For hundreds of years, indigenous knowledge has been pushed aside. But modern science is now listening to this traditional wisdom, as it could help improve our understanding of the planet and the stars.
Back in 1977, scientists made an alarming discovery: the bowhead whale population in the Beaufort Sea to the north of Alaska had collapsed to around 1,000 individuals. It was enough to justify a local ban on whaling. But Alaska’s indigenous whale hunters were baffled – by their own estimates the bowhead population numbered at least 7,000.
The scientists had counted the number of bowheads passing through open water near the coast, assuming that the whales could not swim further offshore beneath the ice. The indigenous hunters insisted that whales routinely swam beneath that ice, breaking it with their heads when they needed air. Bowheads that behaved in this way were not figuring in the scientists’ count, according to the hunters.
Within a few years scientists had confirmed that the hunters’ claims were correct and whaling had resumed on a small scale. A 1991 survey put the whale population at 8,000. It was further evidence that the local hunters had been right to dispute the results of the 1977 survey, even though it had been conducted by highly trained scientists.
What we might label ‘modern science’ emerged in Europe about 450 years ago, and has since spread throughout the world. It is undoubtedly a powerful tool to better understand life, the Universe and everything – but as Alaska’s indigenous hunters realised, modern scientists can reach the wrong conclusions where there are gaps in their knowledge.
Researchers are now recognising that some of those gaps can be filled with information embedded in indigenous knowledge systems. “We’re seeing how weaving Western and indigenous scientific approaches together can advance modern science as a whole,” says Dr Jesse Popp, an ecologist at Laurentian University and a member of the Wiikwemkoong Unceded Territory in Ontario, Canada. By embracing that indigenous knowledge, modern scientists are beginning to appreciate something that members of indigenous communities have long known – namely that their ancestors were scientists.
SCIENCE STORIES
It is perhaps easy to understand why indigenous knowledge was ignored. With the arrival of European settlers in the Americas, Africa and Australasia, indigenous communities were often forced from their lands and pushed to the margins of society, their knowledge systems trivialised. “It makes it easier to colonise a people if they are in that degraded position,” explains Karlie Noon, an astronomer at the Australian National University in Canberra and a member of the Kamilaroi group of indigenous Australians.
There’s also the fact that indigenous knowledge is typically an oral tradition, passed down in the form of stories. There may have been a tendency in the past for modern scientists to dismiss those stories as myths with no practical value – but that misunderstands the true purpose of the tales,explains Dr Ocean Mercier, a lecturer in Maori Science at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand,and a member of the Ngati Porou 'iwi' (tribe). “One way to see the stories is as code,” she says. “Within that code, if you know how to unpick it, there’s really important information.” In other words, the stories are memory aids.
For instance, the Kokatha communities of South Australia told a story of Nyeeruna, a skilled hunter who lives in the sky and is in perpetual pursuit of a group of sisters. It is essentially the same story as the Ancient Greek myth of Orion and the Pleiades – and, indeed, it involves many of the same stars in the night sky.
But the Kokatha story is far more detailed than the Greek version. It goes on to explain how Nyeeruna periodically attempts to attack his quarry: the club in his hand fills with ‘fire magic’. One of the sisters then counterattacks with ‘fire magic’ of her own.
Some astronomers now think the story shows the indigenous Australians had noticed that two of the stars it involves – Betelgeuse and Aldebaran – are variable stars that gradually brighten and dim over several years. Modern scientists failed to realise that Betelgeuse and Aldebaran are variable stars until the 1830s.
“Science is partly about who discovered information first,” says Noon. “Credit needs to be given there: if indigenous people had this knowledge first, why shouldn’t we include that in the history of science?” Australian indigenous astronomical knowledge had been dismissed for so long that Noon was unaware of its existence growing up. It wasn’t until she began her university degree that she first encountered some of the ancient stories. But she is now one of a growing number of astronomers who are convinced that Australia’s indigenous communities should be celebrated for the care with which they observed the night sky. “Whole communities are now embracing this, particularly in the Torres Strait,” she says. “They have so much sky knowledge and they still use it daily.”
