Guest post: What we can do
Originally a comment by Michael Haubrich on Belatedly hearing the voices.
There are a great many issues that can never be fixed when it comes to indigenous poeple in the US, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Obviously the bells can’t be unrung, no matter how many land trusts are bought up and donated to tribal governments. The economies of the people before us have been disrupted, and they long ago began adapting to the new ways.
But what we can do is learn and understand who they were and who they are. The idea that indigenous people were savages that we civilized is not only patronizing, it is wrong. There were some advanced civilzations that waxed and waned over the millenia, doing science in their ways that is just as effective in discovering natural truths as those ways developed by the Royal Society and the French academies of the enlightentment.
There was a recent brouhaha over a New Zealand academic who was brought up on ethics charges, but also had criticized the science standards of New Zealand education because they included Maori cultural inputs in science. The standards have been in place since at least 1993, but they have been newly decried as “wokism gone made” to make sure that Maori “ways of knowing” are included. You can probably guess who complained about it without checking the actual standards. I checked them out and they are actually pretty good and are not equivalent to creationism.
So, we need to know who the indigenous people are, what they had made, and acknowledge their contributions to our societies without assuming they were functionally savages until we came along and led them to civilization (by kidnapping their children.) We can never reconcile, true, but we can move forward with them as participants. We need to acknowledge what he have done to their people, and we can’t just look back and say it was ancient history.
There are pipelines that are being laid in their lands (so-called reservations) that can destroy their water supply, Uranium mines on land that we ceded to them in Treaties, people protest when the decision to honor fishing rights in a treaty signed by the government are going to “hurt the tourism industry.” We can stop this stuff from going on, even if we can’t go back and return the Great Plains to the bison herds that roamed for days.
If we don’t teach a history that includes places such as Cahokia, that Mexican indios developed corn from teosinte, and that the Maori knew their fungal networks long before the British came along, then people will continue to think that Injuns are lucky we saved them from their savagery and that we were justified in slaughtering those who got in the way. They will think of those children buried without markers in the Residential Schools as collateral damage for property. They will continue to think of the Water Protectors as superstitious selfish cretins who deserve the firehoses in the winter or 25 years in prison for trying to stop the pipeline in North Dakota.
We need to admit our own savagery towards the people who came first (“hohogum” in the Pima native language) before we can civilize ourselves.
And the thing about teaching these cultures. We can teach what they believed and what they did without having to accept it wholesale. I learned a lot about Greek culture in my History of Biology class, and many other past civilizations and cultures that did various forms of science. I think it’s important to understand the other cultures, and also to have a healthy dose of skepticism about wild claims, whether from other cultures or our own. Not everything the west has done has been bad and wrong; not everything indigenous cultures have done have been good and right. But we can have so much richer a conversation if we include them, and we just might learn something in the process. Like, they weren’t wild savages we civilized.
Science is included in philosophy, which is based on reason. The Dreamtime stories of the Australian Aborigines and the numerous myths other early human populations are the products of the best thinkers around at the time, and these in turn were either jealously guarded of traded between early peoples in the manner of all their other artifacts and skills.
Though in answer to the question: “how did it all begin?” there are many traditional answers, there is a diminishing number of scientific ones; tending to 1..
But that’s just wrong. Some of these civilisations did indeed have ways of discovering natural truths that were as good as (or better than) European ones were before the Enlightenment development of modern science, but it’s just utterly wrong to claim they were “as effective” as post-Enlightenment science or science as it is today.
And one should not: “… make sure that Maori “ways of knowing” are included” in “science standards of New Zealand education”. Science standards should be based on what is the best science (and it doesn’t matter who developed it; science transcends cultural origins).
[There is a case for teaching cultural traditions, but that is distinct from science.]
PS “The idea that indigenous people were savages that we civilized is not only patronizing, it is wrong.” — ok, but does anyone think that nowadays?
PPS “They will think of those children buried without markers in the Residential Schools …” — but were they “buried without markers” or were they buried with [wooden] markers that have subsequently decayed? Quite a difference.
