Native Science: Interconnection, Local Knowledge, & Memory

Native American, science

By Christy Tidwell

November is National Native American Heritage Month, a chance to acknowledge the history and living culture of Native American peoples. As a science, technology, and society program, this seems a good opportunity to discuss Native science, also called Indigenous science or Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK). As the varied names for this indicate, it’s not one monolithic entity but incorporates ideas from many perspectives. It is both traditional, building on Native peoples’ long histories of learning about and sharing knowledge, and contemporary, an ongoing part of living in and with the world.

Photo by Ponciana via Pixabay

What is Native Science?

Gregory Cajete (Santa Clara Pueblo) coined the term, and he describes Native science as “a metaphor for a wide range of tribal processes of perceiving, thinking, acting, and coming to know that have evolved through human experiences with the natural world.” Cajete says, “Native science is born of a lived and storied participation with the natural landscape. It is the collective heritage of human experience with the natural world” (2). In other words, Native science combines human and nonhuman and describes what humans know by relating to, communicating with, and experiencing the world. It is not a science based on laboratory experiments or anonymous review.

This contrasts with Western ideas of science by emphasizing connection rather than separation, relationships rather than objective distance. Native science sees people as part of the world they’re learning about, not outside it, and therefore people cannot be removed from scientific work. If you’ve been trained to think of science as necessarily objective and tainted by any hint of subjectivity or bias, this may sound unscientific. However, as Leila McNeill points out in a Lady Science interview, “It really just means that it’s grounded in this specific experience of this specific group of people in this specific place, which can actually give us better results than if we were looking at something that is looking at large, broad questions that they’re trying to apply to everything that just kind of obscures the particular.”

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Agrarian Protest: Spring 2022 Course

Classes

by Bryce Tellmann

“Agrarian” is a loaded term. Literature scholar M. Thomas Inge notes that it is most commonly associated with independence and self-sufficiency, as well as long-running tensions between tradition and industry, community, and agriculture as a “positive spiritual good” (xiv). Americans are likely to associate it with Thomas Jefferson’s oft-quoted line from Notes on the State of Virginia: “Those who labor in the earth are the chosen people of God, if ever he had a chosen people, whose breasts he has made his peculiar deposit for substantial and genuine virtue.”

But the history of agrarianism isn’t all community and virtue. From the Whiskey Rebellion of the 1790s to the Tractorcades of the 1970s, farmers in the United States have drawn on agrarian rhetoric to protest commodity prices, foreclosures, corporate control, and more. This line of protest is seen around the world as well, from multiple movements for migrant worker rights to the ongoing farmer protests in India.

Black and white cartoon drawing of a man labeled farmer punching a man labeled politician while saying, "I'm a pacifist am I?"
Image courtesy of the North Dakota Historical Society

In Spring 2022, I am teaching a topics class on Agrarian Protest (ENGL 392) that will examine a broad swath of these protests. Since I’m a rhetorician, we’ll pay particular attention to the communicative and persuasive discourse of these movements, through examination of both primary and secondary sources. Ultimately, I expect that students will be surprised by the sheer diversity of voices in the last century-and-a-half of agrarian protest. It is easy to assume that farmers’ political interests are simple, unified, and consistent across time. The truth is far more complex and – dare I say – radical.

So in the (apocryphal) words of 1880s reformer Mary Elizabeth Lease, “it’s time to raise less corn, and more hell!”

Poster advertising the course. ENGL 392: Agrarian Protest, Spring 2022, Tuesday/Thursday 12:30-1:45. Features the text: Time to raise less corn and more hell.

Environmental Literature & Culture: Spring 2022 Course

Classes

By Christy Tidwell

What is nature? What do you imagine when you think of nature? What are the qualities of nature (better yet, of Nature with a capital N)? 

Pause now and think about that for a minute. 

Seriously. 

What is the image of Nature you hold in your mind? Picture it.

Photo by James Wheeler on Pexels.com

Did you imagine something like that? Maybe not that exact image, but something similar? If so, consider this response more fully. What are the qualities of this representation of nature? It’s beautiful. It has lots of elements of the natural world (I know, that seems circular, but stick with me), like trees, mountains, a lake. It’s pure and untouched. It’s wild. Notably, there are no humans in this image. 

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Welcome to the SuperHuman Sports League

The Double-Edged Sword

By Olivia Burgess
The Double-Edged Sword

What if athletes could voluntarily replace their limbs with prosthetics to make them faster and stronger?

