Abstract
Can epistemologies anchor processes of social inequality? In this paper, we consider how epistemological dominance in science, engineering, and health (SE&H) fields perpetuates disadvantages for students who enter higher education with alternative epistemologies. Drawing on in-depth interviews with Native American students enrolled at two US research universities who adhere to or revere indigenous epistemologies, we find that epistemological dominance in SE&H degree programs disadvantages students through three processes. First, it delegitimizes Native epistemologies and marginalizes and silences students who value them. Second, in the process of imparting these dominant scientific epistemologies, SE&H courses sometimes require students to participate in pedagogical practices that challenge indigenous ways of knowing. Third, students encounter epistemological imperialism: most students in the sample are working to earn SE&H degrees in order to return to tribal communities to “give back,” yet, because the US laws regulating the practice of SE&H extend onto tribal lands, students must earn credentials in epistemologies that devalue, delegitimate, and threaten indigenous knowledge ways to practice on tribal lands. We examine how students navigate these experiences, discuss the implications of these findings for SE&H education, and describe how epistemological dominance may serve as a mechanism of inequality reproduction more broadly.
Keywords
Introduction
Despite decades of research efforts and policy initiatives, women and racial/ethnic minorities continue to be disadvantaged and underrepresented within science, engineering, and health-related (SE&H) fields (e.g., National Academy of Science 2007, 2006; National Science Foundation 2015). Most scholarship investigating these diversity issues has sought to identify various ways that the sexism, racism, and heteronormativity expressed by faculty, students, and professionals within these fields manifest as disadvantages and exclusions (e.g., Cech and Waidzunas 2011; Beasley 2011; Costello 2005; Dryburgh 1999; McIlwee and Robinson 1992; Pololi et al. 2013; Rosser 2012; Sánchez et al. 2013). Yet, inequality in SE&H is not just reproduced through broadly held social biases that individuals “bring with them” into these fields. A vital but underexplored set of mechanisms is embedded in the very content of SE&H themselves—their deeply rooted cultures, practices, and ways of knowing (Cech 2013). One element of that content—epistemologies—may serve as a seemingly benign but deeply consequential source of structural and cultural disadvantages for underrepresented groups.
Epistemologies, or the rules by which practitioners know what they know (Knorr Cetina 1999), are the means through which SE&H professionals claim to produce universal truths and where the social locations and identities of people in these fields are supposed to matter least. We contend that scientific epistemologies and their monopoly on truth claims in US SE&H education can serve as a mechanism through which social inequalities are reproduced. Attending specifically to undergraduate education, we ask, how might the dominance of scientific epistemologies disadvantage students who enter SE&H training aligned with alternative or marginalized epistemologies? We draw on data from a population segment whose experiences help illuminate these processes: Native American students in US undergraduate SE&H majors who are informed by, or adhere to, indigenous epistemologies. We examine how epistemological dominance in SE&H education can reproduce disadvantages for students and, in some cases, for their tribal communities by extension. 1 These processes may perpetuate disadvantages even when educators and students are acting in accordance with egalitarian norms of fairness.
Drawing on fifty-seven interviews with a sample of forty-four Native American undergraduate SE&H students at two research universities, we find that the epistemological circumstances in SE&H training foster disadvantages through three processes. First, indigenous epistemologies are delegitimated, devalued, or otherwise crowded out of SE&H curricula, often leaving Native students feeling frustrated, marginalized, or silenced. Second, pedagogical activities used to teach dominant SE&H epistemologies (e.g., cadaver and animal dissection) sometimes require students to choose between fulfilling class assignments and upholding their traditional practices and ways of knowing, thereby burdening students with additional emotional, intellectual, and/or spiritual work.
Third, Native American students who wish to engage in SE&H-related activities on and off reservations are required to become credentialed in these dominant scientific epistemologies. This practice operates as a form of epistemological imperialism insofar as it requires, for legal and normative reasons, students to earn degrees in the knowledge regimes that delegitimate and threaten the cultures and practices of the very tribal communities that students intend to serve.
As Native American SE&H students are an important population to study in their own right (Smith et al. 2014), we are also interested in students’ responses to these epistemological tensions and ambiguities. We find that students negotiate epistemological dominance in ways that often innovatively blend dominant scientific and Native ways of knowing.
This epistemological imperialism is related to but conceptually distinct from forms of disadvantage that result from ethnoracial stereotypes and cultural biases that Native American students often encounter in college (Cech, Smith, and Metz 2016; Huffman 2008). The disadvantages we describe here are based in (real or perceived) discontinuities between scientific and indigenous epistemologies and the dominance of scientific epistemologies within higher education in the United States. These processes can occur even when faculty and students are following meritocratic norms of equal treatment and inclusion to the letter. By documenting specific ways through which SE&H epistemologies contribute to ongoing cultural and structural inequalities, our approach highlights the salience of epistemological discontinuity and dominance as mechanisms of inequality reproduction—processes that, from the perspective of US higher education policies of diversity and inclusion, can appear unproblematic.