Here, Coel, is the intro to the science learning hub as science is being taught in NZ. Tell me how that is euivalent to creationism:
https://www.sciencelearn.org.nz/resources/2545-matauranga-maori-and-science
Even here in the Rational West we incorporate social understanding into science so that students understand the relevance of what they are developing in their experiments. But, rush to judgment if you will.
#3 Coel
Yes, definitely. Think of the people who want to quash the teaching of anything that does not flatter their idea of national history, calling it CRT; Trump supporters, Pauline Hanson supporters, etc. etc.
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#4 Michael Haubrich
It seemed to me that Coel’s objection was limited to that quoted passage.
I want to add something, a reference to a book that helps explain who the GIants were, those who shoulders that Newton recognized that he was standing on. It’s written by Clifford D. Connor. A People’s History of Science: Miners, Midwives and “Low Mechanicks.”
In it, he shows how many of our most important discoveries were made by necessity outside of what we traditionally think of as Modern Science. For the Polynesians, understanding the natural world did not begin with Cook renaming all the Islands in the South Pacific. They had been navigators for centuries, and there is a chapter in this book.
“The science of medicine began with the knowledge of plants’ therapeutic properties discovered by pre-literate ancient people. Chemistry and metallurgy originated with ancient miners, smiths, and potters; geology and archaeology were also born in the mines. Mathematics owes its existence and a great deal of its development to surveyors, merchants, clerk-accountants and mechanics of many millenia. And the empirical method that characterized the Scientific Revolution as well as the masses of scientific dataon which it is built, emerged from the workshops of European artisans.”
There’s no reason to believe that the Maori were not also capable of building their own science, unless you believe they were just savages.
As to the difference between shoddy gravemarkers and no marker at all, it hardly makes the difference to the families who were not notified when their children died, does it?
@#4:
From the link:
“In a traditional sense, mātauranga Māori refers to the knowledge, comprehension or understanding of everything visible or invisible that exists within the universe.”
One could take the traditional knowledge and folklore of any cultural group — European, non-European, whatever — and parts of it would contain useful information (about, say, local ecology and plants) but also large swathes of it would be, well, folklore, mythical stories of cultural importance, but not comparable to today’s science.
What one should not do is put such traditional folklore on an equal footing with science and teach it as such. We don’t do that in Europe or America (much to the chagrin of some Christians) and we’re not doing kids from other cultural groups any favours by treating science as purely the property of Europeans and telling them that they have their own different “ways of knowing”. We should tell them that science is just as much theirs as anyone’s.
@#6:
And no-one is suggesting that! No-one is suggesting: “Science is European, only Europeans can do science, other kids need to be taught European science”.
It is the people in favour of teaching mātauranga Māori on equal terms with science who see science as being “European” or “Western”. To them, science is just a cultural construct, and so, to them, teaching science is a cultural imposition, effectively a cultural imperialism.
Those opposed see science as universal, as transcending culture and cultural origins. Yes of course, people from many cultures could and did contribute to proto-science and the development of today’s science.
That would include ancient Greeks, and also Polynesian navigators, with their knowledge of winds and currents, and navigating by the stars, and also the ancient Chinese, who were well ahead of the Europeans in many respects, and many others.
And today, contributions to science come from Europe and America, yes, but also from India and Japan and China (the rate at which they’re developing forefront science universities is astonishing!) and from many other nations and cultures. Science is worldwide, it’s universal, it transcends cultures.
Where a particular culture contains expertise about local ecology then, sure, that’s part of science. But if so it is “science”. It’s not something different from “Western” science.
That’s how science should be taught and presented, as the distillation of the best knowledge and understanding from all cultures — which everyone is invited to participate in.
Again, you’re doing indigenous kids no favours by telling them that science is something foreign, something alien to them.
We’re still struggling, and failing, to integrate science into the way we do things. Western industrial civilization wouldn’t be in the mess it’s in, and taking the rest of the world with it, if we had heeded the warnings that science has been giving us for decades. Not that it should take science to tell us not to poison the air, land , and water upon which we all depend. We cannot claim we did not know; our savagery is willful and well-informed. But profitable!
