Professor Jerry Coyne: US attempt to “braid” indigenous knowledge with modern science collapses

US attempt to “braid” indigenous knowledge with modern science collapses and is abandoned by the National Academies

Last October I posted a critique of a new National Science Foundation (NSF) initiative designed to combine indigenous knowledge with modern science—in the U.S. this time, and to the tune of $30 million. The NSF was very optimistic, as you can see from the article below in Science (click to read; see also a similar report in Nature):

Click to view

My main beef with that study is that it conflated a fusion of indigenous and modern knowledge with an attempt to create equity among researchers themselves. As I wrote at the time:

Thus, if you’re going to use money to improve science, and help indigenous people at the same time, virtually all of that money should be earmarked for training indigenous youngsters to learn science, and ensure that there’s no bigotry against them. That is, indigenous people should have equal opportunity from the outset to learn STEM. Then, those with talent and desire can become scientists using modern science. To my mind, this is better than simply scouring indigenous cultures for bits of knowledge that can be further investigated, or giving money to indigenous people without fixed projects to fund, simply as a form of reparations. To fund education rather than cultures themselves is preferable because the results are permanent and self-sustaining (once the pipeline is open, it tends to stay open).

But I was unaware that another “braiding” project—yes, they both use that word—attempting to fuse two “ways of knowing” had been undertaken by a different funding group: the U.S. National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM). This project had a mere $2 million in funding, with the dosh provided by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, and NASA.

I don’t know the fate of the NSF project, but the NASEM one didn’t last long, with the joint effort collapsing after a short period of time, and for two reasons.

Click the Science article below to read about the failure of the new endeavor:


Click to view

The purpose of this endeavor, which involved a panel whose lucubrations were then to be published by NASEM, was this:

. . . to explore how best to pursue coproduction, the process by which scientists, Indigenous community members, and other scientific stakeholders jointly create and share knowledge in a way that values diverse perspectives.

. . . Gregory Symmes, NASEM’s chief program officer, confirmed the panel’s job was “to summarize what’s known about … coproduction,” and that he was aware of the committee’s desire to use the concept in its study early on. But, he says, “The study itself was not intended to be coproduced.” Instead, “We thought we could work through those differences” by, for example, including a discussion in the final report of the obstacles the committee faced.

Note that “coproduction” links back to the first NSF-funded study, involving “two-eyed seeing,” the notion that you can increase our knowledge of the world most efficiently if you combine vision from one “eye” (modern science) with vision from the other eye (indigenous “ways of knowing”). The original NSF project, which largely involved trying to fix climate change, reported this:

The center will explore how climate change threatens food security and the preservation of cultural heritages through eight research hubs in the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. (Ranco co-leads the U.S. Northeast hub.) Each hub will also serve as a model for how to braid together different knowledge traditions, or what its senior investigators call “two-eyed seeing” through both Indigenous and Western lenses.

The new NASEM study, which involved a committee of 11 members including three Native scholars, began well, with a harmonious initial meeting. But then things fell apart, and for two reasons (my headings below; quotes are indented):

1.) The committee was not tasked with producing the final report. Normally, National Academies reports are written by a National Academies-designated committee that includes both Academies members and selected experts who are not Academies members. In addition, every study has many other ‘participants’ who are not members of the committee, but interviewees or presenters who bring information into the discussion, while not participating in the committee’s internal deliberations or report writing. Also excluded from writing the report are people who could conceivably profit from what that report says, and this may have involved people excluded below.

Committee members knew the approach ran counter to NASEM’s rules for what it calls a consensus study. “The traditional way in which a National Academies report works is that you go and meet with people, and they can inform you, but they can’t participate in the [committee’s] deliberations or help shape the report,” says committee member ecologist F. Stuart “Terry” Chapin, emeritus professor at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.

But in this case some of the members of the committee, realizing that they wouldn’t be writing the final report, were upset. The deliberations about “coproduction of knowledge” apparently didn’t involve the coproduction of the report. The indigenous members also felt that they were marginalized in the deliberations:

Many committee members who spoke to Science say they believed their assignment—to explore the “challenges, needs, and opportunities associated with coproduction of environmental knowledge between scientists and local and Indigenous experts”—would require them to take a different approach given the subject matter. “At our first meeting [in August 2023], several people raised concerns that here was a project talking about coproduction of knowledge, but we weren’t allowed to use those processes to carry out the study,” says Gordon, who runs a company that advises scientists and government agencies on coproduction.

In the following, Kyle White is an “environmental justice expert at the University of Michigan and a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation.”

