Indigenous Science -- A Spiritual Path

Please join us for the latest lecture in the series “Indigenous Science A Spiritual Path” featuring Kim TallBear

 

Dr. Kim TallBear will deliver the lecture and speak about the Sacred and Dead Settler Ontologies. This presentation is part of the 2022 “Whisperings of the Land” Indigenous Speakers series, organized by the Faculty of Education, where Indigenous speakers share their perspectives on Indigenous science, and how all teaching and learning is spiritually imbued.

 

Talk Summary: Settler-colonial society works to separate so-called spirituality from the material. This worldview inhibits understanding Indigenous knowledges as knowledge based on centuries of observations and lived relations with other-than-humans. Instead, Indigenous peoples are viewed as “spiritual,” and the disciplines tend to implicitly denigrate Indigenous understandings of the world as beliefs rather than knowledges. The knowledge/belief divide stems from a hierarchy of life that the sciences share with major religious traditions. With this understanding of sentience and agency, some humans rank above others according to race or gender, for example, and humans rank above other life forms. More recently, “new materialists” and multi-species ethnographers have analyzed other-than-humans in less hierarchical and more “vibrant” or agential, if still secular terms. I bring such ideas into conversation with Indigenous ideas of being in good relation in ways that disrupt longstanding racial hierarchies of thought.