We move forward from two broad tenets. First, indigenous epistemologies are not “dead” or antiquated; they continue to be resonant and vibrant within Native communities (cf. Bang and Medin 2010; Cajete 2000; Tallbear 2014; Verran 2002). Second, we do not privilege Euro-American scientific epistemologies over indigenous ones (Bloor 1991). These epistemologies differ in their patterns of understanding and in the resources available to produce knowledge. SE&H epistemologies have considerable material, political, and cultural resources invested in their truth claims, but that does not imply they are inherently better equipped to investigate the natural and social world (Bang and Medin 2010; Harding 1998).
The next section orients the project within literature on inequality in SE&H, discusses the dominance of scientific epistemologies in higher education, and provides background on the experiences of Native American students in SE&H. We then describe our data and methods, present results, and discuss the implications of these processes for scholarly understandings of inequality in SE&H more broadly and for institutional and pedagogical practices in higher education.
Theoretical Background
Over the last several decades, scholars have sought to understand the persistent disadvantaging of women and racial/ethnic minority groups within SE&H. This research has identified institutional and labor market processes (Baker et al. 2008; Beasley 2011; Moss-Racusin et al. 2012; Smith-Doerr 2004; Xie and Shauman 2003), “chilly” interactional climates in education and the workforce (Carr et al. 2003; Cheryan et al. 2009; McCabe 2009; National Academy of Sciences 2006; National Research Council 2004; Ostroff, Kinicki, and Tamkins 2003), and individual-level processes such as internalized stereotypes and confidence differentials that undermine the experiences of women and people of color (Cech et al. 2011; Correll 2004; Deemer et al. 2014; MacPhee, Farro, and Canetto 2013; Smith et al. 2013).
In addition to these structural and climate concerns, inequalities in SE&H can be reproduced through the perpetuation of the foundational assumptions and cultural practices of these professions. In particular, scholars have pointed to the professions’ ideals of excellence (e.g., Cech 2013), allegiance to allegedly universal methodologies and truth claims (e.g., Long and Fox 1995), assumptions of self-correction (Ioannidis 2012), and the cultural specificity of their ways of knowing (e.g., Harding 1998) as possible sources of bias. Attending to epistemological dominance as a site of inequality reproduction can help scholars better understand the endurance of patterns of underrepresentation despite deepening commitments to equality and inclusion in SE&H. 2
Dominant Scientific Epistemologies and Indigenous Epistemologies
Epistemologies encompass strategies of knowledge acquisition, theories of knowledge, and beliefs about knowledge (Knorr Cetina 1999). Euro-American epistemological approaches to nature and the body are anchored in Enlightenment ideals about order and reality (Dear 1995; Harding 1991), which purport that an ordered process of experimentation can produce knowledge claims about the world that are “mirror-like reflections of reality” (Harding 1998, 2). 3 Although they vary across subdiscipline and are not internally consistent or monolithic, SE&H epistemologies typically prioritize a coherent, elegant picture of a universe that follows logical, unchanging “laws” (Harding 1998) and assume a “universal knower” who can see, interpret, and describe the world (Haraway 1988). Such assumptions, in turn, shape the kinds of questions SE&H practitioners ask and the range of answers they consider valid (Harding 1991; Kuhn 1962; Shapin 2008). These epistemologies are dominant in SE&H both in the sense that they are culturally and institutionally valorized and in the sense that they deny legitimacy to other epistemological perspectives (Harding 1998). SE&H epistemologies carry the force of state-sanctioned and institutionally legitimated knowledges; such authority and regulatory power effectively marginalizes both alternative ways of knowing and those who are formed by them (Foucault 1971, 1972, 1980).
This dominance of SE&H epistemologies is not the outcome of an objective selection process for the most inherently valuable ways of knowing. Through processes of imperialism and westward expansion, Native epistemologies were intentionally and unintentionally colonized, or “dedeveloped,” through the extraction of resources, labor, and raw materials from indigenous societies, by the appropriation of local trade and industries, and by the destruction of cultures, traditions, and populations that contain and pass on such knowledge (Harding 1991, 1998). The marginalization of indigenous ways of knowing is thus a deliberate result of political, cultural, and military dominance.
Despite these historically rooted processes of oppression, indigenous epistemologies have not been lost (Bang and Medin 2010; Cajete 2000; Verran 2002). Specific Native epistemologies vary greatly across the diversity of indigenous tribes (to date, there are 566 federally recognized tribes in the geographic area of the United States), yet many indigenous ways of knowing share several common themes. First, indigenous epistemologies often draw from participatory relationships with the natural world and emphasize the roles of perception, logic, sensation, and spirit. Knowledge is often centered on specific geographic places and features of the land local to the indigenous community. This “creative participatory process” of knowledge production (Bang and Medin 2010; Cajete 2000) contrasts with dominant scientific approaches that seek to reduce the dependence of knowledge production on human sensation and locality (Dods 2004; Haraway 1988). Second, indigenous science often emphasizes the chaos of nature, embracing the “flows” of that chaos, rather than seeking its reduction or compartmentalization (Harding 1998). Third, these epistemologies often actively consider the interaction between human and natural communities––an interaction on which indigenous communities rely for subsistence and meaning-making (Cajete 2000; Tallbear 2014). Indigenous epistemologies thus do not typically aim to develop knowledge only for knowledge’s sake, but to develop understanding of the natural and physical world integral to the fulfillment of human physical, social, and spiritual needs (Dods 2004).