This question was raised by Otutoa Afu, an STS major in my Intro to STS course. The class has been discussing what it means to be human in a world where technology can radically transform both the human body and the human experience. Some of these advancements have been tremendously positive, such as the blade runner prosthetic that allows amputees to compete in athletic events, but Otutoa’s question highlights the potential complexities that may arise if technological enhancements become more widespread.

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STS Faculty Profile: Matthew Whitehead

STS Faculty Profile

Matthew Whitehead is the Director of the Apex Gallery and a Lecturer who teaches Art and Art History classes in the Humanities department.

What’s your area of expertise? What do you primarily research and/or teach? And what drew you to this field?

I am an artist. I appropriate images and visual experiences from my surroundings and use them as inspiration for abstractions, mostly drawings, paintings, and collages. I work intuitively, paying close attention to composition and craft. My interest in the arts and the effect it has had on my life pushed me to pursue a career in education. I have taught painting, drawing, photography, illustration, design, graphic design, ceramics, stained glass, sculpture, art history, and foundational arts to students of all ages.

The arts have always been an important part of my life. I come from a family of artists and creatives. On my mother’s side, my grandfather was a renowned potter, painter, and art professor, and my grandmother was a social worker who now spends her time making traditional braided rugs and hand stitching quilts. My mother is a costume designer and art educator by trade but is also an actress and choir singer. My uncle is a potter, and my aunts are also artists of one kind or another. My grandmother on my Dad’s side was a trained aerial performer and painter. My dad was an actor, then a lawyer, and now he’s back to acting again. Given our family background, my siblings and I had no choice but to go into creative fields. My oldest brother is an actor, director, producer, filmmaker, and a professor of acting while my sister is an artist and landscape architect. Becoming an artist always felt like a natural fit.

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Spooky Science at the Movies!: Week 5

Film, horror

By Christy Tidwell

This weekend is Halloween! To celebrate, I have two final movie recommendations to share. One is an all-time favorite of mine and probably no surprise to those who know me. The other is one of the scarier recent movies I’ve seen. Their premises are quite different, but both have science and technology at their core.

Classic Movie #5: Jurassic Park

Of course it’s Jurassic Park! Jurassic Park (1993, directed by Steven Spielberg) is an adventure movie featuring dinosaurs, a horror movie with terrifying monster attacks, and a science fiction movie that asks, “What if we could bring a creature back from extinction?” Jurassic Park is such a well-known part of US popular culture that it is a common reference point in discussions of scientific overreach and a familiar critique of the role of money in scientific research. “Spared no expense,” John Hammond (Richard Attenborough) repeats throughout – but the project still fails.

Jurassic Park is a reworking of Frankenstein with dinosaurs, and it is one of the best movies out there for raising important questions about scientific ethics while also being extraordinarily entertaining. If you haven’t seen it, now is the time! If you have already seen it, well, it’s always a good time to watch Jurassic Park again.

Official trailer for Jurassic Park (1993)

Contemporary Movie #5: Host

As Laura Kremmel noted in her recent post “High-Tech Spirits and Ghost Tours,” Host (2020, dir. Rob Savage) has been named as the scariest horror movie. It’s short (only 57 minutes!) and fun, but it definitely gets your heart pounding in that short running time. Host spends less time raising big issues about science than Jurassic Park and focuses more on scaring the audience, but the way it achieves its scares is worth noting from an STS perspective. Those scares are only possible through the technology of Zoom, and the audience’s ability to be scared by spirits via technology is a) definitely not new (as Laura Kremmel points out) and b) perhaps an indication of how mysterious the inner workings of these technologies are to most of us.

Official trailer for Host (2020)

Collected Movie Lists

This is the final entry in the series of STS-related horror movies for this season, so I’ll end by combining all the movies recommended and linking to the earlier posts.

Classic movies:

  1. Frankenstein (1931)
  2. Godzilla (1954)
  3. Phase IV (1974)
  4. The Fly (1986)
  5. Jurassic Park (1993)

Contemporary movies:

  1. Saint Maud (2019)
  2. Crawl (2019)
  3. In the Earth (2020)
  4. Annihilation (2018)
  5. Host (2020)

Happy Halloween, and happy viewing!

High-Tech Spirits and Ghost Tours

Events, history, horror

By Laura Kremmel

The 2020 film Host (dir. Rob Savage) was recently crowned the scariest horror movie according to a scientific study that measured the heart rates of 250 viewers watching 40 different films. As someone who watches a lot of horror and is usually not affected by it, I had to turn on all the lights in my house after watching it alone on a tablet. Why is it so scary? It’s all in the technology.

