Patty Krawec so I just finished reading The Disordered Cosmos by Chanda Prescod-Weinstein so then when I came across Hilding, came across Hilding a few weeks ago about Indigenous stargazing. Mi’kmaq astronomer and tell us about yourself and about Indigenous stargazing.
Hilding Neilson
Yeah, so I'm Hilding, I'm Mi’kmaq and settler from a group in Newfoundland. That's where my family's from the west coast of the island. Got my PhD at the University of Toronto in astrophysics, did some research back as a contract backdating astronomer, working in the Department of Astronomy, just next door to AW Peet. And I've been really interested in trying to bridge a lot of initiatives in astronomy that we don't really talk about that much, which is Indigenous knowledges.
If I were to show you a textbook, you know, like a 500 page tome of astronomy knowledge from cosmology, the exoplanet, there'd be two pages on Indigenous knowledges. And we'd be sharing those two pages with Stonehenge, and New Grange in Ireland. And they'll be talking about perhaps the Mayan Astronomy, or maybe Hawai’ian navigators. And it will be spoken about as if we're past tense, as if Indigenous people don't exist. And then it will be like, “now on to the real science.”
And, you know, a few years ago, I got to attend a national meeting of Canadian astronomers, and a Cree astronomer educator, Wilfer Buck, was presenting, and he gave a talk to the audience, discussing all these Cree stories, beautiful Cree stories. The Bear constellation with three dog constellation. And us seeing all this knowledge that we don't talk about in academic spaces. And I'm just sitting there wondering like, WTF is our knowledge? Where's Indigenous wisdom, Mi’kmaq knowledge? Where are the constellations? Why don't we talk about that? And so this sort of became of this giant rabbit hole that I've been going through trying to find different knowledges and Indigenous methodologies, and trying to create new space in academic astronomy for more Indigenous knowledges, though, granted, that mostly focused on the North American Carolinian peoples. There's just too much out there to try to do everything.
And so hopefully now in the fall, we'll be launching our new course on Indigenous astronomy, that will be a senior level course talking of issues around colonization and astronomy, whether that's dealing with telescopes on Earth or going out to Mars, talking about knowledges, and then Indigenous methodologies. You know, how would an Indigenous, how would Indigenous peoples think about the concepts like the Drake Equation. Like we asked the question, how many advanced civilizations are there? And, noting that “advanced civilization” has its own problems with terminology, are there in our galaxy? And, you know, some dude named Frank Drake in the 1960s came up this whole way of kind of thinking about this through an equation. And all the assumptions presently require things like, what's intelligent life? How does life form? What is a civilization? And if we just step back and think back to, you know, how different Indigenous communities would think about these things and what does that mean? And there are ways of going through these kind of thought processes. One of the simple aspects of the Drake Equation is, you know, how long civilizations sort of last that can communicate. And Frank Drake, you know, was doing this during the Cold War. So, you know, the biggest fear was nuclear bombs. So he was suggesting maybe a century to 1000 years that's the length societies exist Now that we're in the era of climate change, probably, the same numbers apply. But, you know, I remember when seeing this meme a few years ago of “Canada- 150; Mi’kmaq- 13,000.”
Patty Krawec: Right.
Hilding Neilson: So you know, if Western civilization’s got about a century, perhaps Indigenous civilizations have 10s of 1000s of years.
Hilding Neilson
And you know, that's tens of thousands of years longer to exist. It means many more Indigenous type, or Indigenous life possibilities of intelligent civilizations in our galaxy. So just thinking from an Indigenous perspective, using–and trying not to really be pan-Indigenous–But, you know, common methodologies that you can have so many more civilizations in our galaxy, if you think about it, through those lenses of different Indigenous nations relative to traditional western science. And we could probably play through this exercise through different elements in astronomy and physics. And I think this sort of helped create this critical lens, again, around how we talk about astronomy and astrophysics, because it's become so Eurocentric, so westernized, so much in this narrative of “Space Cowboys, Colonizing Mars, Planting a flag, Sending messages out to other worlds,” that were really embodied within the same colonial narrative in the last four or five centuries, that I think we're due now to actually start thinking about it from a from a broader context.
Patty Krawec
There were two things that Chanda talked about, and I kind of tweeted about it. Because one of the things that she mentions, is Euclidean, she's talking about Euclidean geometry, just you know, to bring it way down to super simple stuff. For all the non-physicists in the room. What she's talking about is that we're thinking in terms of, you know, Euclidean geometry is, you know, squares have a certain number of angles inside them. And triangles always add up to 180. But then, when we map that onto a curved space, that doesn't work, the triangle no longer adds up to 180. And yet, we live on a curved planet, underneath a curved sky. And we think in terms of these, you know, of these flat, you know, these these flat geometries, which got me thinking, you know, which got me thinking about the way colonisation worked, carving up the countries into these little squares to give away chunks of land. And they're carving up spaces that are curved, you know, they're carving rivers in half, and hills in half. And, you know, just because the lines match up, and they're mapping this grid and starting this, this disconnection, and we do that to the sky, we kind of chart it off in ways that aren't super helpful. I mean, they're helpful if you want to lay claim to it, if you want to, like you say, plant your flag in it, then it's very helpful to map it out that way. But in terms of relationship, in terms of understanding how things connect together, is not super helpful. So how does, I guess, how does the night sky change? When we look at it through Indigenous eyes?
