Beyond Knowing: A Marxist Critique of Science Education
Introduction
This piece of writing is intended to reflect my ongoing journey to better understand different (non-western) worldviews and how those world views may impact the ways that we — human societies — collectively produce and validate new information.
I embarked on this journey because I have been seeking a framework for understanding the world — in other words, a “science”— which recognizes not just the objective (or external) world, but also the role that is played by our own subjectivity within the broader universe whose principles and tendencies we seek to understand. No scientific knowledge is ever truly 100 percent objective, since the way that we conduct science and even the questions we try to answer are always shaped by a particular set of socio-historical conditions. But this perspective is lacking in the way that we understand or speak about contemporary western science.
I was born and raised in Calgary, Alberta, in the traditional territory of the Blackfoot Indigenous peoples. But as the descendent of European settlers, and as someone who was educated in settler institutions, I was largely isolated from the original people of this land. Therefore, I had a limited understanding of Indigenous traditional knowledge or worldviews, and my own perspective largely reflected the hegemonic settler-colonial values of the society in which I was raised. The culture I was handed was not one that was born from the region in which I lived, like that of the Blackfoot people, but was a culture that has been imposed — oftentimes violently — on people around the world through the ongoing process of colonization.
My reading of Betty Bastien’s illuminating book, Blackfoot Ways of Knowing, and my experience working alongside Indigenous colleagues has helped me immensely on my quest to better understand the various philosophies of science, Indigenous ontologies, and epistemologies that exist in our world outside of the dominant western colonial paradigm.
As I have come to better understand particular Indigenous worldviews, I have noticed that Indigenous ways of knowing seem to be inherently (while not explicitly) dialectical. This is because they recognize the relationship between the subject and the object in how we understand the nature of the universe. There seems to be a similarity between Indigenous ways of knowing and the Marxist (or Marxian) perspective on science, which is also informed by a dialectic and materialist understanding of nature. Marxism, therefore, in a sense, can provide a framework for understanding the world that could bring us closer to Indigenous world views, which have largely been ignored, delegitimized, and/or erased since European contact.
I see the Marxist perspective on science and Indigenous ways of knowing as two sides to the same coin, and I believe that together, they both represent a powerful tool for addressing the illnesses of alienated life that we experience under settler capitalism. They both have the ability to provide us with a renewed sense of agency within the universe, by recognizing and reaffirming our relationship to all living and nonliving things.
Friedrich Engels believed that “freedom is the recognition of necessity,” which means that our freedom is contingent on us recognizing our interdependence (or reliance) on the rest of the natural world of which we play a part. I am only free insofar as I am able to recognize and respect my dependence on others. Not just other human beings, but all the living (and nonliving) things that sustain us.
Reclaiming science for ourselves, each other, and our communities has the potential not only to improve the living conditions for a society facing numerous intersecting crises. But also to repair our relationships with each other and the natural world of which we are a part. This reclamation is crucial as we refocus our collective efforts towards a world of balance, sustainability, equity and reciprocity with the world around us, in a manner befitting of the many global crises we currently face.
A Crisis of Trust
Recent events have highlighted a growing distrust in science amongst a large swathe of the public in our contemporary capitalist society. For example, our collective response (or lack thereof) to the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic has resulted in millions of deaths and an unknowable number of disabilities due to skepticism towards what science has told us about the benefits of masking, ventilation, distancing, and vaccinations. On top of the pandemic, the increasing frequency and severity of natural disasters and the associated death toll — as well as economic costs — are the result of our inadequate response to addressing the climate crisis in a meaningful and timely manner, in line with evidence based ecological limits and thresholds. Our distrust of science is harming us when science could — and should — be helping us.
I believe that a major contributing factor in the loss of trust towards science lies in the way that science is taught to young learners and students of all ages. I assert that the quality of education that a person receives directly influences their understanding of what science is, or what science represents, which in turn has consequences for what we — as a society — believe to be true or factual. For example, if an individual understands science to be a process by which we learn and validate new information, as opposed to just a body of facts we are forced to memorize in school, they should be better equipped to understand — and trust — any new knowledge that we have learned through the scientific process.