Dialogues between modern and indigenous science are opening up elsewhere too. Climate change is particularly severe at the high latitudes, but monitoring the changes on the ground poses a logistical challenge for modern scientists – the Arctic region is vast and difficult to reach from the major urban centres where many scientists are based. But the Inuit communities living around Hudson Bay in northeastern Canada spend most of their lives on that land, and they have a wealth of knowledge about the environment as it existed in the past and as it is changing today. Much of the knowledge is unique to local communities, but a new database launched last year by the Arctic Eider Society will make that local knowledge more widely available. The database, which is called Siku (meaning ‘sea ice’), has been dubbed a ‘Wikipedia of Inuit knowledge’. It is a map-based app where locals can upload their personal observations, providing invaluable data both for modern scientists and for others in the Inuit community.
“It shows you where to go harvesting different animals, where to pick different plants, where the ice is freezing over first in winter and breaking up first in spring,” says Caitlyn Baikie, who works for Students on Ice, a Canadian charitable organisation, and who grew up in an Inuit community in Labrador.
Baikie says initiatives like Siku emphasise that indigenous communities can contribute to our understanding of the world. Indigenous science is sometimes dubbed ‘traditional knowledge’, but she dislikes this term because it implies the information is ancient and immutable. “It’s not static, it’s changing and evolving – just like my culture is evolving,” she says.
In New Zealand, meanwhile, Maori iwi have long been in influencing conservation policy, says Mercier. The country's iconic kauri trees are experiencing dieback caused by a microbe that is tracked around on hikers's boots.Last year, in an effort to reduce the spread of the disease, one iwi -The Kawerau a Maki - placed an unofficial prohibition on people entering some of the kauri forests. “The council has just responded to say, ‘we agree: let’s put a complete ban there to save the trees’,” says Mercier.
TRAILBLAZERS
Indigenous knowledge even has the potential to help combat climate change, as a vast project in northern Australia demonstrates. In the final decades of the 20th Century, the West Arnhem Plateau in Northern Territory often experienced fierce wildfires at the end of the dry season, each with the potential to burn thousands of square kilometres of vegetation.
Curiously, those intense wildfires appeared to be a new phenomenon: in previous decades, when indigenous communities managed the region, devastating wildfires were rare. Those indigenous communities prevented intense wildfires by deliberately burning small areas of vegetation earlier in the dry season. At this point in the year the plants are still full of water, so fires burn less fiercely and don’t destroy everything in their path. But they do create effective firebreaks that prevent disastrous wildfires at the end of the dry season.
Then in the late 1990s, the authorities encouraged indigenous groups to return to the West Arnhem Plateau and resume managing their land – even though modern scientists have typically looked unfavourably on the idea that land management should involve the deliberate use of fire. It turned out to be a successful move: today, intensewildfires at the end of the dry season are becoming a thing of the past once more.
“It was startlingly simple,” says Shaun Ansell, CEO at the indigenous-owned non-profit Warddeken Land Management Ltd. “The problem was there were no people in the landscape any more. The solution was to put people back.”
But that’s only part of the story. The modest fires now used to manage the landscape collectively release at least 38 per cent fewer greenhouse gas emissions than the intense wildfires that used to rage across the West Arnhem Plateau. In other words, the indigenous groups are helping fight climate change. And because the 21st-Century economy puts a price on reducing emissions, they are being paid to do so.
“The future for these people is that they should be able to run a pretty profitable business,” says Jeremy Russell-Smith, a fire ecologist at Charles Darwin University in Darwin, Australia.
The hope is that the success of the West Arnhem Land Fire Abatement project will lead to changes in the attitudes to fire use by indigenous people elsewhere in the world, says Dr Iokiñe Rodríguez at theUniversity of East Anglia in Norwich. Rodríguez works closely with the Pemon of Venezuela, for whom fire is an integral part of their lives and cultural identity. “Ecologists have started legitimising the Pemon’s knowledge and understanding of fire,” she says. “There’s much more acceptance of the idea that the Pemon have something to contribute.”