Hilding Neilson
I think if we look at the night sky, and start the traditional Greco Roman, we have all these constellations defined by this International Astronomical Union. So ADA constellations. And this was done on, around the beginning of the 1900s, by a British guy, a German guy and a French guy. So it’s a bad joke already. And when this happened, they kind of, like you said, they carved it up. They used Greek stories, they made up and borrowed some constellations from different parts, particularly for the southern hemisphere, where they completely imported their own belief system into those constellations. But in doing so, they also sanitized a lot of the Greek and Roman stories. You know, there are Greek and Roman stories for Ursa Major, Ursa Minor and Cepheus, and all these different constellations. But when we did this mapping, which was solely for convenience for people with telescopes, who want to do the observing and had to know where to look, it became, turned into nothing. You know, it took all the, it took our connections away from it, from a European,in the European sense. And when that became transplanted over here, you know, the Mi’kmaq, where there's Ursa Major, the Mi’kmaq also have a bear constellation. The Cree have a Bear constellation. Lots of cultures in the world have bear constellations around what we would call the Big Dipper today.
Patty Krawec: Really, we all looked at that and saw a bear.
Hilding Neilson
Many, yeah, to many, it's a bear and hunters.
Patty Krawec: That’s neat.
Hilding Neilson: A bear in a tail, sometimes bear and cubs. There's a lot of commonalities like that. And, but the problem is that this was designed solely to erase Indigenous cultures and Indigenous knowledges. And for me, like the Mi’kmaq, for many Indigenous peoples in what is today Canada, you know, what is in the sky, it's kind of a reflection of the land below; your knowledge is localized. And so if we basically say that constellation is Ursa Major, and your knowledge doesn't count, that's all about removing us, removing us from the land, just as much of that–maybe not as much as actually literally removing us from the land, but it's, it's part of that disconnection. And, and so that erasure is a part of the problem.
And I think that, you know, for my own self, like, I didn't get to grow up within a community, you know, most people, most Mi’kmaq in Newfoundland, we were kind of away from most of the communities. Just where Newfoundland was. And in that respect, you know, how do we kind of understand those constellations? Yeah, I only know one or two Mi’kmaq constellations. I don't think I can name all 88 European constellations, but I can name a lot of them. I could probably name a few of the Cree constellations, thanks to, you know, listening to Wilfred Buck and reading his stories. And so trying to reclaim that knowledge is also kind of important, because that's part of our connection to the land. And you know, what, the constellations I see here, where I'm sitting in Toronto, or Tkaronto, are different than if I go to the far north, or if I go to the southern hemisphere. You know, if I go to Australia, the moon looks completely different. You know, for someone coming from Australia to here, the moon looks like it's upside down, and vice versa. And so the stories change, and our connection and our relations to these, to these special objects change. And that's, that's one of the unfortunate repercussions of the legacy of colonization with respect to the night sky. And then another thing, I think, relates to that, not just the constellations, but it's the light pollution.
Patty Krawec
Oh, yes.
Hilding Neilson:
So, you know, I like to joke, you know, I live in Toronto, if I step out onto my balcony, I might see five stars in the night. One of them might be on CBC TV. You know, they, they're just so few you can see. So you just lose that connection in this void of installedl light?
Patty Krawec: Yes.
Hilding Neilson: And how do we, you know, so I can't see the Milky Way, or what in Mi’kmaq would be a spirit road, which is also a spirit path for many other cultures, you know? So how do you connect to the ancestors, in that respect. all these things..
Patty Krawec
Really, that's actually a really interesting point. Then eventually, I'll let Kerry get a word in edgewise. She's just here smiling and nodding and taking it all in the way she does. Because that's something like when I think about language, right, there's something residential schools took from us. And then if, you know, so if, in your cosmology, you believe that you need to speak the language, or the spirits won't understand what you're saying, how do you show gratitude? They can't hear you. And then if you die, and you don't speak the language, then the spirits won't recognize you. And so removing language in that way, you know, kind of cuts us off.
And then as you were talking about not being able to see the night sky, the, you know, the stars, are our ancestors, and after reading Chanda’s book, they are in a very real sense. You know, really, you know, they really are our ancestors, they really are our relatives, you know, in a very literal kind of way, you know, very material kind of way. But that light pollution, that also cuts us off from them, cuts us off from being able to see them in the way that our, you know, our ancestors walking this earth, saw and understood themselves to exist. You know, kind of beneath the sky in relation in relationship to the sky. So that's, yeah, she asks that in her book, like what would it take for our communities to see, to see the stars. What would it take? Reflecting on her own having to be driven outside of LA for a, you know, two, three hour drive to be able to see. What would it take for our children, you know, for our communities? What changes do we need to make for them to be able to see the night sky? We're going to the National Park in Nova Scotia this summer, and I found out that it's a dark sky preserve. So I had to rearrange our travel plans, so that we will be there during the new moon so well, there's no moon and there'll be no moon in the sky. I've never seen the stars like that. This is going to be amazing.
Hilding Neilson: Yeah.
Patty Krawec: And I'm 55. And I've, and there will be a whole night sky that I've never experienced, that my father had. My father did, from growing up in northern Ontario. Like, it's that, it's that tangible. It’s that recent. For a lot of us. Not for all of us, but for a lot of us.