Certainly humans with even basic technology are capable of driving species to extinction (good-bye Moa, so long aepyornis, fare-thee-well any number of naive species unfortunate enough to encounter the genus Homo, and its travelling companions, for the first time.) Nor are they incapable of making large changes to local landscapes with fire. But limited power and limited numbers kept the potential impact of early cultures lower than would become possible with agriculture, and later, with fossil-fuel powered industrialization.
Perhaps the West’s “first past the post” development of the suite of technologies and ideologies that enabled, and justified, its imperial domination and commodification of most of the rest of the planet ahead of anyone else, was just a fluke. Certainly the global establishment of the values and technology of Western industrialism enabled the explosive growth of human numbers and its concomitant pressure on other species, and natural cycles of matter and energy. Would other cultures have followed the same path the West did, had they had the power, technology, and numbers to do so? Western exploration and colonization interrupted that part of the experiment before it was done, but maybe the pattern of borrowing and adaptation (alongside the actual forced imposition) of Western ways by these societies might offer a clue as to what might have been.
Do all cultures of sufficient technological means and social stratification shed any previous ethos they might have had about connections with the lands, waters, and other creatures upon which they depended and with whom they lived? Would other societies have repeated, in broad strokes if not in detail, the same mistakes we’ve made, or might they have retained values that would have been less destructive to the fabric of life as a whole. Or would humans of whatever cultural roots ended up adopting a “Do unto others before they do unto you” mentality? Derrick Jensen posits that the problem is civilization itself, that once any culture reaches a level that creates an urban/agrarian split, exploitation and destruction are inevitable, as the urbanites ultimately depend on the appropriation from hinterlands of foodstuffs and material resources that they cannot produce themselves. From there, social stratification, imperialism, and ecological destruction flow inevitably. In his view, once a culture grows beyond what can be sustainably supported by its immediate, living land base, things go to hell. We’ve been on the road to hell for thousands of years, going faster and faster. Now that we’re beginning to see our ultimate destination, we haven’t yet begun to think about decelerating, let alone slowing down.
Does it say that anywhere in the Learning Hub?
Michael, it seems to inadvertently imply that, by presenting mātauranga Māori as a body of knowledge that is distinct from science.
@#10:
I agree with #11, in that any teaching that distinguishes “mātauranga Māori” from “science”, but promotes them both as of equal standing, is inviting a Maori kid to identify with the former while seeing the latter as “European/colonial”.
It’s also inviting that kid to adopt the idea that different “ways of knowing” are appropriate to different cultural/racial backgrounds, and thus that knowledge systems are “social constructs”, rejecting the idea of a scientific objectivity that can surpass cultural origins.
Both of these are bad ideas. One can see what they are trying to do, given that European largely colonised and destroyed Maori culture, they are trying to resurrect Maori culture as being of equal standing.
But they are going badly wrong in seeing science as being culturally-determined and culturally-bound, rather than as universal. (Of course, to the Woke, everything is a social construct.)
The Chinese are not doing this, though they were a bit behind (owing to Mao’s Cultural Revolution and other factors), but now they just assimilate the science done in Europe and America and set out to be the world leaders in science. They will likely succeed. They have the right idea about science, seeing it as universal and thus just as much theirs.
I’ll drop this after I post this, because I sense that your needle is stuck in a groove that you can’t get out of. This is from this page of the Learning Hub>
https://www.sciencelearn.org.nz/resources/2545-matauranga-maori-and-science
This is not saying that “other ways of knowing” are substituted for science, and it is not encouraging superstition. It’s a measure of incorporating heritage into the teaching and development of science.
We incorporate our culture into how we do our science. Science, culture, and philosophy are intertwined, and can’t be separated. Science requires creativity to solve problems, to ask questions and to propose solutions to test. Science can be taught as an integral feature of culture without harming science, nor even the respect for science.
While science as means of getting knowledge about the natural universe is universal in it’s application, and must be processed formally in order to determine facts and truths (or close approximations thereof) it can’t be separated from culture. I think we’re too used to going from class to class as the bell rings, and shutting of math brain when we engage English brain and then bioliogy brain needs to be engaged, and then we get tested.
Like I said, I’m going to drop it. I’ve discussed this with high school science educators and they like these concepts. Those are the people this applies to.