Given the legacies of imperialism, oppression, and forced assimilation, the appropriation of Native knowledge without reciprocity, and the exploitation of indigenous populations and lands for scientific experimentation (Cajete 2000; Mayor 2009), many indigenous communities are wary of scientists and dominant scientific epistemologies. Some tribal communities even disapprove of sharing their ways of knowing with those outside of their communities (Cajete 2000, 2005). This tension is not simply a matter of conflicting perspectives on the same natural phenomena, but a reaction to the colonialism of dominant SE&H epistemologies that continues to be injurious to indigenous communities (Cajete 2000; Harding 1998; Mayor 2009).
It is within this context that we examine how epistemological dominance in SE&H education is experienced by Native American students who adhere to or revere indigenous knowledge ways. In SE&H college classrooms, scientific epistemologies are the only legitimized medium through which teachers and students can ask and answer questions about nature, the cosmos, and the body. Students are steeped in these dominant epistemologies via lectures, exams, and labs and through more implicit processes of professional socialization like hall talk and homework (Cech 2014; Dryburgh 1999). Learning science within US higher education is thus simultaneously learning what counts as “real” knowledge and learning to devalue alternative ways of knowing. We seek to understand what forms of disadvantage this creates for Native American students, and how they respond to those experiences.
Native American Students in SE&H
Native American students in SE&H programs are both a theoretically illuminating sample that highlights processes through which epistemological dominance may disadvantage nondominant groups and a population deserving of scholarly attention in its own right. Historically and contemporaneously, Native American populations have faced systemic patterns of discrimination, poverty, and blocked opportunity (Connolly 2000; Huyser, Takei, and Sakamoto 2013; Quijada Cerecer 2013; Snipp 1992). Native American students have the lowest college enrollment and persistence rates of any racial or ethnic group in the United States (Guillory 2009; Jackson, Smith, and Hill 2003). Those who attend predominantly white universities frequently face prejudice and marginalization (Huffman 2008; Okagaki, Helling, and Bingham 2009). There is little research on Native American students’ experiences in SE&H (Smith et al. 2014), and extant work mostly documents underrepresentation (e.g., Van Cooten 2014), proposes culturally sensitive curricula (e.g., Smith, Stumpff, and Cole 2012), or examines students’ pathways into and out of higher education (e.g., Katz, Smart, and Paul 2010).
A few studies focus on the experiences of Native students in SE&H undergraduate programs through their own perspectives (Cech, Smith, and Metz 2016; Bang and Medin 2010; Rearden 2012). Existing research has found that Native American students encounter structural and educational barriers related to inclusion and academic support (Huffman 2008). Our research (Cech, Smith, and Metz 2016) also finds cultural mechanisms of disadvantage—derogatory stereotyping, exoticized othering, and assimilative pressures—related to peers’ and professors’ ethnoracial biases about indigenous cultures and practices. However, little is known about how Native students navigate potential epistemological discontinuities between indigenous ways of knowing and hegemonic SE&H epistemologies.
Prior research has illustrated that many Native students, especially those from reservation communities, express a desire to use their college degrees to “give back” to tribal communities (Cech, Smith, and Metz 2016; Huffman 2008; Thoman et al. 2015; Ward et al. 2014). To that end, many Native students seek credentials in Western SE&H epistemologies. Students who wish to, for example, be nurses or doctors in the Indian Health Service, develop alternative forms of energy, or research the environmental impact of abandoned mines on reservation lands are required to earn college or professional degrees from accredited universities and obtain licensure to practice––even if this education conflicts with tribal epistemologies. Native American SE&H students are left to reconcile these epistemological conflicts largely on their own.
Epistemological dominance may disadvantage students who enter SE&H degree programs with alternative epistemologies not only by silencing their ways of knowing but also by marginalizing the students who value those epistemologies. The results below describe three specific mechanisms through which this dominance translates into disadvantages for students: delegitimation, problematic pedagogical practices, and epistemological imperialism.
Data and Methods
Our study draws on fifty-seven interviews with forty-four students enrolled in science, engineering, and health-related majors (e.g., nursing, premed) at two research universities: Montana State University (MSU) and Northern Arizona University (NAU). Both are, in many ways, “best case” four-year institutions for the support of Native American students, as both have more than double the representation of Native students nationwide (NAU: 3.5 percent; MSU: 2 percent; nationwide: 1 percent [NCES 2012]), 3 both have support structures for Native students, such as institutionally sponsored organizations, clubs, and cultural events, and both maintain partnerships with tribal colleges and universities in their region. The processes of disadvantage documented here are likely present—if not more exaggerated—at universities with smaller Native American populations, weaker ties to tribal communities, and fewer student support programs.