Hilding Neilson:
Yeah, no, I mean, you know, I haven't been home to visit my family, since before the, these end times, COVID. And, you know, when going home and seeing the night sky and seeing what is essentially billions of lights over your head, it's completely transforming and different and far more reassuring. In my mind, it's like, it feels more like a blanket. And, you know, there's a greater universe, there's relations, you know, Western science did get it right when Carl Sagan said we are made, we are made of star stuff. Just like Cree people, we are star, you know, star people. You know, it's all true. And we have that connection when you're sitting in Toronto and just basking in that eerie orange glow. You know, I think we miss out on so much. And I think it also negatively impacts how we, how we understand things like astronomy, physics. Even from a Western sense, the great, the great astronomers in Europe or even in, you know, China and India. And, you know, if you only think about it from true, purely Indigenous North American sense, you know, everyone had that kind of perspective of the night sky, they could observe it. If they had the telescopes or lenses or instruments, they can see these things, learn to connect, and figure out how they want to connect with it. Whereas today, in Toronto, there's no way to connect to the night sky. Unless I want to use a computer and then log onto a planetarium software. That's sort of what I think that's sort of what our children have to deal with today is, it's easier to see the constellations through a computer software than it is to go outside.
Patty Krawec
Well, and even what they see is filtered right? Like I've got that Stargaze, that star map app on my phone. So because I don't, I can recognize the Big Dipper on a good night. Really I’m not very good at it.
Hilding Neilson: I’m honestly not much better.
Patty Krawec: But you know, I hold up my phone, and I can find it, I can find it that way. And I kind of map out “Oh, that's where this is. And that's where that is.” But they're all…They're not the Cree constellations. You know, they're not…they're not the Igbo, or Yoruba constellations. They're not the Anishinaabe constellations; they're not the way our ancestors would have seen the night sky. They're organized and collated in a way, you know, in a European way. And all those disconnected stories.
Hilding Neilson: 28:04
Our constellations aren't static, either. I mean, sometimes, you know, in Mi’kmaq, we have the story of the bear, and the bear changes throughout the year. You know, in the winter, the bear is on his back, as a spirit, and in the summer, it’s running across the land. Some of the constellations have different meanings at different times of the year, whereas the European constellations are static, kind of locked in forever, or as forever as they want it to be. So, you know, I think we've kind of missed out on a lot of dynamic aspects of these constellations that come from the motions of the Earth around the Sun, or the rotation of the earth. And motions of sky around us. And so so there's a lot, I think, a lot more depth in eliminating Indigenous constellations that we don't see. Relative to the European.
Kerry Goring
I, this conversation is… I'm loving so many points, there's so many things that you guys have touched that I've kind of been like, yeah, right. Um, what comes to mind for me when I think about it, is how, what you mentioned very early on, the idea of building of, of the erasure, you know, the way that when you were talking about that $500 500 Page textbook, that would just, you know, mention maybe two pages of the ancient ways or of Indigenous cultures showing up in those books. And what I find fascinating about that, is that we know that ancient cultures actually are, actually really had mapping and stargazing down to a science, down to a detailed finite way that they were building architecture and buildings to map and and offer that space up. And so it's kind of like a little tiny bit of a pet project, but I really enjoy talking about this from an ancient space.
And what comes to mind for me is even these knowledges that weren't, or Europeans have suppressed or have not allowed, or colonization has suppressed and not allowed us to expand into. Take, for example, the Dogon tribe, which is an African tribe that existed and was kind of, was very much removed from, you know, civilization or from colonialism until the early 1900s. And I'm sure you can explain a lot more about this, but they knew about the constellation or the the star system, Sirius, sorry, they knew about Sirius B, was it? Was it that they found and could map Sirius B before Europeans even knew it existed, and they speak about it from their own ancient traditions, you know, it goes into a whole other realm, which I'm really into. But the idea that they were given the gifts from their, you know, from their gods that came down and told them how to map the star systems. And they had no modern day interactions to be able to have known that it existed, except for from some sort of knowledge that must have been ancient to them. And I think about when we talk about this, this idea of the erasure, how much of the truth of how the history of our planet, the history of our species, understanding the relationships that exists between us, the stars, space and the universe, are being affected, because we have been narrowed down and washed down into–what I love Patty, when you were talking about the idea of a two dimensional space–instead of knowing the curvature of our lands, and knowing the curvature of the skies? How much of us is not being met, or the truth of us is being so lost in those spaces?
Hilding Neilson:
Definitely true, I've heard the story of the Dogon, and to put it in context, Sirius A is one of the brightest stars in the night sky, and Sirius B is what's called a white dwarf star, which is really small, compact, and is essentially the dead remainder of a star that has lost most of its material. And so today, you can only really see Sirius B with the telescope. Now, I don't really know much about the Dogon story, because, as I understand, it came through from French anthropologists, and as soon as I hear the word anthropologist, I tend to tune out. But yeah, that is very possible, and very likely, they did know better, because it might have been a star bright enough to the human eye 10,000 years ago, or 20,000 years ago, or even 100,000 years ago. And there are stories like that that come up all the time.
You know, there are stories of a Paiute story from the West Coast about how the North Star came to be. And it is a son of the chief who's climbing a mountain, loves climbing mountains. And he finds this really hard peak to climb. And he keeps going around in circles, circles, and circles trying to find a way up the mountain but it’s so hard. Eventually he finds an opening and goes through the cave, and climbs away to the top. But unfortunately, when he gets to the top, there was a, there was an avalanche and the cave closed and he's trapped on the mountain. And that story can literally be interpreted as procession of the star. Because our what we call the North Star today wasn't always the North Star. It had to go around and around around. And so we see these long time domains. And that's one of the things that's very valuable in astronomy.
