Celebrating Native American Heritage Month with Cynthia-Lou Coleman

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Celebrating Native American Heritage Month with Cynthia-Lou Coleman

Feature Story| November 25, 2024

Cynthia-Lou Coleman

Coleman has served as a jury member on the National Academies Eric and Wendy Schmidt Awards for Excellence in Science Communications selection committee for the last three years. Her 2020 book, Environmental Clashes on Native American Land, received praise in the journals Native American and Indigenous Studies and Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly.

In celebration of Native American Heritage Month, we asked her about her background in science communication and bridging multiple knowledge systems.

Coleman: I was very, very lucky to receive full scholarships to work on graduate degrees in communication at Cornell and the University of Wisconsin, and our tribe - the Osage Nation - also offered financial support. After beginning my studies, I asked my Aunt Julia how to reciprocate the tribe's generosity, she just smiled and said, "You will know when the time comes." There was no lightning bolt, no epiphany: just the confidence of family members that I would find my own path. Advanced study in communication and media made sense in light of the fact that I spent my career thus far as a writer, and also as a journalist, photographer, editor, art director, event planner, and media consultant before attending grad school.

My favorite writing is long form - like magazine articles - which means digging deeply into the whole landscape of a story: the history and heartbeat of the story's life. I know I've done a good job if I end up using only ten percent of my notes, forcing myself to carve out a gem from the dirt. That's why serving as a judge for the National Academies Eric and Wendy Schmidt Awards for Excellence in Science Communications is so engaging.

Coleman: Thomas Kuhn famously described scientific knowledge as constrained within a structure - a paradigm - that discourages ideas or evidence that challenge its authority. When I began thinking critically about what challenges scientific practice, I read scholars who describe Occidental knowledge as a hierarchical, peer-driven enterprise that resists change: Pierre Bourdieu, Michel Foucault, Bruno Latour, Laura Nader, and so on.

I was engrossed in what it would take to elevate Native science to a similar status as Occidental science - where Indigenous ways of knowing could share an equal legitimacy. To bolster my studies I received a fellowship to study Native science at the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian in 2010, where I discovered few Native languages have a traditional word for "science." Instead, Indigenous perspectives embrace what modernists call "science" as integral to daily life: gathering foods, hunting wildlife, building watercraft, weaving baskets, and so on.

Science, art, ethics, music, medicine and more were integrated - rather than siloed - in Native communities. Vine Deloria, Jr. and Daniel Wildcat describe traditional Indigenous living as holistic, where "ultimately, everything was related. This world was a unified world, a far cry from the disjointed sterile and emotionless world painted by Western science."

Their perspective takes shape in a landmark exhibit I saw during my fellowship. The exhibit begins with a pronouncement: "The Yup'ik people have no word for science." Titled "Yuungnaqpiallerput" (The Way We Genuinely Live), the program highlights tools, weapons, clothing and "masterworks" created by Alaska's Yup'ik people, whose knowledge of technology and science enabled them to survive thousands of years on the Bering Sea Coast. In essence, the exhibit raises the legitimacy of human experiences to evidence-based judgments.

Coleman: As a researcher and professor, it made sense to have a grounding in Western science, especially when a graduate student, Erin Dysart, and I began studying news coverage of the unearthing of a 9,000-year-old skeleton from the Columbia River in 1996. At first blush, news focused on the rare discovery of intact, ancient remains as a "gift to science," and scholars were keen to examine the bones. But Indigenous communities in the region pointed out the skeleton should be returned to its descendants, in light of antediluvian human remains being protected by Federal laws that require their return (repatriation) to First Peoples. As we analyzed how reporters covered the case of Kennewick Man, Erin and I found most stories were framed as a battle between scientists and Indians, with scientific views presented as valid, rational and absolute, and Native views as peculiar and spurious.

This is when I began to wonder whether and how Indigenous knowledge systems challenge the scientific paradigm Kuhn described, and studied scholars including Robert E. Bieder, Gregory Cajete (Tewa), Vine Deloria, Jr. (Sioux), Devon Abbott Mihesuah (Choctaw), Kim Tallbear (Sisseton-Wahpeton), Daniel Wildcat (Yuchi), and more.

Coleman: Each summer I work with Native students - from undergraduates to emerging MDs - who are studying science, health, and epidemiology in Portland. My role is to help them learn about communication skills, which cover a lot of ground. I introduce them to some of the core theories in communicating science, especially to non-urban tribal communities. The cool thing is that they already have a good grasp of researching who their audiences are and how to reach them.

One of the most provocative success stories is a recent campaign to reduce car injuries among children in a Native community. The researchers did their homework well, and discovered children were often in the care of grandparents. Knowing this, campaigners enlisted elders as the heart of their campaign, and grandparents carried messages to other elders and their children. Once car seats were installed, injuries diminished remarkably.

Coleman: It took me years to figure out that conflicts in Indigenous communities over issues like ancient bones, mining, and water rights aren't about science, per se. Much of the underpinning of disputes arises from different ways we value human existence and how we manage our decisions. Native Americans and a variety of other folk take a more holistic approach that weaves together segments of life; connecting art with science, music with mathematics, and language to action.

As modern people we tend to separate life's segments into discrete bits, which we see in how schools teach: There is a class for history, a class for science and a class for literature. When we shop at a grocery store, we buy milk in one section and fish in another, never witnessing the actions that connect the cow to the milk or the stream to the fish. An artist and teacher described the holistic view in one word: relationships, the underpinning of life.

Tlingit elder Teri Rofkar said Indigenous knowledge lies within a webbed, interlocking system. Rather than thinking of otter, sheep, and deer as "resources," we should consider such connections as "relationships." What would happen if we, like the Klamath Indians, considered the salmon a relative? Such perspectives are worth considering when disputes arise over what we treat as a resource, and how our own lives are interwoven with more than just the material world.

Cynthia has five sisters and two brothers, and she was raised in Tehran, Iran, and The Hague in the Netherlands, where she lived until graduating high school. Cynthia started a blog, Native Science, in 2010 as a Fellow with the National Museum of the American Indian. She and her husband, Scott Emery, are practicing Buddhists and members of the Zen Community of Oregon.