Poor science education has systematically led to uncertainty in the scientific process, which has resulted in the epistemological crisis that is plaguing the world today. It seems that many people no longer have the toolkit to evaluate what is fact or fiction, which is exacerbated by a popular discourse that is increasingly bereft of nuance, as well as misinformation and/or disinformation that has been intentionally weaponized to sow unhealthy skepticism. Skepticism is an important quality when evaluating new information, but the form it has taken with respect to credible science has only aided the extreme political polarization of our time, and it has especially benefitted those who seek to gain from this polarization.
Using myself as an example, I find it strange that I managed to go through my entire formal education — both grade school (Kindergarten to Grade 12), my undergrad (a Bachelor of Science), as well as my Master of Science degree, without ever having to take a single philosophy of science course. I am not sure if this is common in other education systems around the world for the STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) fields, but I think it’s strange that it was never mandatory for me to have to learn the reasons behind why we do science, or what science is intended for. I feel quite fortunate that despite never receiving this education that I still managed to make it to this stage in my life with a reasonable comprehension of the answers (or the diversity of answers) to these important questions — but that’s only because I was self-motivated enough to engage with those questions on a deeper level independently of my formal education. I feel that the lack of any mandatory critical interrogation into why we do science plays a huge part in this crisis of trust we are experiencing today. I believe that understanding the “why?” of science is part of the way forward if we are to collectively address this crisis in epistemology.
Inadequate Education
When it comes to teaching science, we do a reasonable job of teaching students about the various disciplines and the topics of interest that exist within those disciplines (e.g., genetics within biology, organic chemistry within chemistry etc.), but we fail to give students an adequate understanding of why we are seeking to learn this information in the first place. Education seems — as it currently exists — to only teach the “what?”, but never the “why?”, or at least the “why?” that’s provided is so narrowly defined as to be seemingly useless. Such as learning chemistry so that we can do more chemistry in the future (or to obtain employment in chemistry — so that we may earn a wage by doing chemistry), but never engaging with the question of why we do chemistry — as a discipline — in the first place? Are we learning about chemical processes (and how to manipulate them) for the sake of increasing corporate profits? Or are we pursuing an education in chemistry so that we can create substances that help reduce human suffering? I think that the only way we can begin to resolve this issue is to include some form of Marxist perspective into the way that we teach science to students. The absence of a historical materialist perspective in science means that we fail to see ourselves within science, as well as failing to see the role of science within our broader social history as a species, and therefore we ignore our collective role in deciding how and why science is conducted.
Science should be understood as the process of data collection and validation by which we (human beings and our societies) learn new information about the world around us. Science is how human beings have come to understand the laws that govern the universe, life, nature, history, and how we can apply these laws to meet our needs. However, contemporary western science under capitalism has largely existed as a version of science that is wrongly assumed to be objective, independent, neutral, detached, and separate from social processes and human history. In reality, the phenomena we observe and record while conducting science then unfold into new ideas, which, once created, begin to exist on their own, independent of the person who originally described them. These ideas (subjective in their origin) — through living a life of their own — become a part of what society believes to be objective reality and are assumed to be static concepts/phenomena rather than being subject to further evolution and change. The relationship between subject and object has been lost under this dominant version of scientific inquiry.
Western science seeks to atomize the world around us, by isolating particular variables through experimentation, in the hopes that we can separate cause and effect, for the sake of controlling these particular variables in the future. Unfortunately, more often than not, the use of science to control variable is used for the sake of profits and wealth accumulation, rather than to meet our actual needs as a society. By using science in this way, we lose all sense of self in our conduct of science and the pursuit of knowledge. There’s no questioning why we are doing an experiment in the first place. Who is it for? Who does it benefit? Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum’s character) in Jurassic Park captures the essence of western science perfectly when he proclaims: “your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could that they didn’t stop to think if they should.” Science could — and should — be done for the public good, to ensure genuine human flourishing and to bring balance to our relationship with the broader Earth ecosystem we are a part of. Instead, it’s pusued for the sake of wealth generation at the expense of workers and the environment we rely on for our own survival.
