02 Nov 2018 09:00 AM - 11:45 AM(America/Vancouver)
20181102T090020181102T1145America/VancouverIndigenous and Environmental Knowledges in Translation
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 ...
Ravenna A, Third FloorHistory of Science Society 2018meeting@hssonline.org
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.
Organized by Geoff Bill (New York Botanical Garden, Humanities Institute)
Commentator – Joshua Reid (University of Washington)
Taíno Nation: Puerto Rican Archaeology in TranslationView Abstract Part of Organized SessionNon-Western Science09:00 AM - 09:33 AM (America/Vancouver) 2018/11/02 16:00:00 UTC - 2018/11/02 16:33:00 UTC
Archaeological research in Puerto Rico has sought to understand the Taíno Amerindians and their predecessors. The Spanish Empire of the 16th century essentially wiped out these indigenous peoples, but by the 19th century aboriginal archaeological artifacts were being catalogued in Puerto Rico. The leading colonial scientist of the waning Iberian authority, physician-botanist Agustín Stahl, boasted the island’s largest archaeological collection. His work inspired other amateur Puerto Rican archaeologists, members of the insular elite. These professionals conducted serious archaeological work, but nevertheless represented non-expert researchers. That is, none of these workers were trained as archaeologists. During the early days of American colonial oversight, after the 1898 annexation, U.S. archaeologists continued Stahl’s work of understanding Taíno origins. In fact, they cited such local work, often already published in the archaeological literature. Building on indigenous professional expertise, these American archaeologists translated local expertise, validated it, re-interpreted it and expanded it. By the 1950s, when Puerto Ricans had established an autonomous, self-governing polity under U.S. jurisdiction, the Puerto Rican Institute of Culture positioned itself as the scientific authority over archaeology, now setting insular research agendas. In essence, local archaeological experts now re-translated American-led work of the early 20th century, recruiting it into notions of cultural nationalism. That is, Puerto Ricans imagined themselves as a Taíno Nation, an indigenous peoples infused with genetic and cultural additions from European and African sources. Recent Puerto Rican archaeological success has thus contributed to a unique cultural accommodation against frustrated political independence.
Troubled Translations: Ethnoscience and Empire in Twentieth-century PhilippinesView Abstract Part of Organized SessionNon-Western Science09:33 AM - 10:06 AM (America/Vancouver) 2018/11/02 16:33:00 UTC - 2018/11/02 17:06:00 UTC
Ethnoscientists play an invaluable role as exponents of biological and cultural diversity. This role has frequently been compromised, however, by the discipline’s close association with powerful imperial and colonial interests. This paper examines this tension in twentieth-century Philippines, with emphasis on the researches of two individuals: Elmer Drew Merrill (1876-1956), the most prominent botanist of the early years of American colonization; and Harold Conklin (1926-2016), the preeminent ethnoscientist after Philippine independence. The two represent vastly different ethnoscientific paradigms. Merrill’s primarily economic interest in indigenous botany, which took shape under the auspices of an aggressively expanding colonial bureaucracy, is epitomized in his encyclopedic effort to catalogue the vernacular names for useful Philippine plants from Spanish-language sources. Conklin’s research on Hanunó’o and Ifugao botanical classification, and on the connections between indigenous cultures and environmental knowledge, bolstered by facility in numerous indigenous languages, took shape in a vigorously nationalist postcolonial context. Yet the areas of overlap between the two men are equally intriguing: Conklin’s work drew upon military aerial surveillance photography, for instance, and he promoted his Ifugao studies as broadly relevant to projects of tropical “development”; while Merrill insisted on the ontologically stable character of indigenous plant classifications, and even patronized Conklin’s early ethnoecological research. In probing these connections and contrasts, this paper attempts a finely grained understanding of the spectrum of translational practices spanning apparently inconsonant frameworks for understanding differences between indigenous and Western patterns of environmental thought.
