Though promoted for decades in Canada’s universities, the institutionalization of the radical Indigenous assault on Western science, aided and abetted by the Trudeau Liberal government, took a dramatic leap in July 2022 with the appointment of Myrle Ballard, an Anishinaabe woman from Lake St. Martin Indian Reserve, as first director of Environment and Climate Change Canada’s (ECCC) new permanent division of Indigenous Science.
This attack was reinforced Sept. 18 last year when the House of Commons’ science and research committee adopted a motion to “undertake a study of how best to integrate Indigenous Traditional Knowledge [ITK] and science into government policy development; how to resolve conflicts between the two knowledge systems.”
Terming the relation between both “knowledge systems” as “conflicts” that need resolution denies the elementary observation that the two systems are fundamentally irreconcilable because they are rooted in competing paradigms based on very different systems of knowing.
Not so, says Ballard, who claims she is using a process she calls “bridging, braiding and weaving” to unite Western and Indigenous science. Bridging means raising awareness about Indigenous science within the government, while braiding is when Western scientists work together on research with Indigenous peoples on the land.
“The weaving process will be when the government, when the department ECCC, starts weaving Indigenous and Western science for better-informed decision-making,” she said.
In her testimony before the House science committee, Ballard argued Indigenous and western science are “both sciences.”
“For example, when we develop traditional medicines, we have the traditionalists, the medicine-makers who take the medicines from the land,” she said. “They know they have to take the plant or whatever it is they’re using from as far away from human contamination as they can. They have recipes that they use as well. That’s the same as in a lab. There are recipes that have to be tested. There’s the colour and the consistency. That’s the same as western science.”
A close reading of the committee’s mandate on Indigenous Traditional Knowledge and the new Indigenous Science division in the environment department, together with their uncritical – read: “unscientific” – acceptance of the comments from witnesses suggests that the government of Canada also accepts Western science as just one version of science.
These claims about “Indigenous science” need to be closely examined. This is no easy task, not the least because there must be at least 50 different systems of “Aboriginal science” in Canada corresponding to the country’s 50 different cultural and linguistic groups.
As for the content of “Indigenous science,” Jamie Sarkonak’s National Post analysis of the committee witness testimonies shows “Indigenous science, perhaps intentionally, is a difficult concept to pin down.”
“Advocates can’t define it in any consistent way, and frequently confuse science conducted by Indigenous people (i.e., long-term observational evidence on phenomena like caribou migration patterns), with non-scientific cultural beliefs that are somehow upheld as equivalent to the scientific method,” Sarkonak wrote. “There’s often a political, anti-colonial element to ‘Indigenous science.’”
This is not to deny the fundamental importance of Indigenous Traditional Knowledge, systems of practical understanding based on trial and error and careful observation that allowed Aboriginal people to cope with a harsh northern climate that restricted population survival and expansion, at least compared to many other regions of the world. Still, based on the relatively rapid population growth in Europe and elsewhere over the same 15,000-year period, it is reasonable to hypothesize that the absence of genuinely scientific farming systems limited the number of Indigenous people the land could support.
This begs the question of what is meant by the term “genuinely scientific.”
Sarkonok contends, “In reality, the scientific method is just a way of testing hypotheses about the world to determine what corresponds to reality and what does not. The truth is not dependent on ethnicity. If a plant has medical benefits, it ultimately doesn’t matter whether they were discovered in a lab or by the people who have used it for thousands of years. All that matters is that it works.”
But there is much more to scientific investigation than this. Scientific laws are not culturally limited; they are universal in scope. Sir Isaac Newton’s laws of motion which he discovered in 1666 are just as valid in Canada as they are in Croatia. And they are just as correct in 2024 as they were in 1666 because they have never been disproven.
Sarkonok’s claim that “All that matters is that it works” is a practical issue, not a scientific one. And it is far less scientifically critical than knowing exactly why something works: what is it about some plants that Indigenous specialists employ in healing that gives them their medical benefits? Science continually asks and often succeeds in answering questions like this using the tools of modern chemistry and other techniques.
Still, employing the scientific method using observation, experimentation, and the testing of hypotheses cannot prove theories to be true, including old ones like those of Newton; it can only show them to be false.
None of these requirements are met by ITK, a system of practical knowledge and supporting mythology based on everyday experience, buttressed by appeals to the teachings of Indigenous authorities and the power of supernatural forces. It is also a way to understand and explain reality that varies dramatically between Aboriginal cultural groups. And it is subject to constant change, variation, and disappearance because it is transmitted orally by competing knowledge keepers: “Indigenous science” in 2024 and “Indigenous science” in 1024 could never be identical.
What all this means is “Indigenous science,” a term used liberally in the HCSCSR’s hearings, is a logical and empirical oxymoron because privileging common sense visual understandings by labelling them scientific to score political or sectarian points makes a mockery of a foundational concept – science – no amount of “bridging, braiding and weaving” could ever displace.
Hymie Rubenstein is editor of REAL Indigenous Report and a retired professor of anthropology at the University of Manitoba.
