Science Friday - Indigenous Astronomy, Auroras, Inclusive Science. Dec 25, 2020, Part 2

Episode Date: December 25, 2020

Nature’s Own Holiday Light Show The spectacular glowing green of the Northern Lights is caused by charged particles from the solar wind interacting with gas molecules, atoms, and ions in the atmosphere. Protons and electrons streaming from the sun follow the Earth’s magnetic field lines, accelerating down towards the poles. The aurora process is similar to a neon sign—the charged particles excite atmospheric gas, causing it to emit light.  Don Hampton, research associate professor in the Geophysical Institute of the University of Alaska in Fairbanks, explains how the aurora borealis forms, what accounts for its typical green glow, and offers tips for snapping a photo of the lights should you be lucky enough to catch a glimpse of this astronomical light show.   Relearning The Star Stories Of Indigenous People In 2012, the Obama administration projected that the United States would need to add an additional 1 million college graduates in STEM fields per year for the next ten years to keep up with projected growth in the need for science and technology expertise. At the same time, though, native Americans and other Indigenous groups are underrepresented in the sciences, making up only 0.2% of the STEM workforce in 2014, despite being 2% of the total population of the United States. Why are Indigenous people still underrepresented in science? Ira speaks with astrophysicist Annette Lee and anthropologist Kim TallBear about the historical role of science and observation in Indigenous communities, and how Western scientific culture can leave out other voices. They also discuss the solutions: What does an inclusive scientific enterprise look like, and how could we get there? Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

This is Science Friday. I'm Iroflato. Wishing a Merry Christmas to those of you celebrating. The winter holidays are a time for colorful lights. And if you live in the northern latitudes, you may have been treated to nature's own light show. I'm talking about the Aurora Borealis, never having seen the northern lights myself. Perhaps now I'll get to see the glowing green in the sky, normally found closer to the poles. They've been spotted as far south as Michigan, and Ohio. Syphreis Charles Berkwist has more. The Aurora forms when streams of charged particles from the solar wind interact with gases in our upper atmosphere. It works sort of like a neon sign. The charged particles excite the gas, making it emit light. Don Hapton is a research associate

professor in the Geophysical Institute of the University of Alaska in Fairbanks. He studies the Aurora, including by firing rockets up into it. Welcome to Science Friday. Good morning. So people say charged particles hitting gases. What sort of particles are we talking about and what sort of gases? The solar wind is primarily electrons and protons because the sun is mostly just hydrogen. And so when you break those apart, that's what you get. Those are sort of captured in our Earth's magnetic field.

And so the particles that create the light that we see typically with the aurora are primarily electrons that are accelerated down by electric fields and the magnetosphere come down and, as you say, bump into the upper atmospheric gas molecules and atoms and create the light. And generally it's a sort of greenish glow, but there are different colors too. What makes the difference in colors? Is it a difference in the particles or a difference in the gases that it's hitting? It's a difference in the gases that it's emitting. So as you mentioned, it's somewhat similar to a neon sign. Basically, that's the same sort of process that happens in a neon lamp. You basically

drive electrons across a gas and a tube like that. And the different gases have different configurations of their electrons and their orbitals in the outer shell, and those differences create the different colors because the jump between the different shells is of a certain energy, and that's a certain color of light. I would think that if it were like a mix of gases, you'd be getting a whole bunch of different colors all coming at once? Well, it turns out the different colors are more efficient or less efficient. So the green one is very efficient.

It's an easy one to produce an atomic oxygen. And that's different oxygen that we have down here. Our oxygen we breathe is 02, which is molecular, but because the sun ultraviolet at the upper atmospheres can break across the oxygen, you get a lot of atomic oxygen at these altitudes, about 110 kilometers and higher. And so it's very efficient to create that green. So it's the single sort of brightest emission in the visible that we can see all the time. So, yeah, if you take a picture, that's primarily what you're going to see.

But if you look carefully, you'll see that there are some other colors in there, and especially if you take like a spectrograph, like, you know, basically a prism and break it out into its individual colors. You'll see that there's a whole spectrum in there. And you get not only the oxygen, and there are a couple of different oxygen emissions as well. But because there's a lot of nitrogen up there, you often get nitrogen emissions. If you see that sort of pinkish-reddish lower border, that's actually nitrogen emissions, combination of some neutral and some ionized nitrogen.

And then there's some more exotic things. Sometimes there's atomic nitrogen and then there's some O-plus emissions, atomic oxygen and ion emissions. And that sort of thing. So, yeah, if you take a spectrograph, you can actually see several colors in there. But green is just the most prominent one because it's the most efficient one to produce. And so if we do see a patch that's predominantly, say, the pinkish color, does that mean, oh, it's more nitrogen-rich than somewhere else? Or just that is what happened to get stimulated at that moment?

