Che Jim: Long ago, if you knew how to listen, you could hear the trees speaking.

The Potawatomi tells stories about this with trees gathering together, making plants. Stories where the trees decade how to grow, how many seeds to produce, how to survive. 

And in recent years, non-native botanists 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 Che Jim, and this is Crash Course: Native American History. 

[Theme music]

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 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 Potawatomi writer and botanist Dr. Robin Wall Kimmerer, 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, even with all of our diversity, tend to have some commonalities in our ways of knowing and viewing the world, like how we tend to ground relationships, and respect and reciprocity. 

There's much more about indigenous worldviews, by the way, in episode 6.

Indigenous ways of knowing often begin, much like the scientific method, with observation. But in Native American cultures, this observation can go beyond the five senses and involve things like storytelling and oral history. 

Take these rare boulder structures built by native people in the Plains region of the US and Canada, known today as medicine wheels. 

Most follow similar structural patterns like a series of concentric circles or spokes radiating from a mound of stones in the centre. 

Many date back centuries or even millennia, but there's little archaeological evidence as to the purpose of medicine wheels.

Were they built to use as astronomical tools, locations for rituals?

For those answers, many Western practices of archaeology have proven insufficient. We need indigenous knowledge. 

So archaeologists in Alberta, Canada worked with elders of the Blackfoot Confederacy to learn more about these formations. 

John Wolf Child of the Kainai Nation offered stories about his late great uncle, warrior and tribal chief Makoyepuk, who was honoured with a medicine wheel memorial. 

Wolf Child could paint a picture of Makoyepuk, including his famous top knot decorated with feathers from his travels. 

He sounds like a baller. 

Sadly, the Makoyepuk medicine wheel itself has been lost to cultivation, with only a ravine and depressions in the ground to show where it once was. 

But Wolf Child's stories can inform how we interpret other medicine wheels, which adds an important context to our understanding of human history. 

Now, Native Americans did and continue to do a lot more with their ways of knowing than observe and remember. They also invent and create. 

In fact, Native Americans spearheaded a bunch of technological innovations millennia ago that are still used today. 

Like the first kayaks were invented by the Inuit, built from seal skin around 4,000 years ago. 

Lacrosse was invented by the Haudenosaunee before European settlers arrived. 

And the Chumash people ventured out to sea far before the ancient cultures of Egypt, Asia, or Europe did. I'm talking 11,000 years ago.

The Chumash sailed back and forth from the Channel Islands to the mainland of what's now Southern California, fishing with complex hooks and nets, as well as hunting for seals and waterfowl. 

Over time, they used their knowledge of the ocean and the Pacific coastline to build some of the most technologically advanced ships in North America, like the Tomol. 

These canoes could be up to 30 feet long and consisted of planks tied together. They were made watertight with pine tar, which was boiled and hardened.

The preferred material was redwoods that had drifted down the coast from the north, because the Chumash knew, you know, they had their ways of knowing that this wood rotted much more slowly than the other types. [Makes mind-blown gesture]

All of this reflects how Native ways of knowing have been making things happen for thousands and thousands of years. 

And in many cases, these innovations are still a part of both Native and non-native life today. Like, the Chumash still build tomols that could be seen gliding along the ocean near the Channel Islands. 

While Western scientists have long misunderstood and at times downright disregarded native ways of knowing, that's slowly starting to change.

Today, there's a new movement aimed at braiding the two worldviews together. 

The Mi'kmaw people have a word for this braiding, Etuaptmumk. It means two-eyed seeing. A concept developed by a Mi'kmaw elder Albert Marshall. 

The idea is that one eye should look through the lens of Native knowledge, the other through the lens of Western science, but both should work together to form the full picture. 

For example, in 2023, Nicole Mann embodied Etuaptmumk, when she made history as the first indigenous woman in space. She's a NASA astronaut and a member of the Wailaki of the Round Valley Indian tribes, and she spent 157 days in a floating laboratory on the International Space Station. 

While she was on board, Mann performed space walks, spoke to students back on Earth, and studied plant growth. 

She later told reporters that there's also the psychological aspect of growing plants in space that helps you feel connected to your home planet, one that could benefit humans on long space voyages in the future. 

And a sentiment that reflects the deep connection to the place found in native ways of knowing. 

While in orbit, she also had the opportunity to speak to students at the Flathead Indian Reservation, something she saw as a really important responsibility. 

Her hope was that it might inspire native children to pursue their own careers in science. 

The next gen of native space explorers is going to be epic.

Back on Earth, two-eyed seeing is being used to tackle some of the world's most pressing issues. 

Like today, around 2 million of Earth's species face extinction thanks to human activity. But this decline is happening at a significantly slower rate on indigenous lands, where globally there's less deforestation and lower pollution levels. 

Yeah, we're cool like that. 

Thanks to their deeply rooted connection to their lands, native people have developed some of the most effective means of environmental care. 

In fact, today many conservationists see indigenous land management as one of the best ways to protect against biodiversity loss. 

For example, in what's now Montana, the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes, or CSKT, have long practiced controlled burns to encourage new plant growth and reduce the risk of forest fires. 

Today, they manage over 400,000 acres of conservation land, including the CSKT Bison Range, a former national wildlife refuge established on the land originally taken from the tribes in the early 20th century. 

After negotiating for many years to have the land returned to the tribes, it was successfully restored to their care in 2020.

Now under the management of the CSKT Natural Resource Department, tribal biologists use controlled burns to remove fire hazards, protect native plants, and open up more grazing for the bison who live on the range. 

In addition, the Bison Range Museum is now used to educate visitors about the tribe's history and their traditional practices. 

Initiatives like this have been so successful that simply giving more land back to native peoples have been suggested as a major strategy for combating climate change. 

We'll talk much more about native ecology in a future episode. 

Indigenous people have been learning about and connecting to the world since longer than anyone can remember. Listening to the trees, protecting buffalo herds, and much more. And way before "scientist" was even a word.

Native folks weren't just learning, but they were actively inventing, and still are. But they're also finding ways to bring Western science into the fold, too. 

And in the spirit of two-eyed seeing, Native scientists like Nicole Mann are passing on both to future generations. 

As we say here at Crash Course, knowledge weighs nothing. Carry all that you can. 

In our next episode, we're going to talk about traditional native foods. I'll see you then. 

Thanks for watching Crash Course: Native American History, which was filmed at our studio in Indianapolis, Indiana, and was made with the help of all these nice people. If you want to help keep Crash Course free for everyone forever, you can join our community on Patreon.