A Primer on Marxism
Marxism is a scientific framework for understanding both natural history and human social history and was developed most notably by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in the late 19th century. Marxism is the combination of two distinct but connected concepts — dialectical materialism, and historical materialism.
Dialectical materialism is the concept that the universe (our material reality) is dialectic in nature. Our world, including both nature, and human social history are dialectical, in the sense that there is an interaction between subject (ourselves) and object (our external reality). In seeking to meet our basic human needs for survival, we must engage in production, which influences the world around us (i.e., our actions impact society and ecosystems), and in return, the world then shapes how we are able to live and meet our needs. Dialectical materialism arose in contrast to Hegelian dialectics — also known as dialectic idealism — where it was assumed that the evolution of society was motivated primarily by ideas. Dialectical materialism, in contrast, asserts that our ideas are shaped by our material conditions, because consciousness is a product of human evolutionary history, and therefore our brains — as well as our ideas — are a product of the material world (and arose through biological evolution).
Historical materialism is the idea that history is created by the organized movement of the oppressed classes of people at every single stage in our social development — from egalitarianism to slavery and colonialism, to feudalism, to mercantilism, and now again under capitalism. The only way to resolve the contradictions at every stage in our social development is for those who are oppressed to organize and become a force for change. Historical change arises through the class antagonisms that exist at every stage in our social development, and these antagonisms are resolved through changes to the mode of production.
We meet our needs as a society by engaging in production — which includes activities such as harvesting medicines, hunting food, and building shelter. However, there are various ways in which we coordinate our productive activities to meet these needs, such as through primitive hunter-gathering, early forms of egalitarianism, slavery, feudalism, capitalism, or socialism. These “modes of production” play a pivotal role in shaping how our society looks and functions at a given point in history — including how and why we do science. Under capitalism, private property ownership means that most of the world’s population (i.e., the working class) are restricted from influencing what we produce as a society, because the capitalist ruling class own the means of production and we are forced into wage labour to meet our basic needs. This is where the idea of alienation comes from. Under capitalism, we feel alienated both from our own labour time because we have no agency over what we produce with our labour time, and from the natural world, because it is seen solely as a resource for extraction in the pursuit of wealth. Science — under capitalism — becomes a tool for increasing the profits of the wealthy minority.
Capitalism (in conjunction with European colonialism) has proliferated the harmful idea that humanity is distinctly separate from the natural world of which we both evolved from and participate within. Human beings are just as much a part of the broader global ecosystem as forests and oceans, and our relationship with the world is dialectical in nature because our activities (i.e., our production) influences our environment which in turn influences how we live within that environment — like we are experiencing around the world today with anthropogenic (or human-caused) climate change.
Marxian Science
A dialectic and historically materialist approach (i.e., a Marxist or Marxian approach) to science could help to provide a clearer, more comprehensive, holistic, and unifying perspective on the evolution of life, nature, and history, because this method recognizes that science is a social phenomenon that arises within the context of human social history and is therefore a product of natural history itself. The Marxist method helps us to recognize that science is socially constructed and therefore any notion of genuine objectivity is impossible. That doesn’t mean it’s not still the best method of inquiry that we have available to us, it just means that we should abandon the falsehood that science is ever truly independent. Whenever we study anything, there’s always the subject (the observer) and the object (the thing being observed), but anything we come to learn or understand about the object needs to recognize the relationship that exists between subject and object otherwise our understanding would be incomplete. The object does not exist in isolation.