Well, that's a great question, because the ratio of these different emissions actually tell us the energetics of those particles coming down. Because the atmosphere is somewhat layered. The oxygen is predominant at higher altitudes, and the nitrogen becomes more. predominant like it is down here on the troposphere at lower altitudes, that means if we've seen more nitrogen emissions, that means probably those particles are more energetic. In fact, we've got sort of a recipe for being able to figure that out. So if we can take images or use a spectrograph to look at the ratio of the colors, we can actually sort of tell from the ground what the energy

of those particles is coming down, at least to rough order. Why does it look sort of wispy like clouds? It's not an overall glowing background. There's lines and streaks and shapes. That's right. Yeah, there's a lot of morphology. And that's kind of the $64 question is why do we get the morphology and the dynamics that we're getting? It has a lot to do with processes that happen in magnetosphere. The region that will accelerate the particles to come down and create the aurora are sort of localized based on the shape of the magnetosphere.

Are changes to that shape, why sometimes be? people are able to see it far south of the poles? That's right. So the solar wind not only has these charged particles, but it also brings along with it a magnetic field because they're charged particles. They've got currents flowing around. You get magnetic fields. And then you also, because it's basically a gas as well, it has pressure.

And that pressure bumps into our magnetic field of the earth. This whole region is called a magnetosphere. And it'll actually make that magnetosphere ring or it'll actually compress it or turn it more into a teardrop shape. And as those processes happen, that changes the configuration in the magnetosphere. And so that will change where the aurora is happening in any one place. And it also sort of changed the actual specific arcs and patches that you see in the aurora. So in recent weeks, when we've been seeing reports of it as far south as Michigan, Ohio, what does that tell us about the current state of what's going on in space? That means that the solar wind is, is going

gotten much more energetic. The latitude of the aurora that you see has sort of direct response to that sort of total energy in the solar wind at that time. So the sun goes through an 11-year cycle and during sort of the solar minimum, we call it, there are fewer sunspots and it seems to be more sort of stable. The solar wind comes out at sort of a standard speed and you get some aurora, but you don't get quite as big as the storms. During solar maximum, we get all these sunspots, they can sort of, instead of having the solar wind come out at a regular speed, sometimes these sunspots will sort of produce these bubbles of charged particles that sort of build up and then they come out as a big burst,

and that's called a coronal mass ejection. When that happens, you get a much denser and maybe a faster stream of particles in the solar wind. And when that happens to bump into Earth's magnetic field, that's when you get these very large storms. And all that energy goes into sort of expanding that, rural oval and making a much more impactful storm on Earth's upper atmosphere. It seems to me like it would take a lot of energy to get the sky glowing, so to speak. Is there any kind of analogy that we can use for human-scale energy that we would know how much energy that is?

Sure. If you go and look at the NOAA website, there's a space environment center there, and they actually have a sort of a real-time estimate of how much energy is being sort of dumped in the polar region. And it's in terms of gigawatts. And that sounds like a lot, but you have to remember that's gigawatts over an area, you know, the size of the pole, which is a very large area. So the power density is pretty low. But it still is a lot of energy going on? Is it possible to make an artificial aurora?

If I put up a powerful enough radio transmitter or dropped a microwave oven out of the back of an airplane, could I achieve this? Yeah, you can do it a couple of ways. There have been some of the sounding rocket experiments have actually put on board, basically a particle accelerator or a way to produce these high-energy electrons and then looked with sensitive cameras to see if they could see the particles

both on one side or the other side of the magnetic field. And we're successful in doing that. A couple other ways you can do that. There are some ionosphere heating projects where they take basically high-power radios on the ground and try to sort of match a resonant frequency in the ionosphere. When you do that, you get enough energy in the electrons locally

they can sort of bump into the atmospheric constituents, sort of like an aurora, and produce some glow as well. We also do a sort of chemical tracer experiments sometimes, and that's to look at some of the electric fields, and also some of the motion of the neutral particles, which is kind of hard to do from the ground. That's typically a chemical called trimetral aluminum or sometimes things called barium and strontium, which sort of have resonant emissions in the sun. And you put those up and watch how they move around, and that gives you an indication of what's

one on the upper atmosphere. What other things are you interested in learning through the rocket experiments or other parts of your work about the Aurora? There's the basic science question. If you took anything or if you took any point in our solar system, you would basically drop into a thing that's called plasma, which is basically a gas with a significant number of charged particles. It's very few places in the solar system that are not plasma.

