31 Matching Annotations
  1. Jun 2023
  2. May 2022
    1. pretty much all the arguments that we would be making too if we've met a bunch of Jesuits fear right of kings and reveal the faith and it's actually it's 00:41:37 the indigenous sort of looking rationally

      Perhaps summarizing Graeber and Wengrow too much here, but..

      The Enlightenment came to us courtesy of discussions with Indigenous Peoples from the Americas.

    1. Whig history (or Whig historiography), often appearing as whig history, is an approach to historiography that presents history as a journey from an oppressive and benighted past to a "glorious present".[1] The present described is generally one with modern forms of liberal democracy and constitutional monarchy: it was originally a satirical term for the patriotic grand narratives praising Britain's adoption of constitutional monarchy and the historical development of the Westminster system.[2] The term has also been applied widely in historical disciplines outside of British history (e.g. in the history of science) to describe "any subjection of history to what is essentially a teleological view of the historical process".[3] When the term is used in contexts other than British history, "whig history" (lowercase) is preferred.[3]

      Stemming from British history, but often applied in other areas including the history of science, whig history is a historiography that presents history as a path from an oppressive, backward, and wretched past to a glorious present. The term was coined by British Historian Herbert Butterfield in The Whig Interpretation of History (1931). It stems from the British Whig party that advocated for the power of Parliament as opposed to the Tories who favored the power of the King.


      It would seem to be an unfortunate twist of fate for indigenous science and knowledge that it was almost completely dismissed when the West began to dominate indigenous cultures during the Enlightenment which was still heavily imbued with the influence of scholasticism. Had religion not played such a heavy role in science, we may have had more respect and patience to see and understand the value of indigenous ways of knowing.

      Link this to notes from The Dawn of Everything.

  3. Apr 2022
    1. Last night while watching a video related to The First Astronomers, I came across a clip in which Australian elder Uncle Ghillar Michael Anderson indicates that indigenous dendroglyphs (markings on trees) or petroglyphs (markings on stone in the stony territories) are the libraries of the Indigenous peoples who always relate (associate) their stories from the markings back up to the sky (stars, constellations).

      These markings remind me of some of those found on carved stone balls in neolithic European contexts described by Dr. @LynneKelly in The Memory Code and Memory Craft and carvings on coolamon in Knowledge and Power.

      Using the broad idea of the lukasa and abstract designs, I recently bought a small scale version of the Aberlemno Pictish Cross as a small manual/portable memory palace, which is also an artwork that I can hang on the wall, to use to associate memories to the designs and animals which are delineated in 18 broad areas on the sculpture. (Part of me wonders if the communities around these crosses used them for mnemonic purposes as well?)

      scale model of the Aberlemno Pictish Cross with Celtic designs in the foreground with the life size cross in the background

      Is anyone else using abstract designs or artwork like this for their memory practice?

      Anyone know of other clever decorative artworks one could use and display in their homes/offices for these purposes?


      For those interested in the archeological research on dendroglyphs in Australia: - The Western Yalanji dendroglyph: The life and death of an Aboriginal carved tree - Review: The Dendroglyphs or ‘Carved Trees’ of New South Wales by Robert Etheridge (Content warning: historical erasure of Indigenous culture)

    1. and within that within that area then you have on one on the light side with on the eastern side of the milky way all of those people there have a 00:39:56 relationship to each other all the tribes and all the clans and so and then you come on to the west side exactly the same thing again so on the east side those stars on the 00:40:10 bright side we are not allowed if you've got a totemic system that belongs to the east side you cannot marry your children into any one of them you must marry across the river so 00:40:23 you've got to go across the river which is that milky way and so the light side's going to go across the dark side to find their wives and so the old people understood who the people were and 00:40:35 and so they understood that genealogical background of every family every child and so they made sure that that when you made a promise to a child you 00:40:49 make sure that there are at least five generation removed from the people you want to marry them back into genetics was very important to us even though we didn't know it was genetics at 00:41:01 the time but it was maintaining the purity of the people

      There's a light side (East) and a dark side (West) of the Milky Way (seen as a river) which is mirrored into the moieties of the people. Dark people must go across the river to marry those on the light side. The elders kept track of all the genealogy in the totemic system of every family and every child and made their promises such that there were at least five generations removed from their family to maintain the purity (in the sense of genetic soundness, not genetic purity from a "racial" perspective) of the people.

      via Uncle Ghillar Michael Anderson

  4. Mar 2022
    1. for tens of thousands of years Aboriginal people and tourists Islander people have paid incredibly close attention to the world around them and still do today have developed knowledge 00:09:51 systems that are more complex than we could ever imagine or as intellectually capable as anybody else if not much more and that their traditions have a very detailed scientific component that we can learn from if we just shut up and 00:10:04 listen

      For tens of thousands of years Aboriginal people and Torres Islander people have paid incredibly close attention to the world around them and still do today; have developed knowledge systems that are more complex than we could ever imagine; are as intellectually capable as anybody else if not much more, and that their traditions have a very detailed scientific component that we can learn from if we just shut up and listen. —Dr. Duane Hamacher

      AMEN! What a fantastic quote.