I think that this divide in how we perceive of, and conduct science is the result of the artificial split that capitalist society has created between what we call STEM fields and the arts, rather than recognizing the crucial interplay (or dialectical relationship) that takes place between the two. STEM fields are intended to help us understand the objective external world, whereas the arts represent our understanding of the subjective or internal reality (i.e., art as the outward expression of our internal experience). If our society is tricked into thinking that science is completely independent/objective/detached, rather than socially constructed, I think that it helps create (and perpetuate) the idea of the stereotypical, detached science professionals who don’t really recognize what the results of their science could be used for — such as wealth generation, resource extraction, surveillance, military purposes, and/or mass destruction. It creates scientists who disown the consequences of their own actions. We — as a society — have the choice of why we conduct science, whether it’s for the benefit of the capitalist system or to help relieve suffering by addressing the collective needs of humanity. The implementation of science — its principles and processes — needs to enable the flourishing of human communities, otherwise it only serves to maintain the status quo (i.e., bourgeois capitalist culture). Science, and science education, need to be emancipatory.
To me, it is a great shame that there are knowledgeable and credible scientists out there, with large platforms of supporters, who use their expertise in service to industry (i.e., to benefit the capitalist ruling class), rather than using their knowledge to benefit the greater public good. I don’t necessarily blame those individuals themselves because I recognize that under capitalism, many of us are forced into making choices that may be contradictory to our values since we are forced to seek out wage labour to sustain our existence. It just saddens me when I see scientific inquiry being forced down that path and co-opted by capital interests, when it could be a strong force for achieving the common good. Science has always existed to help us meet our needs, but capitalism — and those who uphold it — refuse to let us meet our needs without subservience.
For example, there was a committee of experts put together by an unnamed Canadian energy company (that rhymes with “Bun-Cor”) for the purposes of developing a mitigation plan which would allow for the mining (i.e., destruction) of a charismatic and ecologically important wetland in northern Alberta. Through my work with Alberta Wilderness Association, we felt that there were significant risks of irreversible damage associated with this mitigation strategy if it were to fail, and the approval of this plan feels like a dereliction of duty on the part of these scientist who seem to have put individual prestige or monetary gain over humanity’s collective wellbeing. In an era defined by anthropogenic climate change and biodiversity loss, with all that we know about peatlands and their ability to sequester and store carbon from the atmosphere, the approval of this mitigation plan feels like a direct attack on the future livability of the planet. Science should not be weaponized against humanity or the ecosystems that we rely on for survival. What’s disheartening is that this situation doesn’t come as a surprise, but rather falls in line with the broader co-optation of science for the sake of bourgeois goals for wealth production, as we have seen in the technology industry which has resulted in innovations (i.e., surveillance tools) that are used to exploit and oppress people rather than enabling our liberation.
The absence of any historical materialist perspective in our teaching (and understanding) of science means that we fail to see ourselves as engaging with science in our everyday lives. We fail to understand our own role within science as an ongoing social process by which we all work together to learn new information about our surroundings to make life easier for us. We are constantly engaged in scientific inquiry in ways that often go unnoticed throughout our daily lives. Science is the same process that our primitive human ancestors first used to determine what plants and animals were safe to eat or not. Through repeated trial and error over generations, human societies have learned how to exist within their environment, what to eat, how to build shelter, what medicines help to heal us when we are sick etc. If you have ever tried something — anything — multiple times, to see whether that thing has the same effect on you each time, that’s engaging in science. When we can finally see ourselves as engaged in science and constantly advancing our knowledge of the world, that helps to demystify the field of science for all. We have always used science to our own advantage, but right now it’s being directed against our best interest in the service of profit generation on the backs of our own exploitation.
Let’s say you start a new job that requires you to commute from point A to B multiple times per week. You might try a few different routes to see which is faster at different times of the day. After testing out these routes — over time — you will likely find the quickest path that works for your schedule. That whole process is conducting science, regardless of whether you wrote it down, had it peer reviewed and/or published in a scientific journal.