And that one place is basically the surface of the earth. So most of the universe, in fact, is actually plasma. So what we're trying to do with auroral research is it's sort of a cheap way to be able to observe plasma in its sort of natural environment. So there's sort of the basic just research question about that as well. But also these large solar storms we talked about earlier, they produce a layer in our upper atmosphere of variation in the ionization and the ionosphere. That can really wreak havoc if you're trying to communicate with satellites or you're trying to figure. out your position with a GPS receiver because those changes and the density of those charged particles changes the radio transmission through that medium.

So here on Earth we've got a certain mix of gases in the atmosphere and a certain shape to our magnetic field. Do other planets have this? If I were standing on Venus or Mars, would I be able to see something like an aurora? Absolutely. Well, Jupiter and Saturn have Aurora quite often. And in fact, some of my colleagues here at the GI are studying the effects of the solar wind on Jupiter and how it causes the aurora as well.

So what you need to create an aurora basically is a magnetic field because you have to have the magnetic field to sort of capture and then redirect those particles, sort of accelerate them down into your atmosphere. And then you have to have an atmosphere. So a planet like Mercury has neither a – didn't have a very strong magnetic field and it has really no atmosphere. So you'd have to have a really sensitive camera to see the aurora there, plus you're right next to the sun. And Mars, they've seen some evidence of some accelerating particles hitting the upper atmosphere and causing what it looks like an aurora. But again, there's a very,

very weak field there. But no, so if you've got a strong magnetic field in an atmosphere, you're probably going to see Aurora if you've got a solar wind going by. Interesting. So on a practical level, you see these amazing pictures of the northern lights, but my night sky pictures never look anything near as good as the pros. Are there any tips for snapping a photo of the Aurora? Should you be lucky enough to see one? Sure. So the best thing is a stable platform.

I mean, you know, most of us, that would be a tripod. But even if you can just sort of lean it up against the wall or on top of your car or something like that. And then you need to put your camera in a manual mode and be able to set a two to four second kind of time exposure. and then it just comes down to art history, you know, just find a nice thing in the front and give it a try. So my rough rule of thumb for taking pictures is if you have your ISO, you know what that is, that's the sensitivity of the camera, and your exposure time in seconds,

if you multiply those together, if you come up with about 10,000, that's a good starting point that you can sort of adjust from there. Don Hampton is a research associate professor in the Geophysical Institute of the University of Alaska and Fairbanks. Thanks for being with me today. Absolutely. You're quite welcome. You can see a video of his research and action up on our website at ScienceFriday.com slash Aurora.

For Science Friday, I'm Charles Berkwist. When we come back, more stories from the sky, indigenous astronomy, and how we can all help build a more inclusive science. Stay with us. Hey there, folks. It goes without saying this has been a challenging year, no. And if there's one thing we know for sure, is that the need for fact-based journalism and the need for science are stronger than ever.

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Go to sciencefriiday.com slash give. That's sciencefriiday.com slash give. Thank you. and stay safe. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. Merry Christmas to those of you celebrating and a holiday program note next Friday, New Year's Day, we'll be bringing you our annual look at the Audubon Christmas bird count. Paragans are crazy fast birds. And so that to me was just something that was just so exciting that this bird could fly, you know, over 100 miles an hour. Just crazy. So give the birders in your life a present. Tell them to grab some hot chocolate and tune in. For the rest of the hour, we're opening up the SciFri Archives for a tour of indigenous science. When you look up into the night sky, you see all those constellations.

Weren't you taught as a child what the stories behind them were? Andromeda, chained to a rock. Percy is staring down a sea monster. Hercules, slaying a lion. But even as the Greeks and the Romans look to the stars and told stories about them. So did indigenous people around the world. In North America, communities, the stars hold bears, sweatlages, thunderbirds, and more. And some of those stories are also part of how indigenous people made sense of the world around them, a kind of science separate from, but with similarities to the scientific enterprise built by Europeans. So is there a way to connect the two? Well, in Canada, science museums and indigenous educators are using star stories as a bridge.

Science writer producer Christy Taylor went to Canada to get the story, starting on the shore of Lake Winnipeg in rural Manitoba. You're coming out. It's a freezing cold night in Manitoba, and we are waiting for the stars. It's early May, but I'm wearing three sweaters, and I'm huddled next to a campfire, listening to a man named Wilford Buck, tell us stories behind concentration. that I've never heard of until tonight. And that's called Baguungizek, the hole in the sky. And the hole in the sky is they say is where we come from. Wilfred is Cree, from one of Canada's largest First Nations groups, and he's telling us stories from indigenous communities across Manitoba.