Host (2020)

The film is about a séance held by five friends and a medium, all in different locations and connected to each other not only through the medium leading them or their shared concentration but also through Zoom, a program we’ve all come to rely on to make us feel connected to each other. As the trailer asks, what if it connects us with something else?

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Spooky Science at the Movies!: Week 4

Film, horror

By Christy Tidwell

There’s just a week and a half left before Halloween, but there’s still time for more spooky movies! This week’s classic and contemporary movie recommendations prominently feature scientists and scientific research, highlighting the risks of scientific experimentation and exploration (especially when done outside the bounds of formal research contexts) as well as the limits of scientific knowledge.

Classic Movie #4: The Fly

David Cronenberg’s 1986 remake of The Fly is a classic of body horror. Its central premise is that a human (Seth Brundle, played by Jeff Goldblum) merges with a fly and becomes a horrifying human-fly mutant: Brundlefly. This transformation emphasizes bodily mutation through both the intimate horror of things like losing fingernails (as gruesomely shown in the bathroom scene) and the ultimate form of Brundlefly, so dramatically changed that it no longer has a recognizably human face.

The Fly is also another horror film about mad science (following in the footsteps of Frankenstein, recommended during Week 1). It’s not just that a human merges with a fly, after all, but that a scientist conducts experiments on himself that go very wrong. The film dramatizes what can happen when scientists abandon the norms and regulations of scientific practice. If you can’t get funding through traditional means, how far are you willing to go for your research? Are you willing to experiment on yourself? Although historically there have been quite a few scientists willing to do this, The Fly serves as a cautionary tale indicating that this will not always work out. Some renegade scientists might get to be Humphry Davy (who experimented with nitrous oxide and discovered its use as an anesthetic – without killing himself!), but others are Seth Brundle/Brundlefly.

Poster for The Fly (1986)

Contemporary Movie #4: Annihilation

Alex Garland’s Annihilation (2018, an adaptation of Jeff VanderMeer’s 2014 novel of the same name) also follows a scientist, a biologist (Natalie Portman). She is on an expedition with an anthropologist, a psychologist, a surveyor, and a linguist (all women) into a mysterious environmental disaster zone known as the Shimmer. The Shimmer doesn’t follow the familiar rules of nature and ever stranger things happen to and around the group of explorers. Without giving too much away (since the movie is still relatively recent), I can say that Annihilation centers both scientific exploration and environmental issues, which connects it nicely to the STS degree.

Where The Fly endorses traditional science by showing the awful consequences of going outside its boundaries, Annihilation takes a different approach, illustrating the limits of scientific knowledge. The team of women in Annihilation are overwhelmed by the world within the Shimmer, ultimately unable to study it objectively and changed by it instead. In both films, scientists are unable to remain completely separate from what they study.

Trailer for Annihilation (2018)

For more recommendations, check out earlier entries in this series: Week 1, Week 2, and Week 3!

Ada Lovelace: Victorian Computer Programmer

Events

On Tuesday, October 19, from 6-7 pm (Mountain time), Erica Haugtvedt (Assistant Professor of Humanities) and Duana Abata (Professor of Mechanical Engineering) will present as part of the STEAM Café series. This free presentation will take place at Hay Camp Brewing Company in downtown Rapid City (601 Kansas City St.) and will also be available to watch via livestream on Zoom. The talk will also be posted to the SD Mines YouTube channel and the SD Mines Facebook page after the event.

Long before today’s pervasive digital computers, the first computer programmer was arguably Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace (daughter of the famous poet Lord Byron). An exceptional mathematician, she captured the essence of Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine, which was conceptualized by Babbage but was not constructed in his lifetime. In 1843, she wrote an algorithm to accompany Babbage’s Engine. Her contribution to calculate Bernoulli numbers with the Analytical Engine has since been successfully translated, with minor changes, to the C++ programming language. Dr. Erica Haugtvedt and Dr. Duane Abata will discuss how this extraordinary Victorian woman achieved her insights through translating between languages, people, disciplines, and between the imaginary and the real.

Watercolor portrait of Ada Lovelace. She is standing with her body turned away from the viewer but with her face turned toward us.
Watercolor portrait of Ada Lovelace by Alfred Edward Chalon (ca. 1838)

Spooky Science at the Movies!: Week 3

Environment, Film, horror

By Christy Tidwell

This week’s recommendations stick with the emphasis on ecohorror introduced last week. Instead of presenting monsters like Godzilla or crocodiles, though, these two films find both wonder and horror in exploring the agency of the nonhuman world. How do other species communicate? How do they act upon us and shape our actions?

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