Thread by @KimTallBear

when we are told to simply trust SCIENCE---"LET THE SCIENCE SPEAK"--are we supposed to ignore that science has been built on the bodies of the marginalized with little regard for our agency & capacity to consent? are libs truly this ignorant of their colonial foundation?

BTW I don't take much time for people without a basic grasp of (settler) colonialism and the ongoing role of scientific practices within that. And who can't bother to read my twitter bio or click on a URL before asking and arguing super basic points that deny ongoing colonialism.

Native Studies 115: Indigenous Peoples and Technoscience students are reading this article. i assigned b/c it gives a quick overview of colonial science history & contemporary institutional inheritances, but it curiously downplays ongoing (US) empire. smithsonianmag.com/science-nature…

As such, the article downplays the insidious nature of ongoing colonial science in contemporary empire--that of the US. As i write my lecture I'll tweet thoughts about this article that relate to the point i made at the beginning of this thread re Covid-19 colonial science-speak.

I organize tweets around this article not b/c it's especially egregious or important. it's not. it's an easy-read popular article that demonstrates a typical multicultural argument to remedy historical colonialism while leaving too untouched ongoing empire & its colonial science.

This article focuses on postcolonial countries and possibilities for decolonized science after the fall of European empires. Curiously, it’s published in US empire-based Smithsonian magazine, yet it focuses only on the co-constitution of European empires and colonial science.

The world’s most militaristic and bullying empire (with science and technology at the centre of it) goes untreated in this analysis of western science, colonialism, and the exploitation of colonized people.

First, What does it mean to decolonize science? This article notes practices like collaborations becoming “more symmetrical” with developing country researchers being credited for their analytical work. They should not only serve as often un-cited) collaborators who collect data.

This article also proposes stopping “questionable clinical trials in the developing world where… ‘ethical oversight is minimal and desperate patients abound.’”

And it proposes that scientific institutions “discuss repatriating scientific specimens to former colonies, as botanists working on plants originally from Angola but held primarily in Europe have done.”

A robust definition of decolonization does not rest on concepts of equality or symmetry between “developing” and “developed.” It requires repatriation of colonized peoples’ “lands and life” (to cite Tuck and Yang). #LandBack #Repatriation jps.library.utoronto.ca/index.php/des/…

Repatriating what was stolen (not equity and inclusion, or symmetry) is decolonization. This can include repatriation of “specimens,” including remains of our ancestors and their cultural patrimony.

Decolonization also includes returning wealth built from the extraction of raw materials and Indigenous knowledge to feed the gluttonous empire.

Decolonization can mean stopping undermining the governance authorities of colonized people. Respecting their laws. Returning resources to build THEIR scientific research capacity and the building of their scientific institutions. What else might “repatriation of life” mean?

This article also worries about “extreme attempts” to “decolonize science.” It worries as did some respondents to my first tweet in this thread that too strong critiques of colonial science “play into the hands of religious fundamentalists and ultra-nationalists.”

I am regularly faced with tone-policing when I make anti-colonial critiques. I will not water down my anti-colonial critiques b/c of colonizer infighting (e.g. settler scientists or the liberal state v. settler fundamentalists, right wing conspiracy theorists, or anti-vaxxers).

If we soft-pedal anti-colonial critique, what that means is those who hold imperial power (the colonial and capitalistic US) are still setting the terms of debate and the way in which the colonized can speak back.

As explained in the Smithsonian article—it was viewed in earlier centuries as the white colonizers’ burden to “introduce modernity and civilized governance in the colonies.”

In light of that, tone policing anti-colonial critique as extreme does two things. First, it dresses up the old-school “white man’s burden” in multiculturalist veneer for the 21st century: “Be civil(ized), be moderate in your critique.”

Second, tone-policing slogans like “science must fall” (cited in the article) misses the point of this idea.

This article acknowledges the “gracious gifts [of science] from the European empires to the colonial world.” Despite the colonial doctrine of non-European inferiority, European colonizers nonetheless borrowed or stole from non-European traditions of inquiry.

But still it seems that the author's multiculturalism sees one true and universal science that speaks for nature? It’s just that the colonized had some of that too and it traveled to the empire.

The “science must fall” sloganeers shown in the video clip embedded in the Smithsonian article (tweeted again here) don’t exactly agree, I think. There is a lot to unpack in and beyond the video clip, but… smithsonianmag.com/science-nature…

…The anti-colonial assumption undergirding their call is that there are multiple legitimate methodological and ethical avenues to doing rigorous inquiry that derive from out of different worldviews, lands, waters, and languages.

Slogans like “science must fall” do not IME demand the end of systematic inquiry. It’s convenient for empire-based scientific thinkers to insist that “irrational” anti-systematic inquiry positions are being taken b/c they need not entertain anti-colonial critique as legitimate.

For those who haven’t listened enough to understand, let me clarify: “science must fall” demands that colonial denigration stop. It demands space for ethical and anti-colonial forms of inquiry that are indeed NOT colonial science.

knowing such conversations well as I watch the “science must fall” video clip, I hear the Cape Town students calling for the fall of the hegemony of colonizer science. They are calling for a halt to the racist marginalization of non-colonizer traditions of inquiry.

Such knowledge traditions were viciously suppressed by colonial powers. “Science must fall” centres traditions of inquiry that may be non-capitalist, non-masculinist, not produced according to im/material or human v. nonhuman binaries, etc. Many key differences could be cited.

In my own work, I see US- and Canadian-based Indigenous scientists bringing Indigenous-centred research questions, ethics, and methods into their “western” science laboratories too. I see them working hard to figure out if it is possible to decolonize science in such settings.

Or are they simply “Indigenizing”? Or simply doing “equity and inclusion”? The jury is still out on what is possible, but anti-colonial scientists will figure the scope of possibility.

The Smithsonian article also explains that “New technologies were also put to use expanding and consolidating the [European] empire[s]. They cite photography and steamboats that helped create racial stereotypes and explore Africa.

“Europe’s leaps in science and technology during this period [of empire consolidation] both drove and were driven by its political and economic domination of the rest of the world.”

How does the production of social and material technologies to address the Covid-19 pandemic help consolidate US empire?

Ongoing Eurocentric hierarchies that were used to build the empire in which a select few humans dominate everyone else and the planet helped produce Covid-19 as a virus that entered human populations.

Those same Eurocentric hierarchies inform societal responses to Covid-19 and thus who suffers disproportionately from disease and who dies earlier.

US empire pandemic policy and biomedical interventions also involve yet more colonialism to address a disease produced by colonialism and capitalist extraction.

Consider something more straightforward that others have written about at length: the US capitalistic empire (and other wealthy countries) manipulation of vaccine production and the pharmaceutical market. Which will result in even more wealth for those who run the empire.

It’s hard to understand how the author of the Smithsonian article can write “The empires may have virtually disappeared, but the cultural biases and disadvantages they imposed have not.”

True, I regularly encounter at conferences, in media, on social media the “culturally biased” idea that Indigenous knowledges are “myth” and are diametrically opposed to scientific “facts.” This by people who often haven’t spent any meaningful time in Indigenous community.

On the supposed disappearance of empire though, I feel like I’m back in my Postcolonial Studies seminar in grad school in California. Where Indigenous peoples in lands now occupied by California and the USA, and ongoing colonialism were simply absent from our syllabus.

Okay, that is way more information then I’ll deliver in my 20 min. lecture. Now to figure out how to stimulate students’ critical questioning of this material and the more academic history article on colonial plant science that they are reading.