That naivety about the purity or obvious superiority of Western scientific culture exhibits a complex and ambivalent relationship with Indigenous culture and ways of knowing. Whereas Indigenous knowledge was once dismissed out of hand as unscientific, its ecological and cultural value has been recognized in ways that remain deeply problematic for the sovereignty and survival of those to whom that knowledge belongs.
One vivid contemporary example is the Human Genome Diversity Project (HGDP), which endeavors to collect genetic material of “the “vanishing,” “rapidly disappearing” “isolates of Historic Interest” Whitt, Laurelyn. Science, colonialism, and indigenous peoples: The cultural politics of law and knowledge. Cambridge University Press, 2009: 155 To the bafflement of HDGP project leaders, many potential Indigenous subjects of this study have resisted participation. In ways reminiscent of worries surrounding the One Tree Hill Memorial, one source of resistance is the fear that documenting, archiving, and thus memorializing Indigenous genetic data makes it easier to license their erasure—for if science proper, in its “pure” pursuit of knowledge, collects samples of whatever information it finds of interest, memorializing them in museums or bioengineering projects, then what need does science have of “wild” specimens Whitt, Laurelyn. Science, colonialism, and indigenous peoples: The cultural politics of law and knowledge. Cambridge University Press, 2009: 155?
A second source of resistance, in the words of one Maori voice, Ahora Mead, is the sense that genes (irantangata) are imbued with ancestral “life spirit” that is a bequest to the Indigenous families and nations to whom they belong and may not be owned or manipulated by anyone Whitt, Laurelyn. Science, colonialism, and indigenous peoples: The cultural politics of law and knowledge. Cambridge University Press, 2009: 142 Insofar as methodological conventions of Western science exclude any context of taking such claims seriously, the alleged neutrality, on the one hand, or obviously unquestionable desirability, on the other hand, of scientific endeavor doesn’t hold water. And insofar as the kinds of knowledge of which Mead speaks is not straightforwardly separable from the more general ecological knowledge and values that has recently garnered so much scientific and popular interest, the necessity of sincere and rigorous intercultural negotiation for which the obelisk at One Tree Hill Memorial stands as a monument is all the more urgent. Whitt, Laurelyn. Science, colonialism, and indigenous peoples: The cultural politics of law and knowledge. Cambridge University Press, 2009.