Hilding Neilson: Astro-colonialism and honoring the stories of our dark skies (ep413)
“As it is, space exploration is inherently colonial because we’ve ever only done it from a colonial perspective. Maybe we look at space exploration through the lens of how Indigenous peoples have explored the lands or waters we’re on—largely as a framework of being a guest. ”
In this episode, we welcome Dr. Hilding Neilson, who shares with us his knowledge of the night skies and expertise as an astronomer traced by his Mi’kmaw lineage. Trained in the Western-scientific sphere of astrophysics and shaped by Mi'kmaq methodologies, Dr. Neilson aims to disrupt the Euro-centric claim on the night sky as codified through historical and modern Astro-colonial pursuits of objectivity, discovery, nomenclature.
In demanding that Indigenous stories and systems of knowledge not only be heard but given a leading role on the stage of public policy making, Hilding invites us to reflect upon the value of night sky knowledge and ponder how it reflects and shapes life on earth, as well as how we choose to ethically engage with this knowledge moving forward.
About our guest:
Hilding Neilson, Ph.D., is an astrophysicist and professor in the Department of Physics & Physical Oceanography at Memorial University of Newfoundland & Labrador in St. John’s Newfoundland where his research focuses on stellar and exoplanet physics and the stories we can learn from stars and planets. He is also Mi’kmaw from Ktaqmkuk and his works integrate Indigenous knoweldges in astrophysics research and how we relate to outer space exploitation and the future of large astronomical observatories. Dr. Neilson has been featured in numerous outlets including the CBC, Globe and Mail, the Guardian, and more. He has also published over 50 research articles.
Artistic credits:
Song feature: Mine to Take by Johanna Warren
Episode-inspired artwork by Taylor Tinkham.
Dive deeper:
Explore the works of Cree Elder, Wilfred Buck
Learn more about Duane Hamacher
Article by Hilding Neilson
Learn more about Elders Albert and Murdena Marshall
Find out more about the International Astronomical Union Center for the Protection of Dark Skies
Expand your lenses:
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transcript
Note: Our episodes are minimally edited. Please view them as open invitations to dive deeper into each resource and topic explored. This transcript has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Hilding Neilson: Thank you for having me here today. I am currently in Newfoundland, also called Ktaqmkuk. The island of Newfoundland is on the eastern seaboard of Canada and is the ancestral homeland of the Mi'kmaq peoples, as well as the extinct Beothuk peoples. And the province I'm in, Newfoundland, Labrador, is also home to the Innu and Inuit of Labrador.
I got into astronomy kind of by fluke. I was going to do engineering in the university and I couldn't get into the courses because of scheduling and all kinds of weird things. So I picked up this astronomy course and it was so much fun. You know, the professor was kind of this old gentleman who was a little bit weird and eccentric, but the textbook was all these questions, all these things we don't know.
At the same time, there's all these things we don't know about people because the textbook was written from the perspective of here's Aristotle, here's some other Greek philosophers, here's Copernicus and Galileo and Brahe and Newton and so on and so on. And it was just so one-sided. And so I kind of feel like seeing that element of astronomy, it was just seeing one part of a rich tapestry and trying to connect it back to the different lands and different peoples and learning about how we do science in different ways. And it's really become a significant part of how I work as an astronomer today.
Kamea Chayne: Thank you for sharing this backdrop. And part of what you have critiqued is this concept of astro-colonialism, which contributed to, as you say, sanitizing the sky. So I would appreciate it if you could offer us more of a backdrop of how the dominant field of astronomy and knowledges around constellations came to be, as well as how they have led to erasure of different communities' stories and relations to the sky based on their very unique connections to stars and unique places in the world.
Hilding Neilson:
The idea of changing constellations and these issues of naming constellations and stars trace all the way back to colonization from the beginning.
We call two galaxies in the southern hemisphere the Magellanic Clouds, named after the guy who almost certainly navigated the world but got credit for it. Constellations like the Southern Cross were named by British and Dutch explorers. As opposed to the original names from Indigenous Australian peoples or Indigenous South American peoples and so on. As well as the fact that then later on as we got into the 20th century, it became important to develop this international astronomical union, a way of systematizing, a way of codifying how we do astrophysics so that by 1930 a group of astronomers had dictated what the constellations would be.
And these constellations were picked because of their stories or their importance to people, but how they interact as a map of the sky. So if I'm looking at a constellation like Ursa Major is the big dipper, you know, that is a map. It tells me what part of the sky an object is in at any time.