@#13:
Or, rather, we attempt to make the science we arrive at independent of our culture. Thus, “science” is the same in China as in Europe.
From your link: “Mātauranga Māori is a knowledge base in its own right. It is Māori knowledge, including values and culture. It is different from modern science.”
Then, from the NCEA framework for *science*:
“When approached from a holistic mātauranga Māori perspective, science investigations are underpinned by whakapapa”, and “Whakapapa … [is] the first aspect to consider in mātauranga-based teaching and learning within NZC Nature of Science activities”
What is the “whakapapa” that (in NZ education) now “underpins” the “mātauranga-based teaching” of science?
Well, your own link gives an example of “whakapapa”:
“From chaos sprang Papatūānuku, the Earth mother. Then Papa-matua-te-kore, the parentless, appeared. She mated with Rangi-a-Tamaku. Their firstborn was Putoto, whose sister was Parawhenuamea, the personified form of water. Putoto took his sister, Parawhenuamea, to wife. She gave birth to Rakahore, who mated with Hinekuku, the clay maiden. Hinekuku gave birth to Tuamatua. Tuamatua was the guardian of the different stones and gravel found on sea coasts. The younger brother of Tuamatua, Whatuaho, typified greywacke and chert. Next came Papakura, the origin of volcanic stone…”.
This is an example of the “whakapapa” about the origin of rocks. This (according to NCEA standards) is now supposed to “underpin” the “mātauranga-based teaching” of *science*, in this case the science of geology.
We have plenty of similar European-origin folklore, but we distinguish it from science.
@# 12:
There is a limit to the distance we can see in space and time; that of the known Universe. Anything beyond that limit is outside the Universe we know. But the moment we do build the appropriate technical apparatus, all that becomes part of the Universe we know. So there can never be more than one universe in the way that there is more than one planet in the Solar System.
Nor does it matter what the ethnic origin of the eye doing the observing is. The moment it is published by one, it is available, and (potentially at least) known to all. That is the beauty of the human project we call Science.
Of course, we can speak of Greek science, Italian science etc as stages in the unfolding story. But such labelling has its down side. From my own firsthand contact with modern Australian Aborigines I can say that getting the kids to attend school on a regular basis is hard enough. Labels like ‘white knowledge’ provide them with powerful rationale for staying away; and finishing up drinking their lives to oblivion.
How science is done will be informed by the values of those doing it. Those values may not themselves be “scientific”. It was once believed, in scientific circles, that animals were nothing more than mindless, insensate automatons, meat machines which simply reacted mechanically, “as if” they were in pain. Our belief that we have the right to capture or breed animals to experiment on and kill for curiousity is not a scientific one. It is, however, the embodiment of a judgement about the comparative value of the lives of humans and other animals. Performed on fellow humans, these acts would be crimes against humanity; performed on other sentient beings, it’s just another day in the lab. It’s part of the continuum which sees other living things as resources to be turned into products, rather than acknowledging them as any kind of locus of respect and obligation, owed to them by right of our mutual kinship.
YNnB:
I contend that consciousness in animals of their own identity follows on awareness of danger and the evasion of it. Self-awareness is a consequence of self-preservation. It does not seem to be present in protozoa and porifera (sponges) but is definitely there in molluscs: slugs and snails, and animals above them in the phylogenetic scheme of things.
On this consciousness basis, sponges and below have little significant difference from plants. But organisms at the level of the squid and octopus and above are another matter entirely: a full quantum leap upwards. I am reminded of this every time I go to swat a fly.
One vegan woman I know imposes a plant-based diet on her dog, but does not mind her cat catching the odd mouse. At the same time, she disapproves of humans eating meat, eggs, cheese, etc. I am a carnivore, but am averse to pork and bacon, because pigs are a bit too intelligent. I don’t mind fish and chicken etc, and believe that herbivores like cattle and sheep can be killed swiftly and humanely. Which is why the captive bolts used to kill animals in abbatoirs are so popular in the trade. One moment, the animal is being calmed, next moment it has no brain tissue, it all having been blown away by the air gun.
The state of the animal at time of slaughter has an effect on the quality of the meat. Before the bolt is triggered, it’s alive. The next moment, it’s the same as if it had never existed.