There are stories in Anishinaabe, about heartberry stars, which are red supergiants, that change brightness. And the same very similar stories are seen in different Indigenous Australian nations about these things. And a ton of Indigenous knowledge is carried so much time domain, that, you know, if I think, you know, if Western astronomers just sat down and listened, we would learn a lot about these knowledges and about the history of the universe. Because it was only a couple centuries ago where we were, where the popular dogma was that the astronomy or space was static, and that it was unchanging. But yeah, that wasn't part of, I think, the Indigenous way.
Patty Krawec
What's possible just to come back, you know, to what you had said about you know, when you hear anthropologist, you kind of, because yeah, I mean, they just they get so much wrong because they've got this particular lens that they're trying to jam the story into. So because then like the Anishinaabeg word for North actually means “goes home” and it contains, according to elders, it contains the idea of the glaciers going home, which meant we knew that they weren't always, you know, so during the last ice age, we knew that they had come from the north and gone back, which suggests knowledge of well over, you know, you know, 10-15,000 years because we didn't just know they were there, we knew where they'd come from, we knew that they went back. So it's the same, you know, with the star, maybe they knew it 10,000, 15,000, 20,000 years ago, their language contained the story of this star that is no longer visible, but it was back then. And so when the French anthropologist heard it, they're like, Oh, the stars have always looked like this. Therefore, these people couldn't have figured it out on their own. It must have been aliens telling them about it. Must have been…
Hilding Neilson: Yeah
Patty Krawec: couldn't have known it themselves, and yet, they did. so that's really, but I hadn't put those things together. That's really neat. So yeah, and we're. Yeah, so we had a question in the chat. So if you could, I don't even know what it means. But I'm gonna, I'm gonna let you answer that.
Hilding Neilson: If we look at the Western constellation Orion, on one of the shoulders was a very red star called Betelgeuse. And this is a famous red supergiant that is near the end of its life. And when it finally dies, it's going to explode as a supernova. And it’s going to be so bright, we'll probably see during the day. Like it'd be, it could be about as bright as Venus.
Patty Krawec: Wow
Hilding Neilson: And so this is not the first star that has ever done this, blown up like that. And as opposed to being bright enough and close enough that we could see it. There have been other instances, around the year 1000, there was a star in what was called the Crab Nebula. In terms of Indigenous stories, I've only heard of one. And I can't confirm it, because the times that I was given in the story, don't line up with the astronomical knowledge, but it’s possible.
So I was contacted by someone in Mi’kma’ki telling me about the Mi’kmaq flag. And the Mi’kmaq flag is a white flag with a cross and a star and a moon. And the person was telling me that the stars in the moon reflect a catastrophic, catastrophic event or timeframe, where people were struggling and there was starvation. But it was because there was a bright star in the sky that didn't belong there in a constellation that Europe called Cygnus. And he said, this was about 2000 years ago. I was very curious, because the fact that he took, the person told me the constellation, I'm like, I had to look this up. And there is a remnant of a star that was there, but that's, our best estimates’ that it exploded around 20,000 years ago.
Now, I don't know, everybody tells time different, stories change. So maybe it's related. We know from more recently, there's a very popular one called the Crab Nebula, which is the explosion about 1000 years ago, that appears on historical records from around the world. It has been linked to the city Cahokia. in what is today Mississippi, I believe, which was a large Indigenous city there. I don't know how true that is. But people have tried to link the two events’ timescales. But as seen, seen a lot of Korean and Chinese texts, where they note that there's a new star in the sky. And so, but funnily enough, it never appeared in European texts that I'm aware of. It has happened, and I think we see these, these stories do occur. I'm not really familiar with too many of them. I'm trying to think if there's any, I can't think of any others off the top of my head. But, you know, even just a few years ago, or a few 100 years ago, you know, the heyday of Isaac Newton, and then, you know, that was a big deal for a lot of astronomers, was to find these new stars, supernovae and so like, you know, Kepler and Deacon Brian and these famous white scientists in Europe, spent time and found a few. Not aware of any stories, Indigenous stories that are being linked to these events. I'm sure they're there.
patty krawec 39:16
Yeah, yeah, we just need to listen to the stories and sometimes it's, it's the way we hear them. Right. Like, it's understanding like, remember, we talked with Del Lessin some time ago about they're basically rebuilding the Catawba language. And there was a story about oh, I think it was a rabbit. And it caught, you know, things caught on fire. And it, you know, and it sounded like just kind of this funny story about this rabbit dragging fire through a field. But what it actually contained was agricultural knowledge about agricultural burning. And there was a plant, a sunflower-type plant, that has an edible tuber and required…So the story contains all of this knowledge that they didn't initially recognize because of language loss because of culture loss, it just seemed like an interesting story.
And so, you know, that now they understand is actually something that contains agriculture, you know, important agricultural knowledge, which then makes you go back and look at the other stories. What knowledge is in there, that we're not getting, because we've lost so much contact context? and like you had said about the Greek stories and stuff that are put up into the constellation, even those are stripped. You know, even in the process of colonizing the sky, they still stripped meaning from it, we don't even get good stories, we just get kind of these stripped-down, sanitized picture books. But the real story is there, like it's there. And in our stories, in our cosmology, we just need to…we just need to listen differently, and look at and look at them differently. And some of that is…
how did you start shifting your lens? Because you talked about not not growing up surrounded, you know, by a Mi’kmaq community. How did you start shifting your lens?