    1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KViPueei7TE

      Duane Hamacher identifies as a white American from the midwest.

    2. nura Gila indigenous Center at UNSW is working closely with Microsoft Research to incorporate indigenous 00:12:36 content into the world by telescope so we're creating interactive tours and all kinds of different materials to put in

      Microsoft Research has create the World Wide Telescope (https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/worldwide-telescope/), an interactive free astronomy software, which has a rich body of knowledge. The Nura Gili: Centre for Indigenous Programs at UNSW (https://www.indigenous.unsw.edu.au/) is working in concert with them to include Indigenous knowledge in the project.

    3. archaea what strata me which looked at how ancient civilizations understood

      archaeoastronomy : the study of ancient or traditional astronomies in their cultural context, utilizing archaeological and anthropological evidence.

      sometimes also spelled archeoastronomy

    1. Indigenous astronomy focuses on the empirical, scientificlayers of this knowledge, and Traditions refer to the social practices,cultural activities, and methods of transmitting and applying thisknowledge.
    2. Who were the world’s first astronomers? The answer typicallyincludes scientists such as Galileo, Nicolaus Copernicus, or ancientcivilisations that gave birth to what we consider Western science,such as Sumer in Mesopotamia.

      Given the predominantly non-literate civilizations that comprised the ancient Near East, I've been wondering about how they may have actually been closer to Indigenous cultures than they are to more modern, literate Western culture.

      Perhaps he shouldn't dismiss them so readily here, but rather tie them more directly into his broader thesis.

    3. Professor Mātāmua’s 2017 book, Matariki: The star of the year.
    4. Guardianship of starknowledge is also a family affair in Lakota cultures of the northernMidwest of the United States. Arvol Looking Horse, a Lakota Elderand spiritual leader, teaches that sacred star medicine is maintainedby family lineages bearing the name Lúta.

      Star knowledge is guarded by family lineages in the Lakota cultures with the name Lúta.

    5. In the western Torres Strait, an astronomer is called a ZugubauMabaig, which literally translates as ‘star person’.
    6. The stars also give meaning to our existence. The sky is a canvasof sparkling dots that we connect to form familiar patterns, to whichwe assign narratives about their formation and meaning. Across thesky, ancestors, heroic figures, animals, landscapes and fantasticbeasts tell stories of the human experience. They speak of braveryand deceit, war and peace, sex and violence, punishment andreward. It is fascinating to find striking similarities in stories about thestars across vastly different cultures, with even more similarities in theways they are utilised.

      Are these graphic and memorable stories strikingly similar because of the underlying packages of orality and memory used in these cultures?

      This is one of my primary motivations for reading this text.

    7. Indigenous science has long been rejected without consideration,overlooked, or exploited without recognition by powerful Westerninterests. Bio-piracy sees Indigenous Knowledge of plants stolen andpatented for use in the food, cosmetic and pharmaceutical industrieswith little or no recognition or recompense. Indigenous starknowledge has been ignored, even when that knowledge clearlyexisted long before the ‘discoveries’ of Western science.

      Indigenous knowledge has been broadly ignored, rejected, and even exploited without any recognition by Western colonizers. Examples of appropriation include knowledge of plants patented for use in food, medicine, and cosmetics.

    8. Indigenous sciences are highly interconnected, while Westernscience tends to be divided into different categories by discipline, witheach diverging into ever smaller focus areas.

      Indigenous sciences are highly interconnected while Western sciences tend to be highly sub-divided into ever smaller specializations.


      Are Indigenous sciences naturally interconnected or do they form that way because of the associative memory underlying the cultural orality by which they are formed and transmitted? (I would suspect so, but don't yet have the experience to say definitively. Evidence for this should be collected.)

    9. Western andIndigenous sciences work in different ways, with some crossover
    10. ‘Yes, ofcourse we have science! We’ve been saying that for years, but noone will listen.’

