Indigenous people can talk about how our stories and traditions tell us to learn from the world around us, to look at the plants and animals and the non-living beings in the world as teachers and guides, and to take the lessons they give us and apply them to our lives so that when we’re gone, we’ve left the world a better place than it was when we were born.
We learn how to gather and prepare food from the squirrels and rabbits and other herbivores. We learn how to hunt and how to abstain from the predators. We learn how to work together and act as one from the trees.
Our traditional knowledge is built on observance and testing, using what Mother Earth teaches us because the other beings walking her with us are older and more knowledgeable about the world and we have so much to learn from them.
And yet anti-theists will still look at our traditional knowledge and practices and call them useless superstitions, refusing to hear the lessons in them and comparing them to the psuedoscience that was started by white ableists.
We’re told that we’re ignorant, that we refuse to listen to reason and logic, by the same people who think that any knowledge that isn’t theirs is automatically wrong. Traditions that sustained both the environment and the people for thousands of years are dismissed just because they didn’t come out of a lab and aren’t presented in a way that’s “scientific” enough.
Indigenous Knowledge Is Science.
Hear this. Take it in. Let it settle behind your teeth until you understand what it means.
Indigenous Knowledge Is Science.