He calls this tipis and telescopes. It's a coming together of far-flung indigenous teachers, community leaders, local youth, and one science reporter from the United States, me. It's a weekend of stories, ceremony, and astronomy. Tell us more about Mars.

Wilfred is telling star stories, but also tales of science. Take the peculiar path Mars takes through the night sky, because the Earth orbits the Sun faster than Mars does. When it does that, it looks like Mars does a circle in the sky, then continues his journey. Retrograde motion, so they call it

Ketan Pompano. It circles back. And another name they have for it is Musa-At-Sach, It's a moose spirit. Because what happens is when a moose is startled, it'll run and it'll run in a big huge circle. Then it'll come back, then it'll continue his journey. Three days and 2,000 miles later, I'm in Ottawa at the Canada Science and Technology Museum.

We have here then the wall called One Sky, Many Astronomies, five different languages here, French, the Ajibwe, and Dakota Lakota and the Cree languages. David Pantelone, curator of physical sciences, is showing me around. Here, you can hear more star stories told by Wilfred and other indigenous elders through headsets. This time, they're part of the space exhibit, alongside a hundred-year-old refracting telescope and displays about radio astronomy. The constellations themselves are painted gorgeously on one wall,

moons, fissures, thunderbirds, and the hole in the sky where we come from. And here's a question David gets sometimes. What is a series of star stories doing in a museum devoted to technology and science? People are surprised, but then it makes sense. Oh, of course. Cultures would have different constellations and different stories and different worldview based on this massive canopy from horizon to horizon every night that unfolds before our eyes. Because a story about how Mars circles around in the sky like a startled moose is an instrument.

instrument of astronomical observation, just like the telescope that also sits in this museum. In 2008, Canada began a major effort to right the wrongs of colonization, recognize the rights of indigenous groups, and shape a new relationship of respect and partnership, a process referred to broadly as truth and reconciliation. At the museum, this took the shape of a conscious effort to include indigenous culture and technology in the story of Canadian science. So as much as there's this idea that's embedded, in the identity of science itself, that science is all rational, science is immune from culture, that that's simply not true.

The museum was so serious about getting the details right that they brought in Lakota astronomer Annette Lee as a co-curator. Science itself actually is not separate from culture. It came from culture. And it came from a specific culture, and that's Western European. What Annette means is that our very picture of what science is has been shaped by Western European history and the biases of that culture. But science is also something anyone can do, and Annette says everyone has done it. Just closely observe the world, organize and test what you learn, and transmit it to future generations. That indigenous cultures have done so without test tubes doesn't make them unscientific, she says, just different. On the day I visit the museum, a group of students from nearby Gloucester High School is there.

They're all indigenous. Tonchi joined Hendrixe Dishanakshu and Riviera. Hello, I'm Jordan, I'm Méti from Red River Nation. I use Laylam pronouns because I'm two-spirited. Hi, my name is Jesse. I'm from Northwest Angle 37, and I'm Bear Clan.

At the museum, they explore the constellations as newcomers. They rotate the images of the sky to see the stars overhead on the day and the time they were born. A turtle, a spider, a thunderbird, and a marauding bear named Mista Mosqua. One student, Jesse, tells me the stories she's reading on the walls

aren't ones she ever learned growing up. I'm 18 and I'm learning this now, and I still don't know anything about it. I feel like I know more about, what is it, Greek or Roman, that they're constellations than I do my own. Buford says Jesse's experience is common. It's actually a direct fallout from the ways in which colonizing Europeans killed indigenous people

and weakened their ties to their culture. In more than 14 years of collecting star stories in Manitoba, Wilfred's only found two dozen. Every visible star in that sky had a name, had a story, had a sacred story attached to it. And due to the historical trauma of our people, we lost anywhere from 75 to 85% of that knowledge. At the museum, none of the students, all 17 and 18 and thinking about the future, thought they wanted to be scientists. And I'm talking about nerds. I'm talking about students who said that they loved learning about botany, medicine, engineering, or even designed whole science curriculums for kids at summer camps.

Jessie and her classmates are exactly the kinds of students you would want pursuing STEM degrees. And yet, I don't want to do Western science. I don't have to write everything down all the time because it's the most annoying thing and I'm not good at writing everything down. I keep it in my head because that's how, like, it's in my blood to do that, you know? In 2012, the Obama administration set a goal of increasing STEM college graduates by one million to meet growing need in the next decade. But how do you recruit that many young scientists?

And how do you invite everyone, like Jesse, who feels left out? In Canada, David Pantelone, the museum curator, says, broadening the image of science and who does it is a first step. Give credit to more non-Western scientists, both past and present, and look beyond the stereotypes of lab coats, test tubes, and particle accelerators. When you find out what science really is, you know, observing, making, doing, asking good questions, sharing with people, being embarrassed about not knowing something, failing.

