Watch out, physics! The Marxists are comin' for ya:
Yes, this is a real thing.
The University of Concordia is hosting a conference called "Decolonizing Light: Centering Indigenous Concerns in Science" in partnership with the Centre for Engineering in Society and several Native American groups.
The goal of the conference and its larger Decolonizing Light Project is to "decolonize science" and to develop "a culture of critical reflection and investigation of the relation of science and colonialism."
I bolded "critical reflection" because it very clearly plays into the framework of Critical Theory. Sure, the neo-Marxists can divide society into oppressor vs. oppressed classes via skin color and financial worth, but they can also divide science into the same categories.
So what in the heck does this actually mean? Well, like all commie drivel, it's a mealy-mouthed salad of woke buzzwords that's hard to understand.
One of the Project's initiatives is to "decolonize" astronomy by decoupling European terms for celestial bodies.
Students will present work based on an Indigenous astronomy learning experience. Students from a First Peoples Studies course at Concordia University got the opportunity to learn from Indigenous astronomer Wilfred Buck about Indigenous astronomy. In the webinar they will present their work.
I can't wait for Canada to outlaw the names and terms like Venus, Mars, Jupiter, asteroid, galaxy, and nebula as white-supremacist hate speech!
Like most Critical Theory exercises, you have something good and interesting that's being hijacked by Marxist principles. I would personally love to take a class on the different astronomical terms used by Native Americans. It'd be very interesting.
But to say that we must "decolonize" astronomy is absolutely bonkers. Are Galileo, Copernicus, Kepler, Hubble, Huygens, Herschel, and Hawking all evil members of the white colonial patriarchy? Were their amazing contributions to science – in many cases driven by a desire to know more about God and his handiwork – completely worthless because they were white Europeans and Americans?
(If you said yes, you might be a Marxist.)
Another aim of the project is around "revitalizing and restoring Indigenous knowledges." This wouldn't be controversial in normal world, where we acknowledge that the groups that lived throughout the Americas before the arrival of Europeans had some pretty extensive knowledge about animals, herbal medicine, regional agriculture, and other natural resources.
Much of this knowledge was ignored and lost – although there were plenty of examples of partnerships, such as the natives Squanto and Samoset. They not only gave the Plymouth Colony settlers information on neighboring tribes while they all drank beer together, but they showed the Europeans how and when to plant corn, how to stir up river eels with their feet, where to fish, and all sorts of other scientific things that would help with their survival.
The Decolonizing Light Project wants to go much further than appreciating native contributions to the sciences. They want it to supplant anyone deemed a "colonist."
From the Project:
Even more than other sciences, physics is a white male dominated field and, thus, a mirror of colonial patterns and social inequality. Despite this fact, physics is considered as ‘hard' and objective science, disconnected from social life and geopolitical history. This narrative both constitutes and reproduces inequality, which is reflected by the underrepresentation of women, racialized people, and Indigenous peoples in physics.
What does this mean for the sciences?
I mean, the Aztecs worshipped the Sun as a god named Huitzilopochtli. When they completed their new temple to Huitzilopochtli in 1487, they celebrated by sacrificing 80,000 people.
Should their "science" be considered more praiseworthy than Copernicus, who just a few decades later published his seminal work, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, which challenged the ancient teaching by Ptolemy that the universe revolved around the Earth??
