James Broughel

Feb 29, 2024,07:06am EST

“Indigenous knowledge” is in the spotlight thanks to President Biden, who issued an executive order within days of taking office, aimed at ushering in a new era of tribal self-determination. It was a preview of things to come. His administration went on to host an annual White House summit on tribal nations, and convened an interagency working group that spent a year developing government-wide guidance on indigenous knowledge.

Released in late 2022, the 46-page guidance document defines indigenous knowledge as “a body of observations, oral and written knowledge, innovations, practices, and beliefs developed by Tribes and Indigenous Peoples through experience with the environment.” According to the guidance, indigenous knowledge “is applied to phenomena across biological, physical, social, cultural, and spiritual systems.”

Now the Biden Administration wants federal agencies to include these sorts of beliefs into their decision making. As a result, agencies like the EPA, FDA, and CDC are incorporating indigenous knowledge into their scientific integrity practices.

In some cases, tribal knowledge can certainly provide empirical data to decisionmakers. For example, if an agency is concerned about pollution in a certain area, tribal leaders might be able to provide insights about abnormally high rates of illness experienced within their community. That said, categorizing knowledge that includes folklore and traditions under the banner of enhancing “scientific integrity” poses a number of serious problems, to put it mildly.

Very often, indigenous knowledge deals in subjective understandings related to culture, stories, and values—not facts or empirically-derived cause-and-effect relationships. In such cases, the knowledge can still be useful, but it is not “science” per se, which is usually thought of as the study of observable phenomena in the physical and natural world.

Treating science and indigenous knowledge as equivalent risks blending oral traditions and spirituality with verifiable data and evidence. Scientists are aware of the danger, which explains why the authors of a recent article in Science Magazine wisely noted “we do not argue that Indigenous Knowledge should usurp the role of, or be called, science.” Instead, they argue, indigenous knowledge can complement scientific information.

Indeed, this knowledge should be collected alongside other input from stakeholders with an interest in the outcomes of federal policy. It shouldn’t be confused with science itself, however. Yet by baking indigenous insights into scientific integrity policies without clearly explaining how the knowledge is to be collected, verified, and used, federal agencies will make it easier to smuggle untested claims into the evidentiary records for rulemakings.

Another issue is that indigenous knowledge varies dramatically across the more than 500 federally-recognized tribes. There are likely to be instances where one group’s teachings may offer time-tested wisdom, while another’s proves unreliable when held up against observable facts. Indigenous knowledge can also point in opposite directions. Last year, the Biden administration invoked indigenous knowledge when it canceled seven oil and gas leases in Alaska, but indigenous groups are known to often support energy development as well.

Even the Biden team admits indigenous knowledge is “often unique and specific” to a single tribe or people. But the Biden team doesn’t offer a way to distinguish between competing or contradictory accounts.

While no one disputes the historical mistreatment of Native Americans, this is unrelated to the question of whether knowledge is accurate. Moreover, other forms of localized knowledge also deserve attention. In rural towns and municipalities, for example, long-time residents often develop their own bodies of knowledge concerning everything from flood patterns to forest fire risks. To be clear, this local knowledge is also not “science” in most cases. But, like indigenous knowledge, it can be critically important.

That agency scientific integrity initiatives would single out knowledge based on social categories like race and ethnicity is unscientific. The danger is that indigenous knowledge policies will enable subjective understandings to become baked into rulemakings alongside the latest in peer-reviewed research.

If federal agencies aim to incorporate subjective belief systems into rulemaking, they should take care to do so responsibly without allowing unverified claims to be smuggled into purportedly impartial regulatory analyses. In most instances, indigenous knowledge will fall outside the scope of what can rightfully be considered part of ensuring scientific integrity.

The path forward lies in incorporating indigenous insights into policy decisions at the stage where they rightfully belong: as part of holding meetings and gathering feedback from stakeholders. Very likely, indigenous and other forms of local knowledge will often turn out to be more important than science. But confusing politics and science risks undermining both.

[Note from RT: there are many problems in the line of reasoning presented in this piece; the one that is perhaps most important is that the author’s perception of what “Indigenous knowledge” is is based on the results of processes of decontextualization, fragmentation, and reconstruction of Indigenous ideas in instrumental ways, inside larger social and cultural frames that have no relation to the contexts in which these ideas circulate originally. Indigenous knowledge would not be so crucial today if it were compatible with non-Indigenous, modern/Western modes of thinking and social organization. In most cases, the complaint that Indigenous knowledge is difficult to accommodate comes from realms in which there is great confidence that business as usual will solve the current environmental situation.]