Interview respondents were selected from a larger survey sample of 111 freshman and transfer students from incoming cohorts in 2010, 2011, and 2012. Students who identified as Native American (including Native Hawaiian and Alaska Native) were invited to participate via high school-to-college bridge programs, posted flyers, and through one-on-one contact by Native American student support program directors. Students who intended to major in SE&H-related disciplines and who consented were invited to participate in a follow-up survey and interview in the spring. Respondents were offered a $50 gift card to a large “box store” for their participation in both the follow-up survey and the interview.
Interviews lasted for an average of forty-five minutes and some went as long as two hours. The interviewer (the first author) began by explaining the interview procedure, securing consent, and assuring students that they could stop the interview at any time (interview guide available upon request). Students were asked a variety of questions about their background, their current experiences in college, and most relevantly, whether they see complementarity and/or conflict between Native American beliefs, practices, and cultures and the beliefs, practices, and cultures of their SE&H discipline.
Given past and present patterns of exploitation of indigenous populations in the name of science (cf. Cajete 2000), we were concerned from the earliest stages of the project about the power dynamics involved in Native American college students participating in a study conducted by white non-Native researchers. In particular, we engaged current and former Native American student program directors in conversation about our methods, interview approaches, and analytic tactics. We also shared early findings with the Native American Education Advisory Board at one of our study institutions. We were especially sensitive to these dynamics while conducting the interviews and revisited questions of power and reflexivity throughout data analysis and writing. In particular, we reviewed transcripts again after completing the analysis to make sure the findings described here do not distort or do damage to students’ narratives.
Cleaning, coding, and analysis were completed by the first author using Atlas.ti. Interview transcripts were analyzed with a dual-pass coding technique (Lofland, Lofland, and Snow 2006; Saldaña 2009). Transcripts were first coded along major themes derived from the interview guide. In the second pass, data from relevant codes of the first pass were analyzed for patterns across respondents on themes related to epistemological dominance and conflict. In the results below, the provided quotations are exemplars of the theme being described.
Seventy percent of respondents grew up on or near tribal reservations and 62 percent grew up, in their own words, somewhat or very “traditionally”—maintaining traditional practices, rituals, and beliefs of their tribal communities and with extended exposure to indigenous ways of knowing. The remaining students grew up in urban or suburban areas, most within 200 miles of reservation communities. Even students who were not raised traditionally or do not personally adhere to indigenous ways of knowing expressed a deep veneration for the practices and knowledge ways of the tribes with which they are affiliated.
Students identify as members of seventeen different tribal nations, with Blackfeet, Navajo, and Crow being the most highly represented. Of the forty-four students, eighteen are engineering majors, nine are health majors (e.g., nursing, premed), and seventeen are science majors. Just over half of the samples (55 percent) are women.
Findings
Recognition of Epistemological Dominance
When asked about the relationship between scientific and Native epistemologies in their SE&H courses, over half of the students in the sample, and 65 percent of the students from reservation communities, articulated some degree of tension between Native and scientific epistemologies.
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Many students recognized epistemological dominance within their SE&H classrooms. Several students explicitly noted the hostility of SE&H epistemologies to other ways of knowing. For example, a Salish and Kootenai student at MSU said, I would agree that the new technologies today definitely kind of move forward away from those cultural traditions and kind of put them in the background. And I guess it would be harder for traditional things to kind of be part of that new sciences ideas today. So, yeah, I definitely think that traditional traditions, I guess, are getting pushed back…. (Salish and Kootenai man, MSU)
The reconciliation of these epistemological tensions and ambiguities within their own perspectives and actions personally challenged many students, especially those who were raised more traditionally: As far as traditional and cultural beliefs I have what I believe in, but I need hard evidence in order to believe something’s real…So in science, there’s evidence and you kind of have to prove what you believe is out there type of a thing…But it’s weird…like as soon as something bad happens I pull out my corn pollen…or birdseed or something. But it’s just really conflicting. (Navajo and Lakota woman, NAU) I mean, Native Americans were great engineers prior to 1492…They had built their waterways and trade routes and stuff, and many of the current highways and waterways today are built over those. So I think it’s just…going into engineering by going back to their ancestry to how they originally were engineers to begin with, too. Growing up, in my math classes I took on the reservation they talked a lot about how math is a really big part of our traditional ways and how when you weave you have to go a certain distance and you have to go back and the patterns are really symmetrical and they are really nice and straight and they talk about how even though we don’t have rulers we still had that math in our brain to figure out where to stop, where to go, where does this color go and we had to visualize the picture to do it. I really think math is really involved with it and I don’t think it contradicts.
Processes of Disadvantage via Epistemological Dominance
Delegitimation of native epistemologies
While delegitimation of Native traditions and cultures occurs in higher education more broadly (Cech, Smith, and Metz 2016), interviews reveal ways the dominance of science epistemologies within the context of SE&H education can specifically delegitimize alternative ways of knowing—and devalue Native students in the process.