. . . Whyte also vented his frustration that the committee’s statement of task did not require that the study be coproduced. However, he told participants at the February workshop he “was willing to keep working on the project” to “figure out a way to do this right.” But in late March, he and three other committee members wrote to their colleagues and NASEM staff calling for the study to be “paused.” The four proposed instead writing an interim report on how to “allow equitable participation by Indigenous partners” that could be the basis for a new study on coproduction.

. . . Another participant who was not a committee member, Philomena Kebec, says comments she and other Native people made about coproduction during discussions at breakout sessions weren’t brought back up during plenary sessions and felt like sidestepping. Kebec, a member of the Bad River Band of Lake Superior Chippewa and its head of economic development, says Native representatives were hoping for a dialogue about traditional knowledge across a range of scientific topics as well as “about the power dynamics affecting the ability to share information effectively.”

The issue of “power dynamics” will come up in a second.

2.) The second workshop was to be held in an indigenously-owned casino, and the NASEM didn’t want that.

But that high didn’t last long. Before a second workshop in February, tensions arose over the choice of its venue, which was the Kewadin casino owned by the Sault Ste. Marie tribe of Chippewa Indians in Michigan. Tribal casinos hold important meaning to Native nations as places of gathering and bastions of tribal sovereignty. Yet several sources told Science NASEM leaders saw the venue as inappropriate for a meeting the institution was sponsoring.

The tension made four members of the committee write to the NASEM asking that the deliberations be “paused” and that they be allowed to write an interim report. But that didn’t fly. Shortly thereafter, Whyte was told that he was dropped from the committee, and then the committee (and the whole study) were dropped and removed from the NASEM’s website.

The whole thing was a big failure. Yes, the casino fracas looks a bit trivial, but there are really two issues, not emphasized in the report, that doomed this project to failure, as it will doom others like it.

First, while there is indeed indigenous knowledge, and some of it can indeed be “braided” with knowledge coming from modern science, the latter is far more broad and important than the former. Indigenous knowledge, as far as I can see from reading about it, involves conclusions, based on trial and error, that help local people lives their lives in their environment. It involves things like when to plant and harvest crops, where and when to hunt and fish, how to navigate (in the case of Polynesians) and so on. It’s practical knowledge, which still makes it knowledge, but does not involve empirical studies of the wider world like the ambits of modern chemistry, physics, and biology.

Even if we think about the knowledge that we “colonists” use to live our lives in our environment, that depends heavily on modern science: we take antibiotics, use cellphones, fly in planes, rely on scientifically-generated weather predictions, and so on. When you think of how indigenous knowledge not derived from modern science can be braided with it, almost all of the braid will consist of knowledge coming from modern science. There is simply no way to make indigenous knowledge coequal in breadth or social importance to modern science. It sounds patronizing and colonialist to say that, but that’s really the way it is. (Note that Science buys into the erroneous “Western knowledge” trope in the title above; this trope is insulting to the many people around the world who do science.)

This lack of coequality is exacerbated by the second observation: these discussions are as much about power as about science. It’s an attempt of “minoritized” groups to wield as much scientific power as do majority (“Western) groups—a way, I suppose to compensate for historical bigotry against indigenous people. The power trope is most obvious—and successful—in New Zealand, where the attempt to equalize science with local “ways of knowing” has already infiltrated science, secondary schools, and colleges. Here are two expressions of it in the article:

“There’s a dearth of knowledge on how to apply other ways of knowing,” said Chad English of the Packard foundation, speaking at the panel’s kickoff meeting. “And it’s not just scholarship,” English noted about the scope of the study. “It’s also about addressing the power dynamic—who is at the table, and whose voices are being heard.”

and from the quote above:

Kebec, a member of the Bad River Band of Lake Superior Chippewa and its head of economic development, says Native representatives were hoping for a dialogue about traditional knowledge across a range of scientific topics as well as “about the power dynamics affecting the ability to share information effectively.”

It is of course churlish to mistreat indigenous people or make them feel inferior, especially when they’re invited to participate with others on an equal basis on a panel like this. But perhaps the “power imbalance” ultimately reflects the “knowledge imbalance” that I describe above. If your group isn’t really coequal in scientific knowledge to another, you can hardly expect to have as much influence in the conclusions as does the group espousing the more effective and important “way of knowing.”

That, of course, is no excuse to ignore people or talk over them. But perhaps it’s time to have a hard look at the “indigenous science versus modern science” issue and lay out which “way of knowing” is most important in doing things like fixing anthropogenic climate change or ameliorating epidemics of infectious disease. People avoid this discussion because it’s uncomfortable—indeed, the University of Auckland, after promising such a discussion, has avoided it for three years. But eventually it’s a discussion that must be had, and it helps nobody to pretend in the interim that all “ways of knowing” are equal.

h/t Jon

Professor Jerry Coyne is an American biologist known for his work on speciation and his commentary on intelligent design, a prolific scientist and author. This article was first published HERE