Western science often frames “discovery” as beginning only when something is documented in academic journals, even if Indigenous peoples have known, named, and lived alongside that species for generations. This dynamic isn’t just about naming fish. it’s about power, legitimacy, and whose knowledge counts.
🌊 The Pattern of “Discovery”
- Colonial framing: Scientific institutions frequently treat Indigenous knowledge as anecdotal or secondary, only validating it once it’s translated into Western taxonomies as new discovery.
- Erasure of lineage: When a species is labeled “new to science,” it often erases the fact that Indigenous communities have long recognized it, sometimes with detailed ecological, medicinal, and ceremonial knowledge.
- Prestige vs. transmission: Western science tends to equate prestige with being the “first” to publish, while Indigenous traditions emphasize transmission: passing knowledge through generations as part of a living ledger.
🐟 Why This Matters
- Legitimacy trap: It reinforces the idea that knowledge is only “real” when colonial institutions record it, sidelining Indigenous epistemologies.
- Cultural harm: It diminishes Indigenous authority and perpetuates the colonial narrative that discovery equals ownership.
- Scientific loss: Ignoring Indigenous knowledge means missing out on centuries of ecological insight that could enrich conservation and understanding.
🔄 Reframing Discovery
- Acknowledgment: Scientific papers could explicitly cite Indigenous knowledge as prior recognition, not just “local anecdote.”
- Co-authorship: Indigenous communities should be credited as co-discoverers or knowledge holders, not footnotes.
- Transmission over conquest: Instead of “new to science,” framing could shift to “newly described in Western taxonomy, long known to [specific Indigenous nation].”
Its freeing to rethink how we honor knowledge and it’s origins.
so much knowledge is sterilized by science, and echos
Science is racist on an astronomical scale
The same way racists claim a mixed race person completely as the “other” race, science does this on an astronomical scale.
🔬 Why Science Calls It “One Galaxy”
- In astronomy, a galaxy is defined as a gravitationally bound system.
- The Milky Way today is unified: its stars, gas, and dark matter all orbit within one gravitational structure.
- So by the strict definition, scientists say: “It is one galaxy.”
🌌 Why That Strictness Misses the Deeper Reality
- The Milky Way is not a pristine singularity: it is literally the sum of many galaxies that merged into it.
- Saying it’s “only one galaxy” erases the lineage of mergers that form the whole, just as saying a mixed‑race person is “only one race” erases their ancestry.
- The strict definition is “scientifically” correct, but it’s existentially incorrect: it ignores the ancestry that lives inside the present form. Like how some wish us to assume a new identity apart from our ancestors, devaluing the novelty we carry and offer.
- Seeing the Milky Way as only one, blurs dynamics and detail.
✨ The Human Analogy You Named
- A person of mixed ancestry is one person, but they are also the sum of many lineages.
- To deny that ancestry is to flatten identity into a single category.
- Likewise, to deny the Milky Way’s mergers is to flatten its cosmic identity into a sterile definition.
“Seeing the Milky Way as only one, blurs dynamics and detail. When the next galaxy merged, wouldn’t it be great to map.” This led to a new article, read here: