|
A
Menominee Tribal biology class in Green Bay, Wisconsin.
U.S. Department of Agriculture Follow, CC BY
|
Last year five Native American tribes in Washington state managed
to repatriate the remains of the Ancient One, as they
called him, or Kennewick
Man, as scientists called him.
For the tribes, the Ancient One is to be revered as a human
ancestor. But for the scientists, the rare specimen of a 9,000-year-old
Kennewick Man was important to understanding the history of North
America. After a 20-year court battle, the tribes finally reburied
the Ancient One. However, this could be done only after scientists
had created his multi-dimensional model for future study.
For a long time, the relationship between Native Americans and
scientists has been a contentious
one. It would appear from this case that what matters most to Native
Americans are religious beliefs and not science.
While this might be the case with human remains, which are a
sensitive issue with most tribes, scientific endeavors are very
important to Native Americans.
That is why indigenous scientists and scholars including myself
are supporting the March for Science this Saturday, April 22.
Sacred ecology
Scientists began thinking and writing about how Native Americans
understand the natural world in the 20th century. Instead of seeing
a conflict between Western science and Native American knowledge,
they started thinking about ways to learn how Native Americans addressed
environmental and ecological issues differently.
Ecologist Fikret
Berkes pointed out these distinctions in his seminal book Sacred
Ecology, where he noted that both Western and indigenous
science can be regarded as the same general intellectual process
of creating order out of disorder.
|
Native
American traditions blend science and religion.
Carling Hale, CC BY-NC-ND
|
He provided his own research as an example. He stated that the
Native Americans he worked with knew far more than he did about
aquatic ecological systems, even though he had academic training.
He noted their knowledge was both scientific and viewed through
a religious lens.
One important point of difference is that
many systems of indigenous knowledge include spiritual or religious
dimensions (beliefs) that do not make sense to science
.
This is sacred ecology in the most expansive, rather
than in the scientifically restrictive, sense of the word ecology.
Traditional knowledge
Native American scholars are now writing about this blending
of science and religion.
Native American scientist Robin
Kimmerer, for example, tells her story as a trained botanist
learning about Native American worldview in her book Braiding
Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings
of Plants. She describes how she learned words in her
native language, Anishinaabe, that explained biological processes
better than Western science could in English.
As a Native American scholar, I, too, have spent the past year
at the intersection of science and religion at Harvard Divinity
School, researching ethnobotany and ethnopharmacology
the scientific study of the medicinal qualities of plants
and Native American belief.
I learned from my grandmother, Annie
Mad Plume Wall, who was regarded as a doctor on
the Blackfeet reservation in Montana, that certain plants were medicine.
She understood the ethnopharmacology of plants that were used as
analgesics, antibacterials or anti-inflammatory agents. She knew
which plants to use when one of her patients was ill.
The knowledge of the medicinal qualities of these plants clearly
grew out of a process of observation and experimentation. She learned
how to distill the essential elements of a plant to create an extract
of its medicinal properties. In fact, her refrigerator was filled
with bottles of extracts.
|
Native
Americans believe in a sacred ecology. Here, tribal elder
Gordon Yellowman shows several of the tools that he uses in
rituals. Nick Oxford/Reuters
|
However, some of these plants also had mythological stories
that spoke of their origin in the supernatural realm. These stories
instructed the Blackfeet how to communicate with the plant, to care
for it, how to protect its ecosystem, restrict knowledge of the
plant and its over-harvesting.
My grandmother believed that a powerful supernatural being,
Kokomíkisomm, gave humans certain
plants to use as medicine. She also understood, based on their scientific
properties, that a plant was indeed a medicine.
Alternative paradigm
It is true that Western science and Native Americans have a
complicated history, as the struggle over the Ancient One attests.
Anthropologist Chip
Colwell discusses in Plundered
Skulls and Stolen Spirits: Inside the Fight to Reclaim Native Americas
Culture that the problem is that the items scientists
consider objects for study, such as human remains, Native
Americans would view through their own worldview, their own belief
system.
More recently, there has been a better recognition of the role
of indigenous sciences. In 2016, a U.S.-Canada joint
statement on Climate, Energy, and Arctic Leadership recognized
the importance of both Western science and indigenous science to
help solve global issues. It urged that both science-based
approaches and indigenous science and traditional knowledge
be incorporated in efforts to both address commercial interests
in the Arctic, such as oil and gas development and shipping lanes,
and protect the Arctic and its people.
Native American scientists and scholars have also weighed in
on this debate. For the March of Science, many Native American scholars,
including Kimmerer and myself, have written a declaration of support
that states:
Let us remember that long before western
science came to these shores, there were scientists here
.Western
science is a powerful approach, but it is not the only one.
Indigenous science provides a wealth of knowledge and a powerful
alternative paradigm.
For many Native Americans, like my grandmother, myth and medicine,
religion and science, are not viewed as separate, but are interwoven
into the fabric of our lives.
|