We — human beings — create history through our social behaviour such as when we engage in production to meet our needs. History is the sum of these collective actions with each other and with the natural world. Science is another act of production, or at least a process that aids us in our productive activities — it can help us understand the world around us so that we can better meet our needs. Science is a social practice, not an individual undertaking or achievement. All new discoveries that we have learned through science occur on the backs of those who studied before us. We constantly build on our historical knowledge. Science arises through the human material relation to nature — through the social metabolism between human beings and nature (via production). Friedrich Engels asserted that science and mathematics (what we refer to as STEM fields today) arose to serve the role of connecting humanity (the subjective) to the wider (objective) realm, by employing methods of inference (e.g., repeated and documented trial and error) which originally arose through the human relation to nature as we sought to meet our needs for food, shelter, medicines etc. Whether we choose to realize it or not, to be human, is to be engaged in science.
Science should be used in a way that helps to reduce the burden of production and liberate our time away from the drudgery of meeting our basic needs for survival. We should be using science to find ways for us to work less, to give us more free time, to decrease our reliance on harmful substances (i.e., fossil fuels), to revamp our agricultural system to ensure that no one goes hungry, not for increasing profits. But instead, under capitalism, when we innovate new technologies through science that could reduce the number of hours we work — we are forced to find new and different ways to spend that same number of hours doing increasingly meaningless work. Creativity and innovation are constrained under capitalism because the only ideas that receive any attention are those deemed to be potentially profitable. For those in power (i.e., the capitalist ruling class and our elected leaders who serve them), there’s no incentive to invest in the public good if it reduces private profits, because GDP is the metric we use to define success as nation-states (i.e., why would we expand public transportation if it’s only going to reduce the sale of automobiles and gasoline?).
Because science has been taught inadequately, it has led to a deep distrust in science, where it is often viewed as an elitist institution (i.e., “the Ivory Tower” of academia), or just a growing body of knowledge rather than as a social process. This makes knowledge inaccessible or incomprehensible to everyday people when it should be shared and publicly available to all. Peer-reviewed journals, academia, patents, intellectual property, and the associated paywalls (or other barriers to entry) are just one form that science can take — which should be understood as bourgeois science. This is a colonial and European-centric version of science that is now conducted primarily for profitability’s sake, rather than to improve the living conditions of the public at large. This version of science has led to our current epistemological crisis whereby everyday people either distrust science because they don’t (or can’t) understand it, or they have a distaste for science as an institution because of its elitist character. Science has been captured by corporations across the military, technology, and pharmaceutical industries, while its availability has been limited by the publishing industry. Yes, peer review and validation are important processes that exist to ensure that what we are documenting is reasonably true, but that doesn’t mean that we should devalue science, research or knowledge that doesn’t end up published in academic journals — as settler institutions have historically done towards Indigenous Traditional Knowledge.
The Dialectics of Indigenous Traditional Knowledge
Note: When I first wrote the following section, I used used the term Indigenous Knowledge in places where I likely should have used the term Indigenous ways of knowing or Indigenous worldviews. In the future I plan to revise this section and make the necessary changes, but for now please use those terms interchangeably.
Indigenous Traditional Knowledge or Indigenous Knowledge (hereafter referred to as IK) is another form of science whereby Indigenous cultures and communities have developed an understanding of the land, nature, and ecosystems across various local contexts over thousands of years. To borrow a definition from Canada’s Indigenous Knowledge Policy Framework under the federal Impact Assessment Act, IK is a: “collective knowledge that encompasses community values, teachings, relationships, ceremony, oral stories and myths” and that is “community specific and place- based, arising from Indigenous Peoples’ intimate relationship with their environment and territory over thousands of years”. This is a way of knowing which has been cultivated over generations. Indigenous cultures, over time, developed ways of living in harmony with the land, which requires a depth of knowledge not only about your surroundings (i.e., your ecosystem) but also about humanity’s place within them (i.e., the interaction between the individual and the ecosystem). Therefore, IK can be understood as a science that is born of the land, in a relationship with that land, and rooted in the history of Indigenous cultures spanning millennia. IK recognizes the subject-object relationship in our understanding of the world and its phenomena. It’s the same process of basic science whereby repeated trial and error helps us to better understand our environment and the processes (or scientific laws) that govern nature so that we can use those laws to our benefit. IK recognizes not only the importance of the environment to people (or communities), but also the role of human communities within the broader ecosystem as well. We play a role that shapes our environment, which in turn shapes how we can live as a society within that environment. Therefore, IK can be understood as an implicitly dialectical form of scientific inquiry, of a similar vein to Marxist science.