      No one has listened to Indigenous peoples when they say that they have science. The major boundary in hearing in this case is that Indigenous peoples rely on orality where as Western people rely more heavily on literacy. This barrier has obviously been a major gap between these cultures.

    11. A sense ofconnectedness is a unique part of Indigenous science. In Westernscience, knowledge is often considered separate from the people whodiscover it, while Indigenous cultures see knowledge as intricatelyconnected to people.

      A primary difference between Indigenous science and Western science is the first is intimately connected to the practitioners while the second is wholly separate.


      Would Western science be in a healthier space currently if its practice were more tightly bound to the people who need to use it (everyone)? By not being bound to the everyday practice and knowledge of our science, increasingly larger portions of Western society don't believe in science or its value.

    12. Science is something anyone can do, and everyone has done. Theprocess on paper is simple: closely observe the world, test what you learn,and transmit it to future generations. Just because Indigenous cultureshave done this without test tubes doesn’t make them unscientific—justdifferent.

      Perhaps there's a clever dig here that she uses the phrase "on paper" here because most indigenous cultures have done these things orally!

      quote from Dr. Annette S. Lee

    13. As Professor Rangi Mātāmua, a Māoriastronomy scholar, explains:Look at what our ancestors did to navigate here—you don’t do that onmyths and legends, you do that on science. I think there is empiricalscience embedded within traditional Māori knowledge ... but what they didto make it meaningful and have purpose is they encompassed it withincultural narratives and spirituality and belief systems, so it wasn’t just seenas this clinical part of society that was devoid of any other connection toour world, it was included into everything. To me, that cultural elementgives our science a completely new and deep and rich layer of meaning
    1. The constellations’ positions in the night sky on significant dates, such as solstices and equinoxes, are mirrored in the alignments of the main structures at the compound, he found. Steles were “carefully placed within the temenos to mark the rising, zenith, or setting of the stars over the horizon,” he writes.

      Phoenicians use of steles and local environment in conjunction with their astronomy fits the pattern of other uses of Indigenous orality and memory.

      Link this example to other examples delineated by Lynne Kelly and others I've found in the ancient Near East.

      How does this example potentially fit into the broader framework provided by Lynne Kelly? Are there differences?

      Her thesis fits into a few particular cultural time periods, but what sorts of evidence should we expect to see culturally, socially, and economically when the initial conditions she set forth evolve beyond their original context? What should we expect to see in these cases and how to they relate to examples I've been finding in the ancient Near East?

    2. But crucially, he believes the pool at the center of the complex may have also served as a surface to observe and map the stars. The water surface would have mirrored the sky, as water does – none other than Leonardo da Vinci pointed out the attributes of inert standing water when studying the night sky. For one thing, the stars were adored by the Phoenicians, whether as gods or deceased ancestors; and the position of the constellations was of keen interest to the sailors among them for navigation purposes, Nigro points out.

      Lorenzo Nigro indicates that the "kothon" of Motya in southern Sicily was a pool of Baal whose surface may have been used to observe and map the stars. He also indicates that the Phoenicians adored the stars potentially as gods or deceased ancestors. This is an example of a potentially false assumption often seen in archaeology of Western practitioners misconstruing Indigenous practices based on modern ideas of religion and culture.

      I might posit that this sort of practice is more akin to that of the science of Indigenous peoples who used oral and mnemonic methods in combination with remembering their histories and ancestors.

      Cross reference this with coming reading in The First Astronomers (to come) which may treat this in more depth.


      Leonardo da Vinci documented the attributes of standing water for studying the night sky.

      Where was this and what did it actually entail?

  5. Dec 2021
    1. For Europeanaudiences, the indigenous critique would come as a shock to thesystem, revealing possibilities for human emancipation that, oncedisclosed, could hardly be ignored.

      Indigenous peoples of the Americas critiqued European institutions for their structures and lack of freedom. In turn, while some Europeans listened, they created an evolutionary political spectrum of increasing human complexity to combat this indigenous critique.

  6. Nov 2021
    1. Tania Bubela. (2021, November 17). New resources on #COVID19vaccines & #pregnancy from the fantastic group @CDCofBC Indigenous Knowledge Translation Working Group. @HarlanPruden working to meet knowledge needs of Indigenous communities in ways that are meaningful. @ScienceUpFirst take note! @SFU_FHS @CaulfieldTim https://t.co/oK3WJUj9p6 [Tweet]. @bubela_tania. https://twitter.com/bubela_tania/status/1460776956379557889

  7. Sep 2021