A common way that delegitimation manifests is the denial of epistemological authority to Native ways of knowing. For example, knowledge that indigenous communities have developed over centuries about their local ecologies is often missing from SE&H texts and courses. A geology student explained how she is troubled by the professor’s and textbook’s denials of the knowledge of tribal communities in standard descriptions of scientific exploration: We’re talking about Darwin and these guys who are traveling the world and studying species and discovering evolution…But the thing that really bothers me is that [the book] talks about them discovering all these species…[Native populations] know what species exists in their community and they have names for them already, probably taxonomy…it’s kind of like [explorers] saying “Americans” and they discovered it and named it and claimed it…it’s the same thing but it’s biology and they’re doing it with species [instead of people]…. But then when I spoke up about it my teacher…was like yeah, yeah [brushing off the comment]…every time I do my reading it’s like so in my face, and I’m just like how come nobody notices this…I think it’s very wrong. (multitribal woman, MSU)
Delegitimation is also apparent in the way the perceived superiority of scientific research methods is used to justify the exploitation of tribal communities and lands. For example, a Pueblo Navajo NAU student describes a discussion in her premed class about the appropriateness of drawing blood from tribal community members for medical research: We learned about a tribe and how they had had their blood drawn. The people were Caucasian and they said we’re going to draw your blood and find a cure for arthritis. And they took numerous amounts of blood from people, from that tribe. But [tribal community members] never got any word back on what was going on with their blood. So they were being lied to and their blood was used for other experiments…But [this] girl, she was like, “I don’t understand why you’re mad.” She just didn’t get it…And then I turned around to her and was like, “it was a sign of respect”…. (Pueblo Navajo woman, NAU) We were talking about burial artifacts and ceremonial artifacts. And one of the questions was like should it be given back to the people or just keep, or kept for research. And my opinion was give it back. And some of the people were just like “well, it’s research. We can learn about it more.” (Nez Perce woman, NAU)
Students were asked, if faced with delegitimation, whether they would be willing to share perspectives based in Native epistemologies with their SE&H professors and classmates. A few students did express a willingness to share. A Navajo NAU student, for example, noted that she would be happy to describe traditional medical practices of her tribal community: Yeah, I would. They’d probably think, “What? Really?” And some probably wouldn’t believe them but it’s just like that belief system that we have, really believing in the medicine that we utilize and eat.…I wouldn’t mind sharing it with people, but if I wasn’t Native American and someone told me that I probably wouldn’t really believe them.…There’s no harm in telling someone that this medicine cured a cancer patient and the cancer’s gone. (Navajo woman, NAU)
Problematic pedagogical practices
A second process through which epistemological dominance can create disadvantage is when students are required to participate in learning activities that directly conflict with Native knowledge ways, practices, and/or avoidances. Such pedagogical practices burden students with emotional, intellectual, and spiritual work that other students do not face, and in extreme cases, may require students to choose between their tribal beliefs and their SE&H coursework.
These experiences emerge most often in laboratory settings, particularly with human and animal dissection activities in biology and anatomy courses. In some indigenous belief systems, it is inappropriate or even dangerous to touch human remains or cut open certain animals. As the quote below from a Navajo and Lakota student illustrates, this creates challenges for students: You’re not really supposed to cut people open and [the classes] have labs where you’re supposed to touch human bones. I was told that yesterday so I personally went up to the professors and said I can’t do that. If it’s possibly bones I can’t touch that. That’s taboo. I mean that’s what I told my grandpa. If I were to do anything like that I’d have to have a big ceremony because that’s someone…you’re not supposed to bother things like that.…And I know some people who’ve gotten bad grades…they would get kind of put down for not being able to do that kind of thing because other people don’t understand. (Navajo and Lakota woman, NAU) [the instructor] mentioned something about dissecting and I’m just like, okay, not a big deal, but it kind of is a big deal…it’s like, okay, my science brain goes in there and, well, if this animal wasn’t here than I wouldn’t know what this [biological system] is and how it works…. So I have to kind of wrestle with it in a way because it’s like oh, I know it’s not right, but at the same time I know I’ve got to do it. (Navajo woman, NAU)
Although these conflicting pedagogical activities were most often mentioned in contexts related to bodies and dissection, they arose in other SE&H coursework as well. For example, one student describes her anxiety at the start of her archaeology course over whether her instructor would require students to examine pottery shards: One of the beliefs is that your soul goes into the pottery that’s made so when it’s broken your soul’s like free. But if you like play with it it’s like playing with someone’s casket. So even after the body’s gone it’s like yeah, you don’t want to mess around with the pottery. (Navajo woman, NAU) I’d say hello professor, I just wanted to ask if maybe I could do an alternate assignment because I am Navajo and I know that you shouldn’t be giving me any special privileges because I am still a student but I just I don’t feel comfortable with it and it goes against my beliefs so if you’d be willing to give me an assignment that is of equal value I’d gladly take it. (Hispanic and Navajo woman, NAU)
Credentialing requirements and returning to tribal communities
Beyond delegitimation and problematic pedagogical practices, the credentialing process of SE&H itself may serve to disadvantage Native American students through a process we call epistemological imperialism. Despite formal tribal sovereignty on reservations, credentials in dominant epistemologies are required in order to practice science, engineering, or medicine on reservations. The majority of students, particularly those from tribal reservation communities, desire to return home to their tribal communities to “help out” in some way, contributing to the socioeconomic, ecological, and/or cultural livelihood (Smith et al. 2014; Huffman 2008; Thoman et al. 2015). But to do this, students must earn credentials in epistemologies that delegitimate the knowledge ways of those very communities (Tallbear 2014).
