Indigenous Health Perspectives are Needed
Robin Wall Kimmerer Increasingly Indigenous perspectives on environmental stewardship is being recognised as the only way all humans will be able to co-exist with Earth. Given that First Nations have thousands of years of experience in the management of plants, soils, water and wildlife, why would they not be able to improve on current trends that are proving destructive of our life-support system? Robin Wall Kimmerer’s popular book, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teaching of Plants , powerfully addresses the western scientific blindness to nature-based science. “Western science is a powerful way of knowing, but it isn't the only one,” says Kimmerer. While science is, in theory, open to new ways of understanding the world, it often isn’t. Kimmerer, like most Indigenous peoples in the western world, have had their traditional forms of knowledge ridiculed and dismissed. (See more about this here: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/tapestry/w