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National Academies, other institutions ‘attempt to put indigenous knowledge on par with modern science’: scholar

A University of Chicago biologist is voicing concerns about efforts by prestigious academic institutions to “braid Indigenous knowledge” into the hard sciences.

In one recent example, the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine convened a committee tasked with “bridging Indigenous and local knowledge with scientific knowledge” on the environment.

Jerry Coyne, emeritus evolutionary biologist at the University of Chicago, voiced concerns about the project and similar efforts at other institutions in a recent phone interview with The College Fix.

The National Academies committee was “particularly distressing for us for two reasons,” Coyne said in a recent phone interview. “First of all, the attempt to put indigenous knowledge on par with modern science is distressing. But it also leads to a lot of misguided statements and political clashes that don’t have to exist.”

The committee, Co-Production of Environmental Knowledge, Methods, and Approaches, was created to “make findings and recommendations … about the challenges, needs, and opportunities associated with co-production of environmental knowledge between scientists and local and Indigenous experts,” according to the academy website.

“By fostering collaboration and integrating diverse perspectives, co-production enables a deeper understanding of causes and potential remedies of environmental stressors,” it states.

Academies spokesperson Dana Korsen told The Fix in a recent email that the committee was suspended May 14 “due to concerns about the study’s approach.”

Asked for the definition of “co-production,” Korsen said it “is a methodology that leverages the expertise of practitioners and community members to develop holistic solutions to multifaceted problems at the intersection of society and the environment.”

When asked about the term “braiding,” which was mentioned in media coverage about the committee, Korsen said this term was not used in academy materials.

The word does not appear on the committee’s main page on the academy website. However, it was used in the description for a Feb. 8 workshop hosted by the committee, “Co-Production of Environmental Knowledge, Approaches, and Methods: Midwest Workshop.” One of the objectives was to “explore ways to braid Western and Indigenous knowledge.”

Korsen did not reply to a follow-up question from The Fix asking for clarification on the academy’s specific concerns with the committee’s approach.

The project received funding from the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, and NASA, Korsen said.

DEI is ‘starting to affect the hard sciences’

Professor Coyne told The Fix the academy project is representative of a broader issue with oppressor-oppressed narratives in academia.

“There’s a certain group of academics inspired by post-modernism who see the whole world as jousting for power between different groups,” he said.

“And that’s turned into a sort of DEI [diversity, equity, and inclusion] philosophy, which is that groups should be arrayed in a hierarchy according to how oppressed they are, with the most oppressed on top, and that those people should be deferred to most,” he said.

“It also goes along with intersectionality, the view that different groups can have different kinds of oppression and that those people are even more oppressed,” Coyne said. “So this is the dominant theme in a lot of academia today, … [and] it is starting to affect the hard sciences.”

The professor cited a July 31 post on his blog, “Why Evolution is True,” about efforts at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand to use “decolonialist” and “feminist” methods to “decolonialize” the university.

He told The Fix that New Zealand is a kind of “ground zero” for the prioritization of indigenous beliefs over modern science.

Now, it’s being “pushed” by the National Academies, “a powerful, dominant organization in academia,” he said.

Coyne noted that most of the people on the committee were “not minorities or indigenous people at all, but they have decided that better make a gesture towards indigenous knowledge, because it’s almost considered sacred in a way.”

Coyne also mentioned how DEI efforts can hurt conversations about how science should be studied. He referred to his comments about the committee in a July 28 blog post:

“Perhaps it’s time to have a hard look at the ‘indigenous science versus modern science’ issue and lay out which ‘way of knowing’ is most important in doing things like fixing anthropogenic climate change or ameliorating epidemics of infectious disease. People avoid this discussion because it’s uncomfortable—indeed, the University of Auckland, after promising such a discussion, has avoided it for three years. But eventually it’s a discussion that must be had, and it helps nobody to pretend in the interim that all ‘ways of knowing’ are equal.”

National Academies suspends committee amid conflicts

Former committee co-chair Bonnie McCay said the suspension was a result of disagreements about the involvement of committee members and workshop participants. McCay is a retired professor of ecology at Rutgers University.

“The major issue in this case had nothing to do with research or even consensus,” she told The Fix in a recent email.

McCay said the committee was made up of scholars “from different expertise and experiences,” who worked to review research and “address questions that are posed in a statement of tasks.”

“The committee members wanted more involvement of workshop participants; because that would reflect the principle of co-production of knowledge, the focus of the study. The National Academy administrators wanted less, in order to uphold rules that minimize the input of interested parties to scientific studies. Big conflict,” she said.

The Fix also contacted committee members Kyle Whyte, Ronald Trosper, Robin Reid, Victoria Reyes-Garcia, Preston Dana Hardison, Heather Sauyaq Jean Gordon, Kristina Maria Guild Douglass, F. Stuart Chapin, and Gary Morishima by email.

The University of Michigan communications office responded that Whyte was “no longer accepting media requests for the foreseeable future” due to schedule conflicts. No other replies were received.

Whyte was removed from the committee on April 16, according to the academy.

Whyte previously told Science in a July 25 article that he received an email informing him that he was being removed after he and three other members called for it to be paused and refocused to give greater involvement to workshop participants.

The venue for a Feb. 8 committee workshop, Kewadin Casino in Michigan, was another source of contention, Science reported.

The casino is owned and operated by the Sault Tribe of Chippewa Indians, but academy leaders said it was not an appropriate setting for the event, according to the report.

MORE: UMinn policy would require researchers to get permission from indigenous tribes

IMAGE: Indigenous Climate Action/X

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