Hilding Neilson
It really wasn't that long ago. You know, I'm fully trained in the Western system of astronomy. And I think really hit off when I had that interaction with Wilfred Buck, not seeing any Indigenous Knowledges. And then just diving into some of the great works, you know, the works, Murray Battista, Gregory cathead, all these great Indigenous science experts talking about all these different ideas and ways of thinking, and perspectives. And I always have to step back and be like, Whoa, what am I? Why am I doing? Why am I thinking about this question this way? Why am I thinking about stellar physics this way? Or quantum mechanics that way? You know, all these things are coming together. And you kind of have to question, I mean, it's really only been like the last four or five years where I've really been trying to relearn everything. And for the most part, I feel like I've done a whole other PhD.
patty krawec 42:19
So let's talk about quantum mechanics for a minute, because that's, or maybe longer, because that’ll take a minute just to explain what that is. Because I was reading Lawrence Gross, and he has this book called Anishinaabe Ways of Knowing and Being, and I have to get it out again, it's actually behind me on my bookshelf, because there's a chapter in there where he talks about how in the Anishinaabe worldview and way of thinking–and the Mi’kmaq and Anishinabeg are cousins. You know, we migrated east and I guess made relatives and came back. So we're, you know, we're cousins, but he says that our worldview is much closer to kind of a quantum mechanic way of understanding things. And I've read his chapter. I've read Chanda. It's still just outside my grasp.
Hilding Neilson: Yeah
Kerry Goring
this is just a really, really smart
patty krawec
Two people in the chat are like, Wow, I love quantum mechanics. So yeah, do it!
Hilding Neilson
Yeah, yeah. So quantum mechanics is one of those things I'm always afraid to talk about, because I don't understand quantum mechanics either. I suspect most people in physics and astronomy don't actually understand quantum mechanics, we just do the math and hope for the best.
Patty Krawec
AW says they are a quantum mechanic.
Kerry Goring
And that's interesting, because I had just listened… I'm laughing about that, because I had just listened to a talk with a physicist named Sean. What is Sean last name?
Hilding Neilson: Sean Carroll?
Kerry Goring: Sean Carroll. Yes. And he was talking about that. And I thought it was fascinating that physicists are more concerned with the application, is that a better way of putting it? Versus actually an overall grasp of what they're actually…what actually it is? And that was like mind blowing to me to know that it's, we just assume, there's like this assumption that this works. But nobody's really looked at what makes it work, if that makes…or we're looking at what makes it work, but not why it's there. Does that make sense? Sort of? I think?
Hilding Neilson
I think it makes perfect sense. I think, I think we do focus a lot on the how it works, as opposed to why it’s doing what it's doing. And I think from very much this, astronomers’ perspective, which is quantum mechanics is something you try to do your best to approximate and not actually work with. You just try to work around it. We think so much from this classical Euclidean sense and quantum mechanics is completely counterintuitive to that. Whereas most Indigenous knowledges that are coming to grasp how everything is very much about relative, like how things relate between you and I. How I observe something is very different from how you observe something, and that both truths can be true. Whereas in the West, we think everything has to be an absolute truth, which defies quantum mechanics because quantum mechanics of the particle has some speed and some place, but you can't really tell which is which.
And, and so a lot of these respects, I feel like Indigenous knowledges have an easier time with quantum mechanics, because I think Indigenous knowledge is a little more relaxed about not knowing things; it's okay that there are mysteries. Whereas in the West, having a mystery is the worst thing possible. You know, it, it has to be explainable, has to be reducible. It has to be objective, and, like, I have trouble with quantum mechanics. I listen to Sean Carroll, fairly regularly, you know, I love his, his writing and words, and he signed it as “many worlds theory,” where you get, where if you observe a quantum event, depending on how you observe it, the universe branches. And then like, are we literally increasing the number of universes to help us explain how we don't know something?
And we kind of do that we, when we don't understand something locally, we tend to make things bigger. We don't, we don't understand evolution. So we make evolutionary changes smaller, over a longer time, time periods. It works. We don't understand cosmology? Make the universe older. Or you don't understand why cosmology works? So well, we just create a multiverse. You know, one of the explanations of how we're, that we can live in a universe that seems to work, is that there's lots of universes. And there's just so many of these things like that, I think, you know, my understanding of Indigenous people is, we live in a universe that works, where things are just perfect for us to exist, because we exist, it has to be that way. That's how we're related, that's how our relation with the universe. Whereas if you're in the West, you have the axiom that the universe doesn't care about us, that we, you know, the fact that we exist should just be a fluke. For the fact that we live in a universe that’s just right. Can't, doesn't make sense. And I have colleagues who get really stressed out by this question. And given, given to the point, they try to pull out their hair, which, given that no one’s had a haircut in a long time, might be useful.
But they just struggle with this, and they don't like it. So sometimes they come up with the multiverse theory where we have, where we are in one universe in a bubble of others. And there are other reasons to expect the multiverse. AW Peet is much more of an expert on that than I am, for instance, I'd rather, I'd rather defer to them. But please let AW jump in. There's just so many of these things that I think Indigenous knowledges learn to accept, because it's part of being in relation. And our relationality is what makes, allows for these things to work. I think with quantum mechanics, it’s a little more difficult, because it's, we also accept there's a mystery, but there is fuzzy truth, when there's multiple truths that can can coexist at the same time. Whereas in the West, everything has to be objectively true. I do experiment, you do experiment, you should get the same answer. Yeah. And that objectivity doesn't quite work. Otherwise.
