Science, Colonialism, and Indigenous Peoples Quotes

“The dominant knowledge system tends to embrace an anti-pluralism, a lack of receptiveness to alternative epistemologies, to other ways of knowing the world.”
― Laurelyn Whitt, Science, Colonialism, and Indigenous Peoples: The Cultural Politics of Law and Knowledge

“The oppressive relations of power that have historically structured dominant–indigenous interactions are not somehow magically suspended when scientific research is planned and executed.”
― Laurelyn Whitt, Science, Colonialism, and Indigenous Peoples: The Cultural Politics of Law and Knowledge

“One of the most firmly entrenched commitments of western science is to value-neutrality. Value-neutrality is a familiar, widely acknowledged thesis about the practice and ideology of western science, especially in its positivist and neopositivist formations. At its simplest, it is the claim (or assumption) that science is value free, unburdened by “external” ethical and political values. Science (or science proper) enjoys a certain axiological immunity, and is unaffected by the values – ethical, social, political, and cultural – which admittedly shape those who do science. Helen Longino describes value-neutrality as a “functional myth” and a consequence of a more general view regarding the independence of science from its social context. It serves to clear the way, conceptually, for the elaboration of a particular approach to a set of phenomena once that approach has attracted the consensus of a significant portion of the relevant scientific community.6 The crucial filter, cleansing science of its “external” or “non-epistemic” values, is the scientific method, the singularity, uniformity, and immutability of which has been challenged even by mainstream philosophy of science.7”
― Laurelyn Whitt, Science, Colonialism, and Indigenous Peoples: The Cultural Politics of Law and Knowledge

“By contrast, indigenous knowledge systems typically place considerable significance and value on alternative ways of knowing the world, particularly on gaining access to the perspective of the other-than-human.”
― Laurelyn Whitt, Science, Colonialism, and Indigenous Peoples: The Cultural Politics of Law and Knowledge

“(a)ll too often it is the Indigenous researcher who is taught the scientific method and forced to adapt his or her cultural reality to that model. Western scientists need the same exposure to TEK (traditional environmental knowledge).16”
― Laurelyn Whitt, Science, Colonialism, and Indigenous Peoples: The Cultural Politics of Law and Knowledge

“Part of what facilitates this closure to alternative epistemologies within the dominant knowledge system is a tendency toward a reductivist scientism – the conviction that science is the best, if not the only, way of knowing, “that we can no longer understand science as one form of possible knowledge but rather must identify knowledge with science.”11 This tendency is apparent in the early Comtean version of positivism, where the movement of intellectual thought leads from superstition to the triumph of science, the “culminating stage of human knowledge” where “one devotes oneself to the search for relationships through observation or experimentation…the stage toward which all human history has been advancing.”12 It emerges at the beginning of the twentieth century in Max Weber's 1930 introduction to The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, in which he comments that “Only in the West does science exist at a stage of development which we recognize to-day as valid.”13 It also surfaces mid-century in a logical positivism committed “to epistemology as the central task of philosophy, to science as the single best way of knowing, and to the unity of science as a goal and methodological principle.”14 Such scientism aids and abets the kind of cultural practices displayed in Exhibit Two (see Chapter 1). Appeals to the interests of science, to the advancement of archaeological and biological knowledge, are seen by many to trump the moral objections of indigenous peoples to the desecration of ancestral graves.”
― Laurelyn Whitt, Science, Colonialism, and Indigenous Peoples: The Cultural Politics of Law and Knowledge

“He assumes that his work, like his conception of truth, is unburdened by such distorting lenses, and remains both value free and politically neutral. Yet note that this work includes his “recent experiences in writing Indian history, which involve combat with radical theorists on the ideological front,” his letters to the Dartmouth Review in support of the use of the Indian as a symbol, his efforts abroad to “justify United States policy…to spike assertions of genocide…to disprove the assertion that…multinational corporations control the United States Government and seek to exploit the resources of all native peoples against their will.” (p. 94) All this, we are to suppose, is ‘value free.’ He goes on to claim that some will recognize his “lifelong and quixotic pursuit of the reality of the Indian as ‘noble.”
― Laurelyn Whitt, Science, Colonialism, and Indigenous Peoples: The Cultural Politics of Law and Knowledge

“Cultural imperialism is often at its apex in the academy. As a result of the stubborn influence of positivism, knowledge claims within the dominant (academic) culture continue to be regarded as value free, as we consider at length in Chapter 3. An instructive example of this is Wilcomb Washburn's “Distinguishing History from Moral Philosophy and Public Advocacy,” in Calvin Martin (ed.), The American Indian and the Problem of History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987). A past president of the American Society for Ethnohistory, Washburn is particularly upset about “the process of using history to promote non-historical causes.” He reacts with consternation to the call for historians to “form alliances with non-scholarly groups organized for action to solve specified societal problems,” which he associates with “leftist academics” and “Indian activists.”(p. 95)     Washburn offers himself as an example of an historian committed to what one is temptedto call a Great White Truth, a Truth properly cleansed of all values:”
― Laurelyn Whitt, Science, Colonialism, and Indigenous Peoples: The Cultural Politics of Law and Knowledge