In interviews, students explain that attaining an SE&H degree is a tool for them to be able to give back in the ways they wish to. As a Standing Rock Sioux MSU student explains, “You’re just trying to get your degree—that’s your goal. So you can go back and help those people.” However, “getting the degree” requires them to negotiate a credentialing process that devalues those indigenous ways of knowing. This same student notes that “you would take your chemistry test and study for your chemistry test by the way they [the SE&H instructors] want you to have it. So it’s like you go by their standards.” An NAU student notes the conflict between earning the credential needed to practice medicine in the hospital in her tribal community and the epistemological conflicts between Western medicine and beliefs of her tribal community: I definitely think as far as science there is [a conflict between tribal and western SE&H epistemologies] because I do want to be become a doctor. But we’re not supposed to mess…like the big problem with me going to med school and stuff like that is cadaver labs, being around dead bodies…So it’s like I want to get into science, I want to become a doctor and help as many people as possible. But a lot of stuff that comes along with that [education] is not something that’s approved of. So it’s really weird. (Navajo woman, NAU, emphasis added)
Some students respond to these tensions by “pushing through” in order to earn a degree, believing that a credential in SE&H is the best path forward to contributing to the well-being of their tribal communities. Others attempt to integrate scientific and indigenous epistemologies in creative and subversive ways. Several students interested in health careers, for example, explained that they will attempt to blend dominant epistemologies with indigenous medical practices and rituals (e.g., herbal teas, sweats) in their future practice.
An engineering student explains how he plans to adapt the engineering epistemologies he learned in college to tribal priorities: “some engineering is associated with like mining and stuff like that. But some engineering is associated with like remediation. So you can approach it like kind of a cause and like dealing with an effect you can kind of approach it using traditional values” (Navajo man, NAU).
Similarly, a multitribal geology student explained how she plans to engage in research that explicitly integrates dominant and Native epistemologies: I use GIS, which is Geographic Information Science for mapping. And then I’ll be taking remote sensing to learn how to use satellite imagery…I want to use those along with what people might call like indigenous knowledge or cultural science knowledge…to look for patterns of where they meet and where they complement each other. Right now I’m researching climate change and I’m looking at Native language place names and what the place names say about the landscape or what grew there, or what animals have lived there. Because I think that there’s science knowledge inherent in the languages. (multitribal woman, MSU) You have to practice all your traditional ways and understand the meaning of it. But still you balance the other side with the modern medicine…. Just keep them even and I think that’s how it will be easier….Sometimes it is [challenging] but I overcome it and I can get it back in balance I guess. But I know myself so I know when something’s wrong so I either go to a sweat lodge that’s here or do prayer. (Crow woman, MSU)
Discussion
Through a focus on epistemological dominance in SE&H education, we underscore the importance of considering the cultures and structures of science and medicine as possible sources of social disadvantage. Native American SE&H students, in addition to being a sociodemographic group whose perspectives merit attention in their own right, served as a theoretically illuminating population whose experiences point to several mechanisms of inequality reproduction.
First, epistemological dominance within SE&H curricula delegitimates indigenous beliefs, histories, and ways of knowing. This delegitimation emerges in classroom interactions and course materials and is experienced by students as marginalizing, disheartening, frustrating, and silencing. Many students personally struggle to navigate the tensions that arise from these epistemological ambiguities and inconsistencies. Second, students are sometimes required to participate in pedagogical activities that directly contradict indigenous practices and knowledge ways. Such problematic activities burden them with emotional and spiritual work not typically experienced by their classmates. In certain instances, participation in such activities may even undermine students’ relationships with their tribal or spiritual communities. Students in such circumstances face a conundrum with no formal institutional solution. Alternative assignments may allow students to remain engaged while upholding traditional indigenous practices and beliefs, but instructors may label students who request accommodation as “problems” or simply refuse to provide alternatives. 6 Students faced with such pedagogical practices largely have to navigate them on their own, relying on ad hoc accommodations and the cultural sensitivity of their professors. We suspect that traditional-leaning Native American students in institutions with smaller Native populations and those without institutionalized Native student support programs (the directors of which serve as advocates for students on occasion) may experience such conflicts even more intensely.
Third, in a manifestation of epistemological imperialism, students must acquire certification in dominant epistemologies that devalue, delegitimate, and threaten Native ways of knowing in order to “give back” to tribal communities through science, engineering, or medicine. This epistemological imperialism also has deeper implications for Native ways of knowing. Although tribal governments have jurisdiction over certain laws and practices within reservations, regulations that mandate credentialing—for example, the requirement of a medical degree and board licensure to practice medicine or an engineering degree to become a licensed professional engineer—are codified at the federal and state levels. 7 As such, in order to practice SE&H within tribal communities, one must earn credentials in dominant epistemologies. 8 Through this process, SE&H epistemologies may further threaten Native epistemologies by contributing to the “dedevelopment” of indigenous ways of knowing within and outside reservation communities (Harding 1998).