There has been a push in recent years — as part of the larger emphasis on reconciliation in settler society — to incorporate more IK into our understanding of the world alongside western science (WS) views. Both IK and WS are valid forms of scientific inquiry, with the only major difference being that WS is a colonial construct whereby any/all science needs to be conducted in a certain way, written down following specific standards, and it needs to be validated by an independent body of other scientific experts (what’s known as peer review), and then published in academic theses and/or scientific journals. IK has helped entire Indigenous societies survive across the world for millennia, but because their knowledge wasn’t written down and validated by settler institutions, it was largely (and wrongly) considered as lesser knowledge or untrustworthy. This was despite the obvious strength of IK as being dialectical, validated over thousands of years, and recognizing the role that human activities play within natural ecosystems.
A popular term in contemporary science in the age of reconciliation is the idea of “braiding” where WS and IK are considered equally important and complimentary in their efforts to build a comprehensive understanding of ecosystems and/or other natural phenomena. Key aspects of braiding IK with WS include recognition for relationships, responsibilities, reciprocity, and intergenerational knowledge transfer. These components further emphasize the dialectical (reciprocal) and historical materialist (intergenerational) aspects inherent to traditional knowledge systems, reinforcing their similarity to Marxian perspectives. The braiding of IK with WS is a method by which we can combine two similar, yet distinct, disciplines to come up with a more comprehensive understanding of natural phenomena through the re-incorporation of dialectical thinking via IK. IK helps us to recognize the role of humanity within our ecosystems, and that the activities that human society undertakes in the process of production are just as much a part of the ecosystem for other species as those species are for us. A dialectical perspective, provided through the acceptance of IK, can help us to understand the reciprocal relationship that exists between ecosystems at large and the individual species (including ourselves) which constitute them.
Through my work as a Conservation Specialist with the Alberta Wilderness Association, I have participated in many multi-stakeholder processes related to environmental issues, which has given me the opportunity to learn about Indigenous Knowledge and Indigenous Ways of Knowing directly from individuals representing Indigenous communities from across Alberta. I recognize these views don’t hold true as generalizations for all Indigenous People across the globe, but many of these perspectives are relevant to this discussion, and highlight the dialectic nature of how [some] Indigenous People come to understand the world around us and our place within.
Without being too specific — for the sake of confidentiality — one of the stakeholder processes that I participated in was with regards to the conservation of an at-risk species of bison which is unique to Alberta. One of the requirements of this process is to braid (or weave) IK alongside WS, so that management decisions for the bison incorporate knowledge derived from both ways of knowing. One of the discussions that took place was around IK and what that looks like or means to other people, how IK is different from WS, and how we should or could go about bringing those two knowledge streams together in a meaningful way that helps this particular herd of bison. The discussion was enlightening, and I appreciated having the chance to hear the diverse perspectives of those from Indigenous communities as well as western scientists who have experience incorporating these two ways of knowing with one another. The discussion seemed to always come back to epistemology, and how we validate the data we collect (or what we observe), how we know what’s true or not? Or, why we conduct science in the first place? And I think that certain aspects of this discussion feed into the ideas I have been trying to articulate throughout this piece of writing. I have included some highlights from this discussion below, but names have been changed to protect the identity and confidentiality of those involved.
An Indigenous community member named Jane said that she wants WS to appreciate IK. She always likes to look for a strong foundation and sees history as providing a great foundation. She thinks back to the cure for scurvy, which was found in pine needles, or how we found aspirin from the teachings of the willow. Indigenous people, and their cultures, and their ways of learning about the land is the original science. Indigenous people help to preserve life through their knowledge and teachings. She feels that Western Science is too hyper-focused on discovery and progress, whereas IK focuses on practical uses for future generations, and the sustainability of all living things.