Noon says this idea, that indigenous knowledge has real value in the 21st-Century world, cannot be overemphasised. Modern science is benefitting from indigenous knowledge, but indigenous communities can also gain something in return. “For so long members of these communities have been told: you are lesser humans and your ancestors did nothing,” says Noon. “To be able to say, ‘no, my ancestors had this knowledge’ – it gives you pride.”
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NOMADIC SCIENCE
One woman is mixing modern and traditional methods to help save her community.
Bridging the divide between indigenous and modern was a personal challenge for Hindou Oumarou Ibrahim, pictured. She is a member of Chad’s nomadic and semi-nomadic Mbororo community, but she moved into a town as a child because her mother was determined to see her children educated. Not only was Ibrahim teased by the urban children for her Mbororo heritage, she also encountered some hostility when she later returned to her rural homeland.
“When I went back to the community it was: ‘oh, the Western girl. You must know more than we do’,” she says. Nevertheless, she was intent on using her education to help the Mbororo. She says climate change is threatening their ways of life. This, in turn, is jeopardising the Mbororo’s knowledge of the environment – including, for instance, how observing the behaviour of animals allows predictions to be made about the quantity of rain to expect in the season ahead.
In 2013 she helped her community formally document their understanding of their environment using modern mapping technology. The project made it easier for local authorities to respect the Mbororo’s knowledge. This is helping ensure that their voices are heard when initiatives to adapt to climate change are being planned, which is the best way to make sure their way of life doesn’t become lost.
Ibrahim is now publicising the plight of the Mbororo people and their knowledge on the international stage. She is a member of the Indigenous Peoples of Africa Coordinating Commitee, and she spoke at the Paris Climate Change Agreement signing ceremony in 2016. “I have a duty to play in this world in order to save my people,” Ibrahim says. “Otherwise I have no identity.
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HOW TO NAVIGATE USING THE STARS
Polynesian master voyagers don’t need modern compasses to navigate their way around the vast waters of the Pacific...
Long before the advent of modern science and technology, Polynesian navigators could travel vast distances across the Pacific between New Zealand in the southwest,Hawaii in the north and Easter Island in the southeast. Those navigational practices had almost vanished by the 1970s – but the Polynesian Voyaging Society onHawaii has since revived the knowledge with the help of Mau Pialug, a traditional navigator from the Micronesian island of Satawal.
Kālepa Baybayan was one of a handful of Pialug’s students, and he has now become a master says a key tool is the ‘star compass’. This is not a physical object but a mental construct – the navigator memorises positions of the stars in the night sky, and when they rise and set, to orientate the canoe.
The stars are useful in other ways too: the altitude of a star changes with the canoe’s latitude. This means a skilled navigator with a detailed knowledge of the night sky can pinpoint the canoe’s north-south position from the height of a given star above the horizon, using an outstretched hand as a measuring tool. “You know when you are approaching land because the stars will tell you by their altitudes,” says Baybayan.
The navigator also uses passing flotsm and mental arithmetic to judge how fast the boat is moving, and keeps track of the canoe’swake relative to the orientation of the canoe itself to judge the degree to which winds are driving the boat of-course. Both factors must be taken into account if the navigator is to mentally calculate the canoe’s approximate east-west position. The navigator must track all of these factors – and many more – for days on end. “The trip from Hawaii to Tahiti is 2,400 nautical miles: it’s going to take you about thre eweeks to get there,” says Baybayan. “It’s a mental challenge to do this with out notes or writing. But it gives incredible satisfaction to complete a voyage successfully.”
Written by Dr Colin Barras in "BBC Focus Magazine" UK, n.29, Ausgust 2018, excerpts pp.66-73. Digitized, adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.
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