Broadly then, epistemological dominance in higher education reproduces disadvantage for Native American students by discrediting alternative ways of knowing and by requiring participation in pedagogical practices that may engage with nature and the body in ways that contradict those ways of knowing. Ongoing epistemological imperialism simultaneously delegitimates indigenous ways of knowing while insisting that indigenous subjects who attend nontribal colleges adopt dominant scientific ways of knowing before they can “give back” to those very communities. These disadvantages manifest for students as cognitive, emotional, spiritual, and/or moral tensions, as interactional-level difficulties with instructors and students, and as institutional-level constraints around pedagogical norms and credential requirements. These inequalities also have identity dimensions, as students attempt to harmonize the expectations and requirements of their roles as SE&H students with their identity as Native persons and tribal community members. Although related to cultural and racial discrimination encountered by indigenous populations described in other work (e.g., Cech, Smith, and Metz 2016; Huffman 2008), these mechanisms of inequality are distinctly epistemological, in that they stem from power dynamics embedded in conflicts between legitimated and marginalized ways of knowing.
Implications
This research has several implications for SE&H education. Alternative epistemologies are often not welcome in SE&H and their resulting truth claims are often delegitimized outright. Our findings add to important perspectives from Feminist and Postcolonialist science studies and Native science which discuss the subjectivity and power relations involved in ways of knowing that can be drawn upon to open up cultural space for the consideration of alternative epistemological approaches to nature and the body (e.g., Cajete 2000; Harding 1998).
SE&H education can be altered in a number of ways to challenge epistemological dominance and allow for the epistemological flourishing of Native students, as well as other students who may enter higher education with marginalized epistemologies. 9 First, SE&H training should recognize scientific, technological, and medical advancements made outside of institutionally sanctioned SE&H research and development. Examples of such contributions might include cancer treatments found by indigenous tribes in the jungles of South America or the knowledge of geological activity embedded in Northwest tribes’ oral histories (Cajete 2000; Schulz 2015). This incorporation would help validate epistemological multiplicity and demonstrate to students that knowledge emerges from places and peoples beyond Euro-American science and engineering (Verran 2002). 10
Additionally, SE&H education should acknowledge and openly discuss colonialist and imperialist foundations of scientific and technological advancements and the purposeful exploitation of Native bodies and lands for scientific gain (Cajete 2000; Harding 1998). Such training would help decenter the “view from nowhere” (Haraway 1988, 590) and demonstrate that knowledge production is always an act of power. As an illuminating counterpoint to these colonialist perspectives, Tallbear (2014) describes indigenous bioscientists who employ a tactic of epistemic humility, which emphasizes situated knowledges, recognizes the intersections of science and the personal, and promotes the democratization of science. Contrary to dominant scientific epistemologies, epistemic humility asserts that knowledge advancement must come from listening to those who are marginalized, utilizing a fluid “bottom-up” approach that responds to the needs of those that are disenfranchised, rather than a rigid top-down approach that replicates colonialist practice by dictating “one-size-fits-all” solutions for all cultures and all institutions.
Third, there is nothing inevitable or necessary about the perpetuation of epistemological dominance in SE&H education. Pedagogical choices to, for example, use human remains as learning tools are themselves culturally derived. Alternative epistemologies can certainly be incorporated into classrooms and course content. Other academic disciplines, such as philosophy, law, and sociology, have sought to include the perspectives of non-Western approaches to their disciplinary subject (Cowen and Cyr 2015; Wilmer 1993). Even relatively cursory recognition of different epistemological standpoints suggests to students that alternative ways of knowing exist and hint at the contingency, constructedness, and situatedness of knowledge.
While sweeping reinventions of SE&H training require time and institutional willpower, as well as the recruitment of SE&H faculty with training in or commitments to decentering dominant epistemologies, individual educators can still make room for alternative epistemologies in existing courses. Instructors can provide richer understanding of their own fields by actively seeking examples of contributions and perspectives from nondominant epistemologies and valuing them in their classroom spaces. When unexpected opportunities arise to hear Native voices, as in the case of the student who tried to raise examples of Native understanding of plant species, faculty can take those moments as occasions to listen deeply and considerately, and find ways to centralize those epistemologies rather than marginalize them. Such teaching moments, whether provided via planned lessons or organic student responses, also offer the opportunity to underscore the erasure of nondominant epistemologies from textbooks and SE&H curricular standards.
Fourth, regarding epistemological imperialism, although the institutionalization of epistemological dominance and the long-standing challenges to tribal sovereignty it entails cannot be addressed through academic training, making cultural space for alternative epistemologies and disrupting the dominant epistemic paradigm in higher education could create improved credentialing processes and larger transformations in SE&H practice. Even in spaces without institutional resolutions for the epistemological tensions students encounter, finding ways to help students creatively manage incongruities or even blend epistemologies may improve students’ experiences. Increasing institutional support via student programs as well as promoting campus chapters of national organizations such as the American Indian Science and Engineering Society and Society for Advancement of Hispanics/Chicanos and Native Americans in Science could help nurture these creative strategies. Additionally, providing students with alternative epistemologies the opportunity to engage those epistemologies in service-based learning activities or independent research projects could be particularly empowering.
