Some reflections from artist Helen Yung:

Last month, Dr. Melanie Goodchild, founder of the new Indigenous Knowledge Lab at Agoma University, invited the Laboratory for Artistic Intelligence to participate in a conference organized by the Canadian Association of Science Centres. There I met Natasha Donahue, a Métis mother from amiskwaciy-wâskahikan (Beaver Hills House; Edmonton), and Manager of Indigenous Initiatives at TELUS World of Science in Edmonton. 

In a panel about Indigenous astronomy, Natasha spoke beautifully about the ongoing challenge of talking about Indigenous science when the act of speaking to it often times risks decontextualizing, stripping away its cultural components which are essential to truly understanding it. 

Many years ago, I went to Australia to participate in a symposium and a week-long workshop. I walked away thinking, BYOC. Bring Your Own Context. Our practices are situationist, or mine is. My work, my thinking, has developed in a local culture, and when it’s stripped of this, presented out of context, how do you yourself see it then? How do you need to describe it differently, or allow it to mean different things in its new context, in a different situation? Or how do you bring your own context, so that you and your work is understood as you intend? 

Individually, I think it’s a flexible choice. Sometimes it’s nice to see your work have a life of its own. So long as people see value in a work, does it matter if it’s with the same eyes that helped you create it? (Canadian artists, in particular, have a long history of having to find success elsewhere before they are celebrated at home in Canada.) 

But with cultural practices, when the work you are sharing is rooted in community and collective beliefs, context matters. When practices are stripped of their socio-cultural relatedness, it removes that which gives these practices their potency, and innovative and teaching capacities.

I talked to Natasha afterwards and suggested that perhaps the history of Traditional Chinese Medicine’s encounter with the West has something to offer Indigenous Science. 

Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) is one of the most readily recognized alternative forms of therapeutic medicine. Western science does not embrace all of TCM but acknowledges aspects of TCM (e.g. acupuncture) achieves credible results that go beyond what “science” can fully explain. 

As a surgeon said to me once, “I don’t know what it is, but when I was in an intern I worked in Taiwan and watched a surgery performed without anesthesia, relying instead on acupuncture. I don’t know how it works but something obviously worked.”  

A 5,000 year-old knowledge system, TCM has maintained the integrity of its own medical theories—the practice is still rooted in ancient Chinese views and a Taoist belief in harmony and balance—even while engaging vigorously with Western science. For probably over a century now, TCM has been practiced in the East and West alongside Western medicine, and is continuously studied and evaluated using randomized control trials (RCTs), the gold standard in developing experimental evidence. 

Indigenous Science doesn’t need to follow the same path. At the Laboratory for Artistic Intelligence, our co-inquiry with astronomers have not been about establishing “proof,” but to overturn convention and ask better and more interesting questions. Our findings so far tell us that the cosmologies, metaphysics and medicine of other cultures can heal, improve and advance Western science. 

We started the Astronomical Imagination project asking what happens when we bring scientific and artistic inquiry together. 

Connecting East Asian, South Asian, and Indigenous knowledge from across Turtle Island with Western science is what is happening for us. In the next stage of this exploratory work, we will bring together people from the four directions, East-South-West-North, and across astronomy, physics, biology, technology and medicine, to talk and co-practice—to see, experience, experiment and imagine together.     

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(Image at the top of this post is of Huang Di Nei Jing, the classical medical text of Traditional Chinese Medicine. Photo from UNESCO.)