Patty Krawec: Oh, okay.
Hilding Neilson: but that's sort of the best I can come up with, by kind of b.s.ing a lot. You know, but Yeah, cuz I'm really speaking not in my best. Yeah.
Kerry Goring
I love that you, you know, took the attempt, and I think you did beautifully with it. I appreciate you, kind of, tackling it. Because I think what I love about that is it's almost from this layman's space with a plus, because you definitely know more than we do. But what I, when I think about this, and then we put it into the space of our Indigenous, and you know, my Afro-centric cultures, it does come from that acceptance, that mystery is real, and with that, offers the simplicity to be in relation with all of those spaces. And what I mean by “spaces” is the universe, the stars, the earth, how we stand on the earth, the relationship that we have with, you know, the animals on our planes, all of those things have an interconnected sense that is wrapped in the mystery. And so, when we, like, I totally believe in the scientific, scientific method and I, you know, I understand that being a space that we have as a template to work from, but I do sometimes think that that part of it, the idea of the acceptance, that some of it is still to be revealed. And being okay in that is lacking in the way that we exist. And so what happens with that is that it's exactly that idea of disregarding, you know, or just pretending that that mystery isn't valuable.
Patty Krawec
I had a, I remember when I was in science in grade nine, our science teacher, because it was the only year that I had to take science. We had a teacher who had, we were going over the criteria for life. And I think there's six, I don't remember what they are. Anyway, so we had, we had, there were six criteria for life. And he asked us, you know, you know, he's kind of running us through it, do plants meet it? does this person meet it? Does this, the rocks meet the criteria? And you know, we kind of go through it, And we're like, Nope, they don't. And he asked us again, are you sure? And we're like, oh, is this a trick question? You know, and so we went through them again, and we're like, nope, rocks are not alive. They don't meet the criteria. And he says, Well, what if they just do this too slow? And we can't measure it? What if they do this, and you know, we just don't have the capacity to see it? Like, he wasn't trying to tell us that rocks were alive. He was trying to tell us to keep those questions open. That what we, because he says science is one long chain of “we thought we knew that and we turned out to be wrong.” So maybe our criteria is wrong. And we always need to be open, you know, to thinking and questioning.
And he's the only science teacher that I came across was like that. Because I think like you said, they have this idea that there's fixed knowledge. And I wonder, I wonder if some of that comes down to European thinkers emerging in a place where everybody had the same basic cosmology, right? Like, the, all three Abrahamic religions existed. And you know, in Europe, the Jews and the Muslims were not treated very well. But they had the same fundamental cosmology, the same creation story, the same flood narrative. Whereas here, we're all bumping up against each other with our trading relationships and our treaties and stuff. And we don't have the same cosmologies. You know, the Anishinaabeg and the Haudenosaunee lived, you know, very close to each other in lots of spaces. And we have some similarities, but some significant differences in terms of how we understand the world. And the Anishinaabeg and the Lakota are also kind of right up against each other. And we have significantly different cosmologies in terms of…like, there's a lot of similarities about how we see the world, but our cosmology, like our religions, you know, to use that word, are very different. And yet we learned to accept that it was not a big deal.
So I kind of wonder if some of that, because now I'm reading, a pastor friend of mine, has recommended this book, shoot, what's it called? Hebrew, The Hebrew Bible and Environmental Ethics. And she's writing all about how the Bible is full of language about the world being alive, of trees, of the personhood of creation, and a very Indigenous, like, what I would think of as a very Anishinaabeg way of thinking of, the trees are people, the stars are people, the rivers are people, that this stuff is woven through. Because she says that when we talk about it, like it's a metaphor, we're not… like, you know, “the trees clap with joy.” And we're not saying that the trees have hands, but we're saying that they're expressing joy, that when the Hebrew people came back to the land, the land was happy, that the land had the capacity to care. And that's been completely stripped, like that's not present anywhere in any Christian theology that I have heard. So that's been completely stripped from the text and this is kind of my quest right now, about how these things got stripped. Because it got stripped from the way we understand the sky so…I don't even remember where I was going with that.
Kerry Goring
I’m just loving it though.
patty krawec
They had created this kind of monolithic belief system that didn't allow for that kind of relationality whereas here on Turtle Island, or whatever we want to call it, we were constantly bumping up against other ways of thinking about things and had…we're just okay with it. Like that's just the Lakota are weird, but that's who they are.
Kerry Goring
It's okay to be like that, you know, that sense of acceptance, right? It's that sense of being in acceptance for all of it that I think is, is what you're bringing front and center. And just even taking in what you're saying there, Patty, I think it's quite brilliant, really interesting book, that's got to go down in the check of that one.
Hilding Neilson
That me too, that sounds very…very interesting.