SE&H classrooms have much to gain by including postcolonial approaches to understanding both indigenous and scientific epistemologies. Even without such changes, faculty can serve as allies by helping students find individual paths through conflicting epistemologies, by listening to student needs, by better understanding paths Native scholars have taken (e.g., Alvord and Cohen Van Pelt 2000), and by working toward institutional policies that take the pressure off students to try to find ad hoc accommodations to problematic pedagogical practices. Recognizing that incorporating and valuing Native epistemologies adds to, rather than detracts from, a profession’s ideals of excellence may also help faculty (and departments and institutions) be more comfortable adopting more inclusive curricula.
At their core, alterations to epistemological dominance in SE&H education challenge the portrayals of science, engineering, and medicine as objective, neutral spheres of knowledge production—portrayals that are building blocks of the social and political legitimacy of those professions. These alterations necessarily require that both instructors and students understand that all epistemologies are social constructs and that inconsistencies among them emerge out of cultural–historical variation in truthmaking and legitimation practices, not more or less correct perspectives on an objective reality (Harding 1998). Many SE&H students are likely unacquainted with such ideas, and most SE&H faculty are likely unprepared for such instruction. 11 Our findings highlight that decentering epistemological dominance in SE&H classrooms is both necessary and fraught. The ongoing difficulty of implementing such changes speaks volumes about the power of dominant epistemologies to shape the content and tenor of US higher education.
Limitations
This paper describes Native American students’ experiences with dominant epistemologies in undergraduate SE&H programs at two universities. We interviewed students from seventeen different tribal backgrounds; our sample is not conducive to nuanced discussion of the types of conflicts that students from particular tribal backgrounds may have encountered. A majority of students in our sample are affiliated with either Navajo or Blackfeet tribes. As such, the patterns and examples we describe may not be representative of the particular conflicts that students from other tribes may encounter. The content and methods of some tribal epistemologies may conflict to a greater or lesser extent with dominant science epistemologies than others. However, we expect that the mechanisms of inequality we identify—delegitimation, pedagogical practices, and epistemological imperialism—may be in play across tribal affiliation.
Conclusion
Concomitant with the epistemological dominance in SE&H is a fundamental unwillingness to recognize indigenous epistemologies as legitimate ways of understanding the world. Our findings illustrate how dominant SE&H knowledge regimes often fail to see indigenous modes of knowledge as anything other than quaint cultural relics that may or may not need to be “accommodated.” 12
The processes of disadvantage we describe here do not necessarily conflict with liberal egalitarian norms of color blindness and equal treatment in US higher education. The textbook that discounted pre-European ecological knowledge, the student that justified keeping tribal artifacts unearthed for the purpose of archaeological research, and the teacher who assigned a lab activity that used human bones all fall in line with the ideal of universality. From the perspective of typical university policies of diversity and inclusion, epistemological dominance and its delegitimation of alternative ways of knowing, pedagogical practices, and credentialing requirements are not necessarily problematic. As such, these findings illustrate how inequality is reproduced in SE&H even when instructors are following accepted protocol for course design and when staff, administrators, and students are following university policies of fairness. The veneer of universalism in dominant SE&H epistemologies makes these processes of inequality simultaneously difficult to see and difficult to change.
To the extent that other cultural or demographic groups are informed by and understand the world through marginalized epistemologies, epistemological dominance may also delegitimize their ways of knowing and require them to participate in problematic pedagogical practices. Further, epistemological imperialism points to a larger structural process through which epistemological dominance can entrench inequalities for disadvantaged groups. For minority communities to legally engage in practices of healing, engineering, and scientific inquiry, they must submit to US regulations that require certification in SE&H epistemologies.
Broadly, inclusivity in SE&H not only requires formal processes of fair treatment—where all students are treated the same—but also demands serious and critical consideration of the ways that cultures, practices, and knowledges at the heart of these fields reproduce inequality. Our findings thus offer an important caveat to US national calls for “broadening participation” of underrepresented populations in SE&H fields: if the very culture of SE&H requires assimilation to one “true” set of epistemologies, it is not possible for SE&H fields to fully support demographic diversity (Schneider 1987). SE&H fields are not truly inclusive of the innovation, creativity, and discovery afforded by broad participation of diverse peoples until diverse ways of knowing are considered, valued, and integrated (Intemann 2009).
Footnotes
Acknowledgments
We thank Sergio Chávez, Heidi Sherick, Sandte Stanley, and Alexandra Vinson for valuable comments on earlier drafts and Fernando Clark, Meghan Huntoon, Jordan McCray, Christina Moyer, Michelle Pham, and Kandi Raymond for excellent research assistance. We appreciate the advice and assistance throughout the course of the project provided by Joshua Adams, Alexis Baca-Spry, Jim Burns, Mariko Chang, Julian Collins, Marjorie Old Horn, and Sheree Watson. We reserve our deepest gratitude for the students who participated in this study for their openness, honesty, and time. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are our own and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This project was supported by a grant (award number HRD-0936647) from the Gender in Science and Engineering Division of the National Science Foundation.