The Roles of Worldview, Realpolitik and Motivation in Studying the Earth Sciences: Perspectives Drawn from Working as a Geoscientist and Educator on Native American Reservations

Native American nations and people face a complex relationship with the earth sciences. This is especially true for American Indian reservation-based populations, who must negotiate land and resource management as sovereign “domestic dependent nations”. This relationship with Federal, state, and local governments frames the realpolitik of their economic and political existence. These realities must be balanced with internal tribal priorities and culturally-held indigenous knowledge, which is a mixture of social, religious and scientific information unique to individual cultures native to a given region. Indigenous knowledge is intertwined with a cultural worldview, which is the fundamental belief set embedded in each culture's experience that determines one's relationship to nature, one's place in the home culture and attitudes toward other cultures. Worldviews guide decision making of all sorts for all people. Worldviews also provide epistemologies and hermeneutics, which sometimes for indigenous cultures conflict strongly with the Judeo-Christian underpinnings of “western” science, of which geoscience is a part. Motivation to study the earth sciences and the knowledge we seek to provide has to take root within the context of indigenous self-determination, and this has proven non-trivial at all educational levels. Scientific expertise remains critically low in all reservation communities, but many geoscientists are now, over two decades of sustained effort, working successfully to include Native Americans and make geoscience relevant and accessible. The best pathways toward bridging this gap involve 1) field-based, place-based education, 2) partnership with Native elders and community leaders, 3) openness to the unique blend of skills and perspectives that indigenous people bring to earth system science. The emergence of the earth systems perspective and the paradigm of local action amidst global change resonates strongly with indigenous people, and offers a motivation and intellectual bridge between scientific and Native cultures that have much to gain from one another.