Kerry Goring
That's very interesting. Um, however, what, what also comes to me when I think about that, is this sense that we have here that with that stripping, it was, it was what afforded this whole system, the colonial space that we exist in, to be even created. And this disconnection that we are experiencing with the Earth and the land, I just want my, my breath was just really heavy earlier today, because I was reading an article, I think it was in USA Today. And they were talking about, they want to move from saying climate change into using the terminology climate emergency. Because of the carbon that's in the earth, in the atmosphere, we're moving in major, major ways that is getting scary. They know that the Antarctic, the sheets, the ice sheets in the Antarctic, are going to hit the sea very soon. And it's just a really scary dynamic. And personally, I have family, you know, in St. Vincent right now, where there is a, the volcano is going off, and I'm getting live, you know, real live. You know, just talking to my people's real live experience of what that kind of space is. And so when I think about how we have existed and disconnected, the answers for me are coming from when we are doing and having conversations like this, of course, but really deep diving into this exploration of how we relate. How do we come back? How do we figure out those pieces that have been taken out and put back in? So you know, when I hear that you're doing this work, Hilding, that, to me is like, it's invaluable. How do we create this space now?
Hilding Neilson
Yeah, this is very interesting. Without the discussion, last semester was popped my mind is Mars. So NASA just .. this most recent mission Mars called Perseverance, you know, a little toy car going around the surface of Mars, going out of the first helicopter launch on Mars. And there are lots of robots on Mars, and maybe in 20 years, there will be people. And hopefully, those people will not be led by Elon Musk. But, you know, but it does raise a lot of questions in the meantime, which is, how alive is Mars? We don't know of anything alive on Mars within our current definition. We're pretty sure nothing comes above the surface. We haven't really explored the subsurface of Mars. There could be life. Maybe single, probably single single cell life. Life is there, probably there. And even if it isn't, do we have rights to impact that? What are the rights of Mars? I mean, you know, there's a great comic. That's the earth in a hospital bed. And another planet is a doctor saying, “Oops, you have humans?” Do we really have a right to infect Mars with more humans? Or do we have that same right to the moon? How do we do that? How do we talk about coloni-? You know? Because we do, we literally talk about Mars as colonization.
Patty Krawec:Yes
Hilding Neilson: We have movies of Matt Damon on Mars and we send billions of dollars rescuing rescuing a dumb white dude. Yeah, and fully full disclosure. I'm also a dumb white dude. So you know, how do we talk about Mars? From an Anishinaabeg perspective? What would an Anishinabeg, what would the Haudenosaunee, what would a Mi’kmaq or Inuit mission to Mars look like? How do we engage and interact with Mars? You know, do we? What gifts do you offer Mars? If we visit, what are we allowed to take away from Mars? And we need, really need to have that conversation because right now the conversation is basically a Western novel. And we, the word frontier gets used a lot. Or colonizing, you know, they've sort of avoided colonization for the word exploration. But it's pretty much a dog whistle when it's basically going to be Elon Musk, or another rich dude sending people there to do space mining. Because, you know, capitalism. And how we face these things, I think very much because in this play of environmental ethics, as you mentioned, how we relate, how we want to be intentionally related with Mars, because I mean, humans, if the human mission to Mars has the same kind of history as on Earth, and last century of climate change, we're probably not going to leave it, do anything good on Mars.
Patty Krawec
We're not going to leave better than we found it.
Hilding Neilson
No. And I mean, there are people who talk about dropping asteroids on Mars with the sole purpose of heating it up, blowing it up and creating an atmosphere, so that we can terraform it. I mean, that's sort of what people really dream about is terraforming Mars. And I think we can look around North America and various other parts of the world and see terraforming from, you know, when Europeans killed the bison and introduced wheat and cattle to the prairie, or how we terraform north, at different parts of the world.
Doesn't quite work as well as when we look at how various Indigenous communities sort of lived in concerts, where you know, Haudenosaunee, and their farming practices, pastoral farming out east, you know, the way we treat hunts, and all these things. And so we need to have a, we definitely need to have this space open for more Indigenous, whether it's Indigenous from North America, Afro-Indigenous, Australian Indigenous, specific, everywhere in this conversation. And to be honest, if I'm going to fly on a rocket from the Earth to Mars, over 200 days, the person I probably want to ask about is someone who can actually navigate the Pacific using nothing but their hand, as opposed to say NASA who, sent Matt Damon to Mars. There's so much expertise in Indigenous communities for doing these things that we don't even think about. At least in the Western, from NASA or the Canadian Space Agency, necessarily. And so we should be having this conversation. And we should be having that we really need that space, if this is what we want to do. If not, if we not we're basically going to leave space exploration and going to the moon and basically passing NASA satellites to people like Elon Musk. And if it's not obvious, I kind of really dislike that guy.
patty krawec
Well, just like when we were talking about the sky
Kerry Goring: How did we guess?
Patty Krawec: And, you know, it's not just cluttered from light below. Thanks to Elon Musk, it's cluttered from, it's now cluttered, you know, from things he's putting up there. And, you know, it's causing problems and he doesn't care because that's not, that's not his, that's not the frame that he thinks within.
Hilding Neilson
If light pollution erases our stories, those satellites are rewriting them.
Patty Krawec: Yes.
Hilding Neilson: And why does he get to do that?
Kerry Goring
Love that. And I think that is so powerful. I never, like, I've had these thoughts. So hearing you speak it and really, you know, bringing that into the light, love that. I'm really relating, it resonates deeply because I agree with you. And for me, the other piece to that is this idea that we discard the earth, this idea that we have raped her, you know, The Earth has been raped and pillaged very much like, guess what, you know, every colonial story that we know. And now we're about to just move on. And so it speaks to me about this push in the way that we are human. And how we are showing up in our humanness. So I, and without the interjection, without that conversation being had, and I don't know if it's happening en mass yet, but without those conversations, we are destined to repeat it
Hilding Neilson
Absolutely, I mean, you know, if Amazon, Jeff Bezos , if these people are driving the conversation, you know, they're just, they're just the mercantile colonialists. There's no difference in Elon Musk and Samuel de Champlain. And the worst part about Samuel de Champlain, is he had his life saved by Indigenous people cuz he went .. and be cured of scurvy and he just thanked God, as opposed to the, you know, people?