A representative for an Indigenous community named Megan wanted to share a story with everyone, from 20 years ago, when another organization was trying to establish their own IK processes. She remembers going to a workshop and hearing something that stuck with her to this day. When attempting to describe the difference between WS and IK, there was a discussion around how WS sets out with a defined question or hypothesis from the beginning, and WS seeks to test that question by conducting lab or field work. After taking many samples to test if the hypothesis is right (or not), that hypothesis may become what we believe to be objectively true or factual. But WS is only a baby compared to Indigenous Knowledge. With Indigenous Knowledge, these people and their teachings have been around for millennia, learning with and on the land, and they have already moved way beyond the hypothesis testing stage. They have reached the truth stage. They know where the buffalo live, they know the best places to fish, they know how the seasons change and what to expect in a given area at a particular time of year. IK already knows the land through a millennia of hypothesis testing. And since IK is already a form of truth about the land, then the information that is collected through observation by Indigenous peoples can be considered a form of monitoring, to look for changes and to further validate their truths.
A representative from the provincial government mentioned that this discussion made him think about how we — as a group — come to accept certain things as truth or not. He remembered a meeting from a decade ago, which led to the creation of this process for the protection of bison. It all started because someone from the Indigenous community planted a seed of doubt regarding the truth of the knowledge of Western Science. WS assumed that this particular bison herd was the same as other bison in the region, but Indigenous knowledge holders and elders claimed that the animals were unique. He wondered why we — settler governments and scientists — assumed that WS knew more about the landscape and the ecosystems than Indigenous Knowledge, which had developed their understanding of that place over thousands of years.
Another Indigenous community representative — named Jim — described himself as an infant when it comes to understanding Indigenous ways, but that he is often caught off-guard by striking revelations when he has spoken with community elders. Jim has a friend named Doug, who is an Indigenous elder that he has known for many decades. In a conversation with Doug the previous month, Doug told Jim that life in the 20th and 21st centuries has been tremendously unsettling for everyone, for all cultures, not just for Indigenous Peoples. Life has become more complicated, and enlightened westerners are finally starting to work on their mental, emotional, and spiritual health, which has been neglected for so long. Doug mentioned that a fully healthy person needs to braid all elements of health, which is becoming commonplace in mainstream culture, but what was important about Doug’s comment was that he said that the rest of creation has the same aspirations as we — humans — do. Physical, mental, spiritual, and emotional health. And that it is only through a healthy relationship with creation (which has to this point been atomized by western science) that a resolution is possible and for all parties to become healthy together. The trees, the rivers, the buffalo, they all have the same aspirations for health as we do, and we rely on their health for our own.
A community representative named Kyle stressed the need for us to take a holistic approach when trying to understand things. During his Master of Science degree, he did a course in methodology to try and narrow in his research interests, but the feedback he received was that his research wasn’t specific enough, and he had to keep going deeper, more niche, and more obscure. This demonstrates how Western Science hyper-focuses on smaller individual topics, which isn’t how we should be looking at relationships between animals and ecosystems and human communities. Fundamentally WS is asking different questions than IK. We need to throw everything out that we have learned from WS and academia when dealing with Indigenous elders and land users. They are constantly looking ahead to future generations, and settlers — or western scientists — need to reframe our perspectives to start from that place, building solutions for the next 600 years rather than just 20. No one knowledge system will be able to fill all the information gaps alone, and our knowledge systems come from vastly different perspectives, but they should work complementary rather than as adversaries.
The ideas shared as part of this discussion of IK help to reinforce the idea that Indigenous ways of knowing seem to be inherently dialectical, because they see humanity as a part of the natural world, and understand the role that we play as subjects in dictating why we engage in scientific endeavors. Science has always been a tool by which human societies have sought to meet our needs by striving to understand the world around us. Indigenous Ways of Knowing seems to recognize and appreciate the role played by subjectivity in the production of knowledge, and I think that incorporating these perspectives might help settler society reclaim the agency we have lost over what we choose to study, why we study, and who gets to benefit?
