pima, Havasupai, or any of the other 21 federally recognized nations, communities, and tribes in Arizona? They have different creation myths that are part of their ways of knowing. What about healing arts contradicting each other? Songs and chanting are a part of the traditional Māori healing methods. Sweat lodge participation is part of many native American healing traditions. Those things might contribute to feelings of wellbeing and thus to psychosomatic healing. When a friend of mine gets a fever due to a cold or a flu bug, he sweats it out in his greenhouse with a heavy shot of whiskey, lemon juice, and honey. Eventually, his fever breaks. Don’t substitute those methods for an appendectomy. Don’t even try to argue that those things are equal in value.
Intuition, mythology, revealed knowledge, and culture are not ways of knowing. Intuition is a way of thinking, and the others are ways of believing or behaving. They’re worth studying, but not as science. Intuition can come from logical fallacies such as confirmation bias, mental shortcuts, or subconsciously picking up on clues around us (like behaviors). Any of those might turn out to be right, but just as easily wrong. Intuition might lead to further investigations. If an objective investigation yields data, intuition can be a good thing. A cop may follow up on a gut feeling with an investigation, but whatever created the gut feeling isn’t the data, it’s the hypothesis. Ways of thinking or believing are not ways of knowing. There is no indigenous science vs. colonial science.
We need to find a better way to show respect to indigenous cultures and that’s what this is really about. Some people are getting ready to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