Patty Krawec: Yeah.
Hilding Neilson: And this is what we’re facing again. Yeah, we're facing this again. It’s this, the same story, just being retold on a whole new scale. And people are, conversations are starting to be had. I think there’re developments in terms of international law with things called Artemis Accords, which are related primarily to going to the moon and lunar exploration. But the biggest thing there is about preserving sites on the moon of astronomical significance or human significance. So, you know, where they planted the flag on the moon, that might be a national park, or lunar National Park. But that doesn't stop anybody from moving up there. And, you know, drawing a smiley face on the face of the moon.
patty krawec
And national parks…
Kerry Goring
What, what does that even mean?
patty krawec 1:05:58
Right, because they create this idea of wilderness and nature that takes people out of it. And it preserves it, like, for what? You know, so it's just, why are we like this? Why are we like this? where to think about what kinds of humans. I just wrote an essay for Rampant Magazine, where we're like, what kind of people do we want to be? What kind of ancestors, you know? As we get thinking about, you know, thinking about the stars, you know, looking up at the stars, and knowing that those are our ancestors and knowing that we're going to be ancestors, we're going to be star stuff, you know. So what kind of ancestors do we want to be to the worlds that come after us? Because we're, you know, worlds came before us, worlds will come after us, what kind of ancestors do we want to be? What do we want to leave? What kind of footsteps do we want to leave? And stories and possibilities? And we got to think about that stuff. As opposed to? Well, they are, they are thinking about that kind of stuff. They're just not coming to the same conclusions that we would want them to.
Kerry Goring
What big? How big is that? Like? What we're talking about? I'm really interested in those, in the conversations. How big is that movement? Is it? Is it growing? Like, is there an understanding that, wait a minute, we're creating the possibility of lunar parks on the moon like that, that makes me…I'm laughing, but I'm horrified all in the same breath. Are those conversations coming up in real ways, like in “Wait a minute. Hello, hello, hello,” type thoughts? Because we are hearing more about the explorations happening. And, and do we have somebody tempering it? Is that something?
Hilding Neilson
I don't think we really have a very strong conversation around space ethics. It's growing, largely because that's the only direction it can possibly go. It's harder to have fewer, fewer than zero people talking about it. So there's things that are starting to happen slowly in the astronomy community, but it's very limited. I think astronomy, my colleagues really kind of learned something about this from Elon Musk, when he put up the satellites and it interfered with telescopes on our, you know, because when the satellites cross upon the telescope, you just got all these streaks on your images. And they, and there were people who freaked out and accused Elon Musk of colonization, and not consulting and all this other language that we were ignoring from Native Hawaiians talking about the 30 meter telescope on Mauna Kea. And this is a project in Hawai’i to build a very big telescope on top of the mountain, where many Native Hawaiians said, “No, we're good.” And many of my colleagues were turned, kind of, were very against the Hawaiian response, using phrases like “science versus religion,” “progress versus history.” And then they used the same language as many of the Indigenous peoples were using to talk about Elon Musk. And I'm not sure they, some of them, I don't think quite got that hypocrisy. But I think a lot of people started to see that there has to be a greater discussion of voice because no matter, no matter what's happening, you know, at some point, your voice is not, might not be the one that gets heard. And then you pay the price. And so I think some of this is becoming more and more important, you know, particularly as space becomes the playground for the very, very ridiculously, uber rich.
Patty Krawec
Well, this has been super interesting.
I’m super interested in, you know, get in, getting more into, kind of, what quantum mechanics… just because, like what you had said about the relationality of it, and how that, you know, and how that has implications for how we understand how we work within the world, and how we relate to things. So I'm really interested in kind of going, going in that direction. I don't know, man, I read this physics book. And it was super interesting. And nobody saw that coming.
Kerry Goring 1:11:45
Did you watch Ant Man? Have you watched Ant Man?
Patty Krawec 1:11:49
No! It’s probably one of the few MC films that I haven't watched
Kerry Goring 1:11:53
Watch Ant Man. It will, it's a very, it was what? Okay, not really, but a little bit of what really sparked my interest in wanting to know more about quantum physics, was Ant Man. So that's also, maybe that's something we can all chat about too the next time you’re on.
Patty Lrawec 1:12:13
Well, I’ll watch Ant Man
Hilding Neilson
Also, go back and rewatch End Game. All the time travel stuff is basically Sean Carroll's interpretation of quantum mechanics.
patty krawec
Really. Okay that I have seen, that I have seen. Okay, AW’s putting Ant Man on their watch list.
Hilding Neilson
It’s a good heist movie.
Kerry Goring
It was a great movie. It's one of my favorites for this, from that world so…thank you, Hilding!
Thank you, Hilding! I appreciate you man. This was a great talk. And also please let's, let's do this again. Got my mind working. Definitely got my mind working. And I appreciate you.
patty krawec
Thank you so much.
Hilding Neilson: Thank you!
Patty Krawec: It's super interesting. Alright, bye bye
Hilding Neilson: Take care.
You can find more about Hilding and his work on his website
And thankyou to Nick for the transcription!!
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