Hymie Rubenstein, editor of REAL Indigenous Report, is a retired professor of anthropology at the University of Manitoba and a senior fellow at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy.Anyone not totally captured by the ongoing indigenization of Canadian society, namely those who still believe in Western Enlightenment notions of the rational, objective, and factual pursuit of truth, would find our federal government’s assault on the scientific method both shameful and incomprehensible.As highlighted by Blacklock’s Reporter, a Department of Natural Resources analysis titled Decolonizing Science One Experiment At A Time recommends that all federal scientific research be indigenous-focused and that accompanying research practices be “decolonized.”According to the report, this involves acknowledging the destructive effects of colonialism, celebrating the veracity of Aboriginal knowledge, and partnering with indigenous people in conducting research. Decolonizing Science also stresses the need for employee training and information about “reconciliation,” while omitting that implementing this concept always involves financial and other reparations for alleged past and present transgressions against indigenous peoples.“How can we as public servants be actors in reconciliation?” asks the report.It answers by asserting that “In the spirit of reconciliation, research practices must free themselves from the colonial legacy,” claims the 2025 report republished on September 4 for reading by all federal agencies. “Ideally, the decolonization of research implies full Indigenous ownership of research,” the report claims.What “full Indigenous ownership” means and whether this ownership should be monopolized by indigenous people goes unmentioned.Instead, the report admits that “… it is still hard to fulfil this ideal. At the very least, the simplest expression of decolonization would represent research undertaken in partnership with Indigenous people.”.This undertaking must acknowledge the “devastating effects of colonialism” and “recognition of Indigenous knowledge,” the report also asserts.Surely, one of these “devastating effects” has been the exposure of indigenous people to Western scientific knowledge and its technological and other achievements, phenomena indigenous people have eagerly embraced from first contact to the present, thereby making them willing agents of their own colonization.As for any “partnership,” this would be impossible given that indigenous and scientific knowings are irreconcilable, as argued below.The department, in a separate October 7 internal report, opined, “As a science-based department, Natural Resources Canada has made important efforts to transform the way it conducts science and research activities. With efforts often still developing in maturity, case studies highlight a deliberate shift toward recognizing and respecting Indigenous knowledge systems, data sovereignty and cultural identity.”Though promoted for decades in Canada’s universities, the institutionalization of a radical indigenous assault on Western science, aided and abetted by the federal Liberal government, took a dramatic leap in July 2022 with the appointment of Myrle Ballard, an Anishinaabe woman from Lake St. Martin Indian Reserve, as first director of Environment and Climate Change Canada's (ECCC) new permanent division of Indigenous Science.This attack was reinforced on September 18, 2023, when the House of Commons Standing Committee on Science and Research (HCSCSR) adopted the following motion: “…the committee undertake a study of how best to integrate Indigenous Traditional Knowledge [ITK] and science into government policy development; how to resolve conflicts between the two knowledge systems.”Terming the relation between both “knowledge systems” as “conflicts” that need resolution denies the elementary observation that the two systems are fundamentally incompatible because they are rooted in competing systems of knowing.Not so said Ballard, who claims she is using a process called “bridging, braiding, and weaving” in trying to unite Western and “Indigenous Science.” For her, bridging means raising awareness about “Indigenous Science” within the government, while braiding is when Western scientists work together on research with indigenous peoples on the land. “The weaving process will be when the government, when the department ECCC, starts weaving Indigenous and Western science for better-informed decision-making,” she said..In her November 6, 2023, HCSCSR testimony, Ballard argued that such “weaving” is possible because:“Indigenous and Western science are both sciences … For example, when we develop traditional medicines, we have the traditionalists, the medicine-makers who take the medicines from the land. They know they have to take the plant or whatever it is they're using from as far away from human contamination as they can. They have recipes that they use as well. That's the same as in a lab. There are recipes that have to be tested. There's the colour and the consistency. That's the same as Western science.”A close reading of the mandates of both the HCSCSR regarding ITK and the ECCC’s new division of Indigenous Science, together with its uncritical — read: “unscientific” — acceptance of the comments of HCSCSR members and witnesses, suggests that the government of Canada blindly also accepts Western science as just one version of science, presumably a step in totally deplatforming, perhaps even renouncing, Western science.These claims about “Indigenous Science” need to be closely examined, no easy task, not least because there must be at least 50 different systems of “Aboriginal Science” in Canada corresponding to the country’s 50 different cultural and linguistic groups.As for the content of “Indigenous Science,” Jamie Sarkonak’s National Post analysis of the HCSCSR witness testimonies shows that “Indigenous science, perhaps intentionally, is a difficult concept to pin down. Advocates can’t define it in any consistent way, and frequently confuse science conducted by Indigenous people (i.e., long-term observational evidence on phenomena like caribou migration patterns), with non-scientific cultural beliefs that are somehow upheld as equivalent to the scientific method. There’s often a political, anti-colonial element to ‘Indigenous Science.’”This is not to deny the fundamental importance of ITK, systems of practical understanding based on trial-and-error experience and careful observation that allowed Aboriginal people to cope with a harsh northern climate that restricted population survival and expansion, at least compared to many other regions of the world. Still, based on the relatively rapid population growth in Europe and elsewhere over the same 15,000-year period, it is reasonable to hypothesize that the absence of genuinely scientific farming systems limited the number of indigenous people the land could support.This begs the question of what is meant by the term “genuinely scientific.”Sarkonok contends, “In reality, the scientific method is just a way of testing hypotheses about the world to determine what corresponds to reality and what does not. The truth is not dependent on ethnicity. If a plant has medical benefits, it ultimately doesn’t matter whether they were discovered in a lab or by the people who have used it for thousands of years. All that matters is that it works.”.But there is much more to the scientific method than this. Scientific laws are not culturally limited; they are universal in scope. Sir Isaac Newton’s laws of motion, which he discovered in 1666, are just as valid in Canada as they are in Croatia. And they are just as correct in 2026 as they were in 1666 because they have never been disproven. Sarkonok’s claim that “All that matters is that it works” is a practical issue, not a scientific one. And it is far less scientifically critical than knowing exactly why something works: what is it about some plants that indigenous healers use that gives them their medical benefits? Science continually asks and often succeeds in answering questions like this using the tools of modern chemistry and other techniques.Still, employing the scientific method using observation, experimentation, and the testing of hypotheses cannot prove theories to be true, including old ones like those of Newton; it can only show them to be false, a principle called falsifiability that is absent from so-called Indigenous Science.In short, ITK meets none of these requirements: it is a system of practical understanding and supporting mythology based on everyday experience, buttressed by appeals to the teachings of indigenous authorities and the power of supernatural forces. It is also a way to understand and explain reality that varies dramatically between Aboriginal cultural groups. Moreover, it is subject to constant change, variation, and disappearance because competing knowledge keepers transmit it orally: “Indigenous Science” in 2026 and “Indigenous Science” in 1026 could never be identical.What all this means is “Indigenous Science,” a term used liberally not only in the HCSCSR’s hearings but increasingly throughout the federal government, is a logical and empirical oxymoron because privileging common sense visual understandings by labelling them scientific to score political or sectarian points makes a mockery of a foundational concept – science – no amount of “bridging, braiding and weaving” or alleged reconciliation could ever displace.Hymie Rubenstein, editor of REAL Indigenous Report, is a retired professor of anthropology at the University of Manitoba and a senior fellow at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy.
