Decolonizing Science
Reconciling my newly found materialism with the imperative to Decolonize Science
One of the places that I am personally challenged in actively decolonizing my mind is in the field of science. As I shed the last vestiges of religion, moving towards a more materialist approach to the world based in scientific discovery and the scientific method, I find myself pushing back on any approach to science that is not specifically grounded in the scientific method, or any approach that imports religious perspectives into data collection and analysis. My perception of Indigenous science, what little I know of it, is that it does not see a distinction between the spiritual and the material, especially as pertaining to the Land. That dualistic divide is, itself, a western idea that traces its roots all the way back to Greece and Rome, through the Middle Ages and the Enlightenment, all the way through the post-modern turn of the late 20th century. As we enter the 21st century (who are we kidding, we’re already 21, nearly 22 years in), complete with the catastrophic effects of a climate change caused, in part, by the exploitation of western scientific discovery, it’s probably time we start acknowledging that in our effort to rid science of the superstitions of religion, we have also erased important Indigenous knowledge about the land and the world around us.
In a challenging article in Nature Geoscience, Indigenous scientist Max Liboiron lists a few things that we can do to help move this process along:
“How do our disciplines, pedagogical norms and research methods benefit from access to Indigenous land, life and knowledge? Who has done the research on Indigenous land and where are they from? What are the permission processes for field trips and research sites, including seemingly landless datasets? What open-access data management policies are in place and how might they increase access to Indigenous land, rather than respect it? If your department has sample archives, where are they from? What are the implications of saying a research group is the first to have knowledge of something on Indigenous land?”
I’m not sure how this works going forward. My education in scientific literacy is amateurish at best - I have a basic grasp of most of the sciences and can figure out how to get information on just about any scientific idea, even if I can’t interpret the data itself very well - and I only want to become more versed in ‘what science is’ as I leave religion behind.
What I’m beginning to understand is that I can’t just leave spirituality and religion behind. It’s baked into who we are as human beings, into our origin stories and, for most human beings, into our daily lives. Disentangling the two may not, indeed be wise. I’m eager to learn from and continue to be challenged by my Indigenous brothers and sisters’ diverse ways of approaching scientific discovery.