Pūrākau, or traditional stories, are a part of Māori culture with great potential for informing science. DANIEL HIKUROA: Weave folklore into modern scienceĭaniel Hikuroa is an Earth systems and environmental humanities researcher at Te Wānanga o Waipapa, University of Auckland, New Zealand, and a member of the Māori community. Nature asked three researchers who belong to Indigenous communities in the Americas and New Zealand, plus two funders who work closely with Northern Indigenous communities, how far we’ve come toward decolonizing science - and how researchers can work more respectfully with Indigenous groups. There’s no road map out of science’s painful past. So, too, have the United Nations cultural organization UNESCO and the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services.īut some Indigenous groups feel that despite such well-intentioned initiatives, their inclusion in research is only a token gesture to satisfy a funding agency. A key sentence in the programme description reflected a shift in perspective: “Given the deep knowledge held by local and Indigenous residents in the Arctic, NSF encourages scientists and Arctic residents to collaborate on Arctic research projects.” The Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada and New Zealand’s Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment have made similar statements. In 2016, the US National Science Foundation (NSF) launched Navigating the New Arctic - a programme that encouraged scientists to explore the wide-reaching consequences of climate change in the north. Last month, the University of Auckland’s vice-chancellor, Dawn Freshwater, announced a symposium to be held early this year, at which different viewpoints can be discussed. Tensions surfaced last year, for example, when seven University of Auckland academics argued that planned changes to New Zealand’s secondary school curriculum, to “ensure parity between mātauranga Māori”, or Maori knowledge, and “other bodies of knowledge”, could undermine trust in science.įor better science, increase Indigenous participation in publishing But finding a path to better relationships has proved challenging. Today, many scientists acknowledge the troubling attitudes that have long plagued research projects in Indigenous communities. Researchers drop into communities, gather data and leave - never contacting the locals again, and excluding them from the publication process. But these relationships have often felt colonial, extractive and unequal. Many scientists rely on Indigenous people to guide their work - by helping them to find wildlife, navigate rugged terrain or understand changing weather trends, for example. Dominique David-Chavez works with Randal Alicea, an Indigenous farmer, in his tobacco-drying shed in Cidra, Borikén (Puerto Rico).