And you even hear that, like you hear that from kids and you hear that from Nobel Prize winners. For both Annette and Wilfred, bringing star stories to the mainstream halls of Canadian Science Museums isn't just about sharing indigenous knowledge with Western visitors. or even about expanding the vision of what science is. It's also about the future of indigenous communities,

still recovering from the damages of colonization. In both Canada and the U.S., indigenous youth have the highest suicide rate of any other racial or ethnic group. Indigenous communities have also been hit hard by the opioid epidemic, and young indigenous people also have high rates of homelessness. Literally and figuratively, Annette says, youth are leaving. There's a lack of hope. That's part of what the start.

Our knowledge brings this sense of purpose, this lifeline that each person is connected to the bigger whole, the universe, right? The stars. So Ken's stories about the stars bring broken communities back together. For Wilford, that connection to his history was a key part of his thriving. As a teenager, his family scattered by poverty, he was homeless on the streets of Vancouver. Until, Cree elders invited him and other youth to come back to Manfred. Manitoba to learn about their culture. I found a piece that was missing in my life.

I found something that made sense to me. I found something that was ours, was in New York, was Cree. And it was a sacred thing. And it was a powerful thing. It was a journey that led him ultimately to the stars. In New York, I'm Christy Taylor. And you can see the Cree Ojibway and Dakota Lakota Star Maps and hear more of Wilfred.

stories on our website at Science Friday.com slash stories. We want to talk more about indigenous knowledge, science, and culture. And to begin that conversation, let me introduce two guests. Dr. Annette Lee, who you just heard in that piece, Associate Professor of Astronomy at St. Cloud State University in Minnesota. She describes herself as mixed-race Lakota. Dr. Lee is director of the Native Skywatchers research program. Welcome to Science Friday, Dr. Lee. Hello, Matakuasen. I'm here. Thanks, Ira. I'm happy to be here. Thank you. Thank you for coming. Dr. Kim Tallbear, an associate professor and Canada Research Chair of Indigenous Peoples, techno science, and the environment at the University of Alberta in Edmonton. She was also a citizen

of Sissotan-Wapiton-O-Y-Tayte. Welcome to Science Friday. Hi, nice to be here. Let me begin with a submission we have from one of our listeners who herself is an indigenous scientist. I always get a bit frustrated when I hear definitions of science that exclude indigenous knowledge and native ways of knowing and understanding the universe. I'm an indigenous scientist, and I value empiricism, experimentation, data, observation, and objectivity just as much as my non-Indigenous colleagues. However, as an indigenous scientist, I never forget about the importance of spirit, dreams, visions, and intuition as tools for attaining scientific knowledge.

To be clear, I don't think that Western scientists are somehow above all of this. I just think that they're not as likely to admit that Native ways of knowing are just as valid as the methodologies they've been taught through a Western worldview. Thanks to Linda, an ethnobotanist from the Mill Lacks Band of Ojibway for her submission. That was on our Science Friday Vox Pop app. Nice. Yeah, Linda just referred to the indigenous, quote, indigenous ways of knowing. What are these in that? Well, indigenous ways of knowing are different in Western science in a few ways I can point to.

One is that we have four parts of being human. What does being human mean? So in a native way of knowing, we have our bodies, our minds, our hearts, our spirits. Our bodies, our minds, our hearts, our spirits. And in Western science, it's really very much focused on just the body and the mind. And that's where it stops.

It leaves out the other half, the spirit and the heart. Another way that's indigenous knowledge is different is that there's a very deeply embedded idea that we are related to all living, things, that all living things have spirit and we are all related. This includes things in nature, trees, rocks, stars, and people, animals, right? And I would say the third thing I could point to is that in indigenous ways of knowing there's a strong concept that we can practice logical thinking, observation, measurement, prediction, but there's always a space for the mysterious,

the unknown. That's a part of it. I'm Ira Flater. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. Talking with Dr. Annette Lee and Dr. Kim Tallbear about indigenous ways of knowing. Annette, when you say that science is inseparable from culture, what are some of the places where culture is affecting how we do science? Well, I would just look at many examples. I mean, we could look at historical examples like when we used to think that the Earth was the center of the universe, right? And everything that happened with Galileo, how he was put on trial and thrown out and restricted to not do

any more research, people like Bruno were burned at the stake for believing that stars had planets going around them. So this idea that science is embedded with culture and beliefs that are strong, at whatever particular time. Now, our society today is full of technology and science. And so we are just saying, instead of just looking at science that comes out of one particular culture, Western European culture, that's very good and very strong, and we can do a lot of incredible things.