Blackfoot Ways of Knowing
The following paragraphs were developed following my reading of Betty Bastien’s insightful book, Blackfoot Ways of Knowing.
From a Siksikaitsitapi (or Blackfoot) perspective, we — humans — are cosmic beings, and as cosmic beings, we are related to all things (both living and non-living) in the universe through our shared origins. This perspective corresponds to a material (or Marxist) understanding of the origins of the universe, whereby matter and energy, and the interaction between the two, constitute [most of] what we know about our universe. As a broad generalization, everything in the known universe is comprised of matter and/or energy, or some combination of the two. This interaction between matter and energy then eventually gave rise to the earliest forms of life on our planet. Humanity shared the same basic building blocks as all other forms of biological life, as well as non-living things.
Since we are related to all things, then learning, or knowledge seeking, therefore can be seen as coming to understand all our relations, and our alliances with those relations. According to Betty Bastien, Indigenous ways of knowing are the processes that align Niitsitapi (people) with their alliances, from which all knowing is obtained. Knowledge is generated for the purpose of maintaining our relationships, and the seeking of knowledge is a responsibility we take on for the sake of the collective good. Not just for humanity’s sake, but for balance and sustainability with all our relations. The process of knowing or coming to know is based on the interrelationships of our alliances. Knowledge is developed through participation, and can only be generated through alliances, which recognizes the importance of the relationship between the subject and the object, rather than through the separation of the two, as is typical in western, settler-colonial science. Betty Bastien wrote that: “Both [forms of science — Indigenous and colonial] have careful observations at their core; however, the context for the observations (how they are held and what is observed) is entirely different. Instead of a concern with replicability or experimentation for the sake of technological development and progress, Niitsitapi science is part of a holistic practice of balancing ourselves within our environment.”
Science for Liberation
By embracing a Marxist perspective on science and nature, science education can be liberated from teaching only the “what”, whereby we force students to memorize a body of useless facts that are only destined for regurgitation on standardized tests. Instead, through Marxism, we are enabled to mobilize behind the question of “why” we are studying something and can democratically choose how we use science to meet our collective needs as a society. To paraphrase Karl Marx, the point [of philosophy] is not simply to understand the world, but to change it. I believe this applies equally to science as it does to philosophy. As things stand, our education systems only seek to develop an understanding of the world but fail to empower students to use this understanding to benefit humanity at large because corporate interests control the means of production. A genuine understanding of science should enable human social flourishing. For example, science tells us that our relation to nature (i.e., capitalism — and specifically our dependence on fossil fuels) is driving the interlinking climate and biodiversity crises. There is a vast body of research out there that highlights the problem, and we should be using this information to drive a movement away from fossil energy and towards a more sustainable relationship with nature on our planet, but instead we seem content to just talk about this catalogue of horrors, instead of doing anything that might revolutionize our material existence in a sustainable way.
Our inability to see ourselves as engaging in science, or how science is inextricably linked to the social history of the human species and human society, has contributed to the epistemological crisis we are currently facing. Science now appears as something detached from the day-to-day reality of working-class people in capitalist society. The influence of capital over the scientific process has resulted in an elitist institution which denies any chance for democratic deliberation over what we study and why. Bourgeois science doesn’t exist to serve the people, and it’s no wonder that more and more people are struggling to trust an institution that doesn’t serve their needs. This inability to trust science as a way of knowing, as a process of validation, exacerbates the many other intersectional crises we currently face from climate change to biodiversity loss, to our response to the Covid-19 pandemic, as well as broader social issues such as the affordability crisis and rising wealth inequality. As the prominent American ecologist, author and politician Barry Commoner put it in his 1966 book Science and Survival: “science can reveal the depth of this ecological crisis, but only social action can resolve it”.
If anything is to change for the better, it is our responsibility as the oppressed peoples of the working class to recognize our shared struggle and to bring our desired future to fruition. Not only to reclaim science itself from the clutches of capital, but to engage in science in ways that might benefit the movement for human liberation as a whole, as a science for the people and the planet we call home.