But when they did this codification, it was done by, you know, leading Belgian, leading French, leading American astronomers, almost entirely white men, all white, almost entirely white men. And this astro-colonialism changed how we teach and talk about these stories. So much so that now when we see constellations, they're almost always the stick figure drawings in a way that sanitizes and removes all elements of knowledge and background and culture because Ursa Major was a Greco-Roman constellation. It has a story, it has meaning, just one that we don't really think about now. And this route, now that as we have those constellations, they became part of our textbooks, our first-grade science, you learn about the stars. That star is Deneb, that star is Polaris, that star is Betelgeuse from these old, mostly Middle Eastern Arabic names, but you know, codified through a European system. We don't learn about Datapin, which is the North Star of Mi'kmaki. We don't learn about Muin or the Great Bear or the Gourd, which are all different versions of the Big Dipper. And this, because these constellations as codified by the astronomers became the norm, all these other stories were pushed aside.
And just like in many other knowledges, you know, Indigenous knowledge has been pushed out across Canada, the U.S. and beyond in favor of the dominant white narrative. Astronomers did the same thing. And I think that erased and was meant to remove people from their relationship with the land and the sky.
Kamea Chayne: I feel like a lot of people have come to increasingly become aware of how, for example, plant knowledge and so forth has been very universalized in mainstream science and the importance of honoring Indigenous knowledges, especially when it comes to place based traditional ecological knowledge. But when it comes to our skies I personally think about constellations and you mentioned the stick figures. like that is what I have pictured in my mind as I think of constellations, so I think this is really important for all of us to unlearn and relearn in terms of what alternate ways there are to relating to our dark skies and on that note I wonder if you can share some examples of how other cultures and communities have storied and try to conceptualize stars in different ways.
Hilding Neilson: Well, I could talk a lot about different anthropological views from the anthropologist side, because I don't spend too much time, say, in Quechua communities and dark side constellations. But I could talk about Muin and the Seven Bird Hunters. This is a Mi'kmaw story from the territory where I'm from and from my ancestors. And the story of Muin and the Seven Bird Hunters is a story of the Big Dipper. The four stars of the bowl that we see of the Big Dipper is a bear, Muin.
As you go through the arm, you'll have three stars and you keep going through past that, you'll have four more stars that make up the seven bird hunters. In Mi'kmaki, the story isn't told over one night. The story is told throughout the year and is told usually around the same time of day, early in the morning, just before dawn. Not my favorite time of day, but to each their own. We do this because the Big Dipper or Muin goes around the North Star every night because of the rotation of the Earth. But if we tell the story at the same time every day, the constellation goes around the North Star again in a different path.
When we start the story, we start in the spring. And in the spring, the Big Dipper or Muin is pointed downwards. So the arms are pointed higher in the sky or more north, more north-like. Because at that point, Muin in spring, Muin is waking up from hibernation. And after a long winter, Muin is hungry. Muin wants to search for food. So she emerges from her cave and starts foraging and hunting. When the first bird, Robin, spies Muin, knows that Muin will provide meat for community, furs for warmth, grease for medicine. He grabs his bow and arrow and he calls his friends. First comes Chickadee with a pot. And the funny part of that is, if you look at the Chickadee in the night sky, it's two stars, Chickadee and his pot. Then for the sake of brevity, the other birds follow. And they all begin chasing the hunt. And as we move through the summer, Muin and the constellation appears kind of flat in the sky as Muin is running across the land evading the hunters. All throughout the long warm summer Muin is evading the hunters and keeping ahead foraging, having cubs, doing what bears do. But eventually the fall comes and Muin is getting tired and so are the birds. In fact in this story some of the birds are now below the horizon and have fallen away from the hunt. But Muin and is tired and in his frustration, raises on his hind legs and growls and tries to scare the birds. This is Robin's chance. Robin takes his bow and arrow and fires a shot at Muin, striking Muin in the chest. Blood goes everywhere covering Robin and Robin flies into the trees, shaking it all off, staining all the leaves red except for one spot on his breast, which we see for the Robins.
Muin passes onto the spirit world. Chickadee catches up with his pot, as do the other birds. They begin to build a fire, begin to celebrate, tell stories, and they keep doing the sharing meals as we go into the winter. And in the winter, Muin is in the sky on its back, its spirit waiting for that spring to re-emerge. While at the same time in the winter, the birds are still on the ground sharing, building community, and supporting each other.
And this story is told throughout the year. So that, by again, by the time spring starts, you start the story over again. And the story is great because it tells us about motions of the stars across throughout the year. It tells us about certain polar stars. But on the land, it tells us about the animals, the birds. It tells us about behaviors. You don't hunt bear in the spring or the summer. You wait for the fall after, you know, it's had cubs, it's grown fat and you know, lived his life. And so when we have this story, we have a sense of community.
It's about being in community with the animals and the land in such a way that the sky is a direct reflection of the land.