We can send people to the moon. We can send spacecraft to Mars. We can use the Hubble to look back 13,000, billion years in time, right? We love this kind of science. But what we're simply saying is that there, that just comes, it has grown out of one culture and that there are many other cultures that are part of this planet and that those cultures have also done science. And so we need to widen what we mean by science. And, you know, if you think about the definition of, let's say, physics. It originally meant the philosophy of nature, this relationship with nature. Why can't all

cultures have a way of having a relationship with nature, right? And contributing to the conversation, contributing to the body of knowledge. So that's simply what we're saying, that there's engineering, there's technology, this ingenuity. How many people alive today could make a means of a transportation, for example, a canoe out of a birch bark tree completely, or make their home out of a buffalo, right? There's so many examples where indigenous cultures have made contributions, but with our history of colonization, somehow we just got trapped, we got stuck on one way, one particular culture's way of doing science. And, Now it's time to widen that definition to let other cultural contributions join our human resources.

Interesting, interesting aspect. Yeah, and we do have, as you mentioned, we certainly have precedent with the history of science about how our cultures have influenced the progression of science. We're going to take a short break and come back and talk lots more about indigenous science. Maybe you are part of that movement. that is interested in indigenous science. We'll take a break and come right back. Stay with us.

This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. We're talking this hour about science and specifically how science can be more welcoming to indigenous people and cultures that have been building other systems of knowing for thousands of years. With my guests, Dr. Annette Lee,

Associate Professor of Astronomy at St. Cloud State University in Minnesota. She's also mixed-race Lakota. Dr. Kim Tallbear, an associate professor and Canada Research Chair of Indigenous People's Technoscience and the Environment at the University of Alberta in Edmonton. Let me begin with you, Dr. Tolbert. You come from anthropology. How do you point that lens at the culture of science itself?

Because, you know, I'm listening to these stories being told, and they have sort of a familiar ring that I've heard in other cultures before. Like the Chinese and herbal medicine and all kinds of things that used to be denigrated. years ago, now we're taking other looks at them? Well, I'm an anthropologist of science, and I wrote a book called Native American DNA, Tribal Belonging and the False Promise of Genetic Science. So I study as an anthropologist, genome scientists, who are largely, have been straight white men. So I'm not really looking in my anthropology at indigenous cultural practices around science, although certainly I have had to look at that as I examine the culture of genome science. So, you know, I can sort of address both of those issues, but definitely my lens is focused on looking at the cultural biases, quote-unquote, of Western science.

So I can give you a couple examples of that, if you like. Absolutely. So one of the things that I learned in spending so much time with genome scientists, and particularly those who look at human migrations, they're really obsessed with the Bering Strait. They're obsessed with that particular geographical trajectory into the Americas. They're obsessed and shaped by, I would say, an immigration narrative. We often hear this inappropriate, overly generalized claim that we in the U.S. are a nation of immigrants. Well, of course, that's not completely true.

It forgets indigenous people and it forgets enslaved people who were forced to come here. So that's one bias that I think is shaping their overattention onto migration narratives versus, say, looking at trade routes and other kinds of travel routes within the Americas that indigenous people undertook because they were trading with one another and relating with one another. but non-native genome scientists have been overly interested in how people got here from the quote-unquote old world. And that terminology, old world versus new world, that's a biased terminology. Old to who? New to whom, right? The other way is they assume a certain set of ethics that are not universal ethics. So, for example, in Western bioethical practices, the bodies of our ancestors, dead bodies, human remains, are not considered human subjects.

They're not subject to human subject ethical guidelines. But in our indigenous cultures, there's still a sense of a vibrancy or a life force. And so we have a different ethical relationship to our ancestors remains. There's more of a sense of they're still with us. Their presence is still with us and vibrant and must be respected. That kind of worldview is not written into the federal bioethical guidelines in terms of the way that genome science gets done. And then there's also these kinds of, all of these ethics are what I would call biased,

value choices, and there are a focus on some narratives and not others, some histories and not others, some worldviews, and not others. Let's see if we can get a question in from Florida. Lolita. Hi, welcome to Science Friday. Hi, hello. Go ahead. I was listening and I'm hearing all the great steps Canada is taken towards incorporating

indigenous people into science and just to, I guess, get students involved. but I wanted to know if the U.S. has taken any steps or have they tried to incorporate it in schools because I felt like my education was very Eurocentric, and everything that I know outside of what was taught in school is pretty much what I looked up on my own, as far as history and science is concerned for groups of people that you don't see in your textbook going to school. Good question. Annette, Kim, would you like to respond? Sure. I would say we're trying. Canada's definitely taking a leadership role in this effort. But in the U.S., for example, I started a revitalization effort called Native Skywatchers back in 2007.