Geoff Bil New York Botanical Garden, Humanities Institute
"I See the Land Desolate": Competency, Agriculture, and the Omaha NationView Abstract Part of Organized SessionNon-Western Science10:06 AM - 10:39 AM (America/Vancouver) 2018/11/02 17:06:00 UTC - 2018/11/02 17:39:00 UTC
In 1912, ethno-botanist Melvin Gilmore met with White Horse, an elderly member of Nebraska’s Omaha Nation. White Horse described the terrible transformation he had seen in his lifetime: “Now the face of all the land is changed and sad. The living creatures are gone. I see the land desolate, and I suffer unspeakable sadness.” This presentation draws on early twentieth-century research from ethnographers, geographers, and government officials, as well as contemporary oral history, to examine the interplay between Omaha and Euro-American understandings of lands and peoples in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The first half of this presentation focuses on the indigenous perspective. The Omaha were not only hunters, but also industrious farmers of corn and vegetables, and their spiritual system understood the earth as a vibrant, living body. As the land filled with settler farmers, it seemed, paradoxically, to empty and wither. The second half of this presentation takes up Euro-American obsessions with productivity, which, conversely, understood Omaha lands as empty and unused until brought into a Euro-American style of agriculture. These competing cosmologies came into high relief with a 1910 government competency commission, which assessed each member of the Omaha Nation, including White Horse, to determine whether their lands should be held in trust; individuals’ competency was determined in large part by their commitment to sedentary farming. Shifting rubrics of ableism evaluated individuals and lands through Euro-American sciences of agricultural efficiency, leaving only the Omaha and their ethnographers to recognize the awful desolation settler-colonialism had engendered.
Perry H. Charley: Translating the Disruption of HozhoView Abstract Part of Organized SessionNon-Western Science10:39 AM - 11:12 AM (America/Vancouver) 2018/11/02 17:39:00 UTC - 2018/11/02 18:12:00 UTC
Perry H. Charley’s life illustrates translation as an act of healing. He is entwined with the American quest for nuclear supremacy through uranium. Like many other Native Americans, Charley was sent to boarding school as part of the U.S. government and Bureau of Indian Affairs efforts to assimilate Indians. At Shiprock Boarding School his hair was cut off, and he was treated with insecticide against lice. “I was told to never speak my language again, but I sit here today as a fluent-speaking Navajo,” Charley says. “To repair as best I can what was lost, that has been my life’s work.” His father died young as one of the thousands of unprotected uranium miners sacrificed in the building of the first nuclear weapons and the uranium economy. Perry later discovered the cause of his father’s death as respiratory failure from fibrosis of the lung. It was a disease with which the Navajo had no experience and thus, no vocabulary. There are no Diné words for radon progenies and radioactivity, or for alpha and beta particles, or gamma radiation. But Charley is changing that with a painstaking effort to create a glossary, constructing new Navajo words for radiation-related terms. In his published work he translates in the opposite direction to re-inscribe his traditional culture's way of seeing harm from contamination to show that health physics is not inclusive of spiritual, mental and physical health.
Reclaiming Be-hi ka-li, A Traditional Indigenous Food and Medicine Plant: Decolonizing Western Botany View Abstract Part of Organized SessionNon-Western Science11:12 AM - 11:45 AM (America/Vancouver) 2018/11/02 18:12:00 UTC - 2018/11/02 18:45:00 UTC
Be-hi ka-li (Umbellularia californica) is a hardwood tree native to California and southwestern Oregon with the potential to be a more widely valued source of a chocolate-like superfood in the future. Its nut is a nutrient-dense food and the leaves have many medicinal properties. Known by numerous different English names including California bay, Oregon myrtle, and pepperwood, the avocado relative is garnering the attention of an increasing number of wild food foragers and trend setting chefs in the restaurant industry. Simultaneously, some people hope to commercialize production of the nuts to foster economic development and food sovereignty in Indian Country. Although the evergreen tree is adapted to the droughty west coast of North America, it is known to be an intermittent fruit producer and to be vulnerable to a variety of diseases and pests, as well as climate change. These challenges need to be addressed if Oregon myrtle is to become a profitable commodity. However, negative environmental and social impacts could potentially result from commercialization as well. To better understand the risks and identify strategies for guarding against such unintended consequences, this case study of Oregon myrtle considers knowledge construction and use in historical context. Particular attention is paid to the legacy of colonial botany, patent law, indigenous proprietary knowledge rights and native food sovereignty. Based on the historical record, without changes to the practice of capitalism and its relationship with science, commercializing Oregon myrtle will unlikely benefit Indigenous people or sufficiently mitigate the externalized environmental and social costs of global capitalism. However, that doesn’t preclude botanists from examining and challenging the colonial legacy of their profession and seeking to use their knowledge to collaborate in contemporary food sovereignty initiatives and alternative forms of emancipatory economic development.
