Scientific knowledge is customarily understood as a product of value-neutral observation, and its transmission as a straightforward process of diffusion. In recent years, historians of science have come increasingly to recognize the creation and communication of science as invariably complex processes of translation. Translations represent inventive adaptations and appropriations of languages, cultures, and non-human elements of nature. They embody diminutions as well as augmentations of untranslated originals, and can be material or conceptual, coercive as well as subversive. Inequalities and violences engendered by colonialism bring the stakes of translation into especially sharp relief. Our session brings together five case studies in colonial scientific translation: Puerto Rican indigenous expertise rendered as colonial archaeology and reshaped as a Taíno-led nationalist enterprise; settler agricultural “improvement” experienced by Omaha people as colonial impairment; Philippine indigenous botanical and environmental knowledge mobilized to serve shifting colonial economic, anthropological and botanical objectives; Diné vocabulary adapted to encompass concepts of radioactivity and nuclear contamination; and indigenous women’s botanical knowledge masculinized by agricultural technology in the name of food sovereignty. Scientific stories have frequently worked to marginalize indigenous cultures in the service of colonizing environmental and cultural resources. Collectively drawing on indigenous critical theory, oral history, disability studies and environmental humanist scholarship alongside history of science approaches, we attempt a different reading: of colonial translational modalities impoverished socially, spiritually and ecologically; and of colonial knowledges translated and transformed into potentially decolonizing instruments of indigenous cultural sovereignty.
