Bridging Indigenous and Western Sciences: Toward Ethical and Reparative Engagements
In this paper, we consider the complexities, challenges, and possibilities of enabling more ethical relationships between those trained in Western and Indigenous sciences. This is particularly important in light of the growing interest in bringing together Western and Indigenous sciences to address today’s pressing ecological challenges.
We argue that despite their good intentions, those trained within Western scientific disciplines often unconsciously reproduce colonial patterns of relationship grounded in assumptions of Western epistemic universality, objectivity, and superiority. These patterns can lead to extractive and transactional engagements with Indigenous knowledges that reproduce colonial inequities and fail to account for the role of Western sciences in the historical and ongoing dispossession and subjugation of Indigenous Peoples, lands, and knowledges.
Read this open access paper on the FACETS website.
In this article, we seek to support those trained in Western sciences to identify, interrupt, and unlearn these patterns in their fields and their scholarship in order to create the conditions for more respectful and reciprocal approaches to bringing together the gifts of multiple knowledge systems.
We also review three possible approaches to engagements with Indigenous sciences by Western sciences, including dismissive, inclusive, and reparative. We emphasize the possibilities offered by a reparative approach that recognizes the responsibility of those trained in Western sciences to enact material redress and relational repair for their complicity in colonial harm.
Read the paper — Toward more ethical engagements between Western and Indigenous sciences by Sharon Stein, Cash Ahenakew, Will Valley, Pasang Y. Sherpa, Eva Crowson, Tabitha Robin, Wilson Mendes, and Steve Evans.
