Decolonizing Geology
Here is a controversial topic.
“One of the existing traditions and legacies of colonialism is the renaming of geological features after Europeans.
This practice undermines indigenous contributions to human knowledge & rewards European Colonialism.
Returning to indigenous names is vital to Decolonising Geology.”
Discuss. — A Post Prompted in a Geomorphology Group
I don’t think it should be controversial if there’s honest accountability for what the colonization of names entailed. How often are overdue but sincere apologies controversial among people who are interested and willing to do the right thing?
Decolonizing the name of a place is often a step toward acknowledging the cultural genocide imposed on the people who originally live/d there considering how often erasure of a language and culture is tied to the negation and dehumanization of people.
On many nations, the names of places are sacred in that they often connect people to sense of purpose and cosmology — it’s not just the name of a person, it might be part of their creation story, or the language is a form of inductive reasoning once you learn the context to its words.
While Western Science is premised on process for discerning replicable truths mostly through deductive reasoning, several languages embed ways of knowing or looking at the context for existence into the meaning of their words — the language is often a direct device for inductive scientific reasoning, not just a means to deducting how things come to be, behave, or are.
I wish I knew enough Vietnamese etymology and linguistics to point to my own heritage but I can point people to consider Ojibwemowen which is one of the indigenous languages spoken where I live — gichigami tends to refer to “big water” or “fresh water sea” as I understand it and is suffixed to the name of our various Great Lakes. Linked you’ll see a map of the Great Lakes from an Ojibwe point of view — the map is East Facing in accord with their creation story.
Apparently Gaa-zhigaagowanzhigokaag (At the Place Abundant with Skunk-grass) describes what most of us now know as Chicago, IL; Gaa-zhigaagowanzhigokaag even in a simplified translation says a lot about the potential soil, ecology, and climate conditions in ways that Chicago, IL does not.
If we think about how invasive species disrupt an ecosystem from ecological point of view as analogous to colonizing names for places, there’s an apt parallel: the connections that often uphold a community in name, relationship, and refined experiences that become reliable truths over time are often severed.
The word for Autumn, Dagwaagan, has been translated by some as “the time for bending trees”
As I think of it: in many places throughout the NE United States, you can find bent trees that often served as major trail markers or sign posts pre and post colonization by native people.
Bend a tree in the spring and the growth spurts throughout the season can rupture part of the tree just like how tomatoes will burst with stretch marks when there’s too much rain after a drought. But in the fall, a tree is on its way to dormancy and the various growth hormones do not come into play until after the winter subsides into springtime. It’s reasonably the best time of year to bend a tree without risking great harm to it.
Granted these are a few examples gleaned by a non-native learner from an entire language — it’d be a logical fallacy to claim one word or name represents everything so do what you want if you feel the data is insufficient.
If I could dig up the Radiolab episode for an optical phenomenon (Zimulski effect? some Russian name) that Arctic indigenous people used as a way to gauge shifts in climate I’d link it here as an example also.
But on the whole, I think it’s important to consider decolonization as a process for recognizing and acknowledging that there’s intrinsic value and context for people and different epistemological methods beyond the Western approach.
I’ll add that decolonizing the sciences like Geology likely makes it easier to tackle abstract issues like Climate Change and even defending science-based guidance.
From a scientist’s point of view: Localizing contexts to different ways of validating certain realities that don’t require the kind of institutional resources climate and air quality data we normally use (which is still important).
But beyond that, the kind of social + public engagement necessary to connect, respect, and learn or reconcile different epistemological and cultural approaches is sorely needed.
In a society where we can hardly communicate basic public health, medical, and epidemiological scientific guidance for safety with residents (and government officials[!]) who are vulnerable to mis/dis-information and obfuscating rhetoric — consider the US President and much of his supporting base, not to mention low-income people or the MANY people living in places where fundamental education for scientific literacy and climate science are non-existent.
Navigation for most “wicked problems/processes/systems” like climate change or COVID-19 eventually boil down to cultural, social, and behavioral challenges — the scientists and other technical professionals tend to figure out the answer or at least good guidance earlier on than what the public (including the politicians who “represent” them) is willing and able to accept.
In large part it’s because most scientific findings are disseminated piecemeal and haphazardly with little guidance on how to process or embrace what it means and how dynamic the prescriptive approaches tend to be.
The information yielded is often imposed in ways that the public has no meaningful stake in aside from dependency on a small population of trained professionals and their institutions. Those institutions were never designed for public engagement — and the media has little to no incentive for accurate and precise scientific communication reporting when most results are really about “risks” and putting nuanced disclaimers for “statistical significance” [very important, but rarely to the media] and a call for “further research needed” to validate a study.
“Citizen”/”Community” Science initiatives like Project Budburst (phenology which potentially points to climate change — budburst.org for those who want to check it out; this is probably the best time of year to get involved if so!) provide a glimmer of hope and are a step in a positive direction. It can potentially scale out scientific inquiry and learning much faster than we’re used to seeing from academia.
But more often than not, the average participant tends to be used as a data funnel for scientists rather than being given the literacy and agency to shape actual experimentation or study at a local level.
Taking the deliberate path to decolonizing (and maybe even re-indigenizing) science eventually leads us to a more robust range of capabilities for addressing what we need so long as we’re willing to look at the skills embedded in the endeavor beyond the compatibility of expected outcomes and epistemic paradigms.