And so we basically started the idea of like, we've lost a lot, but we haven't lost everything. So let's start with our own communities and remember the star knowledge, Ojibwe and Lakota Dakota. And so we began to talk to elders. We began to make resources. So we made the star maps, Ojibwe Gisikanang Masanagan, right? We now have four star maps, three indigenous. and then the Greek Star Map. We have workshops, Native Skywetters,

teacher and community workshops. So we've created workbooks and lesson plans. So you could even go to the website or come to a workshop. I think that this is one example, and there are many examples, that people are trying, like grassroots efforts. But we definitely need help.

We need allies. We need support. We need funding. So please join, join in and help us out however you can. When we talk about the drastic underrepresentation of indigenous people in STEM careers, I mean, indigenous people make up something like 0.2%. What do you think the source of this is, Kim? You know, I think there's a couple of reasons.

I think the first obvious reason is genocide. I mean, we saw 90% or more reduction of the number of the number of. people that we have. So when we're looking at the fact that we're two percent tops of the population of Americans, that makes sense that there's very few of us in science. The other thing is we, like other people of color, other poor people, are tracked away from STEM fields in early on in school. And I think that is also related to the fact that there are a lot of Native people who are living in rural areas or if they're urban, they're living in poorer school districts. and there is a dearth of lab facilities, math and science education in those schools.

We know in the U.S. that we have a shortage of math and science teachers, and I think that's particularly problematic in rural areas and other poor school districts. So there's a lot of factors coming together that are both about race and class intersecting. Annette? Sure, so there was a big report done back in 2012 that studied this question. They came up with three main barriers, and the first one was mathematics as a barrier to go into STEM. The second one was uninspiring introductory STEM courses. What does that mean?

What does that mean? That means lecture-based memorization and fact-based courses, mostly, you know, PowerPoints with maybe a few demos sprinkled in. This is the old style of learning. So the third barrier, why we have a national crisis in STEM right now, we do not have enough young people in general going into STEM careers is unwelcoming environments, unwelcoming atmospheres in the departments. And this was particularly bad for females, so for women, and for people of color.

Interesting. Let's go to the phones. Lots of people would like to talk about this. Michael in North Carolina. Hi, Michael. Hi, I'm glad I made it. I've got to go into work. But I'm Cherokees from North Carolina, and I was always interested in the subject,

but what really sparked my intuition on the whole thing and even taught me a few things about how I am myself, I read a book by Gregory Cahante, and it's book Native Science, and it's a real eye-opener to our culture in how we view in a science. its type way with cosmology and a lot of things. But I just wanted to put it out there. That's a really good book to learn on. All right.

Agreed. Thanks. Thanks for that tip. Annette, we can talk about why science feels like it's leaving indigenous people who might otherwise be interested in becoming scientists. But also, is science losing out important perspective when it does this? What are we losing? Exactly. I think there's a couple issues here we can speak to. One is simply fairness. And we've kind of talked about this before. Like stem jobs are often higher paying jobs by quite a bit. So why should only certain segments of the population have those opportunities to even consider doing a higher paying career STEM type job? The second big reason is demographics. So you're probably aware of this. But the United States is quickly becoming more.

and more of a brown nation, right? So some, by some predictions, by 2040, 24, we will be a majority, minority society, right? So we can't afford to leave out so many of our people in science. What's going to happen? We will not be able to be at the leading edge of research and development if we just don't have enough of our numbers, our population going into the sciences. So I think increasingly this idea of diversity is it's going to be more and more on the forefront as our nation is becoming increasingly populated with people of color, right? And I think the third reason why this is relevant here, the idea of including everyone, especially indigenous people, especially people of color, everyone in science, is because the idea of science itself, like how well can we really

solve and tackle the really hard problems of today, climate change, the idea of colonizing Mars, the idea of engineering the genes and babies, right, the idea of artificial intelligence and jobs changing, right? All of these ideas are difficult problems, just to name a few. How are we going to tackle those problems if we are limited to one way of thinking? One cultural perspective. You know, Ira, I'd like to offer this simple analogy. Think back on the electromagnetic spectrum. And we know that our eyes are tuned to see the visible spectrum, right?

The colors red through violet, the rainbow of optical wavelengths. What if we never had known about or discovered or allowed the other wavelengths of light, infrared, ultraviolet, gamma rays, right? all of that to be a part of our knowledge base, how much will we be missing out on? Do you see what I'm saying? Yeah, I see that. And that's a very interesting point because you never know where a new idea is going to come from. Exactly.

