Weaving Indigenous Science into Ecological Sciences: Culturally Grounding Our Indigenous Scholarship

摘要

Indigenous peoples are the original stewards of their native and ancestral lands, having maintained the balances of their ecosystems since time immemorial. However, as a result of colonization, imperialism, and the mass genocide of Indigenous peoples, environmental systems have been drastically changed. Since Western ideologies such as capitalism and Western science were introduced, Indigenous stewards and their knowledge systems have been invalidated and often ignored in environmental and ecological discourse. Their complex nature-culture nexus has been dismissed and suppressed, and European men have been given the credit for their discoveries and nuances in environmental and ecological discourse (Wildcat 2009). For instance, James Cook is considered the pioneer of oceanography and navigation, and Gifford Pinchot is considered the father of forestry.