Introduction to Indigenous Knowledge : Ep 8 of Crash Course Native American History

Long ago, if you knew how to listen, you could hear the trees speaking. The Podawatami tells stories about this with trees gathering together, making plans.

Stories where the trees decide how to grow, how many seeds to produce, how to survive. And in recent years, non-native botnists have picked up on the same thing. Trees really are communicating.

They share resources and information through chemicals in the air and networks underground.

So, how did native peoples thousands of years ago figure out something that western scientists are only just discovering? Hi, I'm Jim and this is Crash Course Native American History.

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Science is a useful tool for understanding the world. It's helped us figure out really complex ideas like particle physics and evolution and microwave popcorn. And native people have made plenty of scientific discoveries, yet we're often perceived as anti-science.

So, what gives? Turns out what we typically consider science today isn't the only way to arrive at accurate information. There are a variety of ways of knowing or means through which people discover knowledge. And many Native American ways of knowing are rooted in observing the earth and living in close relationship to it since time immemorial. To paraphrase Pawatami writer and botnist Dr. Robin Wall Kimmeer.

We tend to think of science as being neutral and objective where the conclusions drawn are influenced by the people doing the concluding. But years ago,

Western scientists assumed plants didn't communicate because they don't do so in the ways that look like animal communication.

And later, when scientists revisited that question with the understanding that communication could look really different from what they'd expect, bingo, they started to find compelling evidence, which just goes to show that all knowledge is influenced by the perspectives we humans bring to it. And Native American cultures,