You know, and bringing other cultures, other ideas, I cannot see a reason not to do that. Let me just remind everybody that I'm Ira Flato. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. And we actually asked some of our listeners to tell us how they define science on our Science Friday Vox Pop app. And here's some of what they had to say. My personal understanding of science is a rational approach to acquiring and re-evaluating knowledge. Science is a response to the human experience of wonder. I define science as investigating your curiosity by using the scientific method.

to prove or disprove your expectations. Science comes from the Latin word C-O-S-C-I-O, which means to know, knowledge, or to learn. Kim, what do you think of those definitions? I think about science in a couple of ways. We can go with those definitions, which I think are focused on the literal interpretation of scientific method. So that's what I would call little less science.

but because I'm an anthropologist of science, because I study the culture of science and the politics of it, I think a lot about big-ass science, which is a science tightly wed to capitalism and colonialism historically and settler colonialism in the Americas. So the scientific method, rational knowledge production, as I think one of the previous quotes said, is part of that, but that's not all that it is. And so I look at the role that science has played in, again, narrating a history of discovery, the way that it talks about frontiers, the way that it uses its cultural, and political cachet to help build U.S. Empire. And as an indigenous person who's been critical of that because that resulted in, you know, the massacre and marginalization of my ancestors,

I'm really interested in us being more critical about science and not just viewing it as a scientific method, but really paying close attention to the politics and culture of it so we can do it in a different way. So we can do it in a way that is more inclusive, that is more critical. And so I've really geared my energies towards not only studying scientists,

who I think are getting it wrong, but also helping other critical scientists train indigenous scientists to do things right in some of the ways that Annette is talking about. You talk about bringing indigenous people to genetic science specifically. A new ways. You mentioned how sacred the remains of a person is, and you found that, you know, there was a, it was really not a good idea to grind up bones to bring out DNA, but you found a different method of doing it. Right. Well, not me in particular, but yeah, some of the scientists that I work with. So there are, there were a couple of Colville tribal members who were scientists who were commenting on the Kennewickman remains that, of course, were 90, maybe 9,500-year-old remains found in the Columbia River in 1996. And there was a big lawsuit where non-native scientists wanted to examine those bones. And a lot of native people were pushing back and saying that that's the ancient one, that's our ancestor, let's rebury them. And there were a couple of Colville tribal member archaeologists who, one of the them came up with an idea that we could not grind up the bone because that's one of the issues that some native people have. It's viewed as the desecration of those remains, but we could actually take the calcified plaque off the teeth of the ancient one and then use that to get DNA out of it. So indigenous scientists who come from cultures who view dead bodies that we still need to

respect them, will have an incentive to come up with alternative methods to do science in a way that according to our ethical framework is more respectful of those ancestors' bodies. And then so that's part of the kinds of discussions that we have in the summer internship for indigenous peoples and genomics, or Singh, which was founded in the United States in Illinois, University of Illinois, actually, in 2011,

and we've since expanded to Aal Teoroa in New Zealand because there are Maori scientists down there. We expanded to Canada in 2018, and I'm one of the leaders of that initiative up here, and then we're just expanding to Australia in January. So we have a four-country indigenous genome training program now. Very interesting. I want to thank you both for taking time to be with us this hour.

It's quite interesting discussion. Dr. Annette Lee, Associate Professor of Astronomy at St. Cloud State University in Minnesota and Director of the Native Skywatchers Research Program, Dr. Kim Tallbear, an associate professor in Canada, research chair of Indigenous Peoples, Technoscience, and the Environment, University of Alberta in Edmonton. Thank you both for taking time to be with us today. Sir, Philemia. Thank you. Great show. One more thing before you go and before 2020 ends.

I wanted to share a special thank you to everyone for listening, participating, and supporting Science Friday and your local radio station. 2020 was challenging in so many ways, wasn't it? But it also showed us how much science and community mean to all of us. Year-end donations are an important part of how Science Friday and the public radio community, thrive. So please don't forget to make a gift. Thank you again, and I look forward to sharing more science stories with you in the new year. Have a happy and healthy holiday season. And that's about all the time we have for today. You know, if you missed any part of this program or you would like to hear it again, you can subscribe to our podcasts or ask your smart speaker to play Science Friday. Say hi to us on social media, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or email us the old-fashioned way.

SciFri's address is SciFri at ScienceFriday.com. Send us feedback. Tell us what you'd like us to cover. Have a great holiday weekend. Stay safe. We'll see you on New Year's Day. I'm Ira Flato.