Kamea Chayne: Yeah, thank you. This is really powerful. I can see people holding this perception that stories and science are separate and different because stories might animate or make certain things relational, whereas science seeks to more so, or Western science seeks to more so, discover some sort of universal truths about the world. So what do you see as the purpose of stories and the importance of recognizing stories as science?
Hilding Neilson: I don't think science doesn't do stories. I think we tell stories. Cosmology talks about the big bang, and that's the story of the creation of the universe. We talk about dark matter, which is a story of gravity, or general relativity is another story of gravity, or top quarks and bottom quarks and, you know, quantum mechanics in many respects is its own story. We tell stories, I think, in science as a way of trying to approach a universal truth on the basis that we think we're objective, that we think what we do to have a science can be replicated by someone else. But Indigenous stories are truths of their own, truths that are from an individual perspective, from a community perspective, and how we relate to that knowledge. When science, the knowledge is objective, we are separate from it. And that allows us to think of science as “moral” or “not moral”, as essentially neutral. But when we think about from indigenous perspectives, and to note there is no one indigenous methodology or science, there are many, but there are many commonalities. But from that kind of indigenous perspective, the knowledge is something we interact with, something we need to build wisdom and connection with. And I think having that connection is a way of viewing knowledge as something we have to work with and have not necessarily wisdom, but we have to understand why we're doing it.
What is the value of it to ourselves and to our communities? What does the knowledge allow us to be or do? And how do we ethically use that knowledge? Which a lot of ways Western science doesn't have that kind of methodology. You know, it's the knowledge exists and we can do what we want with it, whether it is learning atomic physics so that we can build nuclear bombs, or so we can do nuclear medicine. And I think that's kind of the challenge and why we develop these stories of value, because they tell us how to interact with the knowledge, but also how to ethically use that knowledge.
Kamea Chayne: Yeah, thinking about the intentions and the motivations behind all of this too. I would be interested in leaning deeper into the idea of objectivity because it seems like the mainstream field of astronomy has tried to come up with and universalize a sort of objective picture of what exactly our night skies constitute. But I wonder if there can just be one objective reality when it comes to our dark skies and what this presumption might lead people to gloss over or miss out on when people are really trying to understand our stars and outer space.
Hilding Neilson: When we think about how astronomy views the universe, we are essentially an observer on a small pebble looking into a vast universe that the more distant we look, the more the universe looks the same to us. So astronomy struggles with objectivity because we seem to be in a special place. And so we have to come up with theories to make it that we're not in a special place. But I think what we lose when we do that is an appreciation of where we are in our universe, where we are in our solar system. The sheer fact that we have water on Earth when we probably shouldn't have water on Earth is something we should be in awe of. And so I think as we build things like these more universal or generalized theories of cosmology and astrophysics.
We can lose some of that perspective of just how special that we can be on earth. The more we try to be not special, I think we kind of lose a little bit of ourselves and a little bit of this perspective of how life on earth is in a very special place.
And it could so easily not exist if any one small thing happened a billion years ago or two billion years ago. And I think indigenous knowledge has helped us remember that.
Remember that we are in a special place because what we see is related to where we are. What I see here in Ktaqmkuk, Newfoundland is very different than what an observer would see in Australia or New Zealand. And so therefore we have to think and appreciate where we are and how we use the knowledge in those observations in a general sense. So it's a bit of holding, I think, two beliefs in place here when we talk about astronomy.
Because from our local and indigenous knowledges, we have to appreciate very specific spots we're in and the truth in that moment. While Western astronomy might want to generalize and be universal, which has its own set of values, we have to acknowledge that is a very hard thing to do being one set of observers in a very vast universe.
Kamea Chayne: You've also talked about your inspirations from Cree elder, Wilfred Buck, and how he mentioned seeing astronomy as medicine. So I'd be curious to have you share more about how you've personally related to astronomy as medicine and how else you might see this mode of healing being pertinent in our troubled times today, given our globally aggravating injustices, health crises, and planetary breakdown.
Hilding Neilson: Yeah, I think it's a very important thing. And particularly from Elder Buck's perspective, I think when he was, not to put words in his mouth, but I think a part of his way of using astronomy as medicine is as a way to reconnect with Indigenous knowledge, Indigenous perspectives, and community. As he noted previously at a meeting a few years ago, a lot of indigenous knowledge is lost. And if you want to think of a story, you know, the story could be a hundred words and each word is held by a different person. But, you know, because of colonization and genocides and, you know, 400 years of atrocious history, you know, most of those people have forgotten those words and we're trying to relearn that Indigenous knowledge with starting from maybe a handful of that hundred words. And so learning every time you learn a new word or new story that's a reconnection to where we were in the past to our ancestors and to, and to the land. I think in a more broad sense, we can think of astronomy as medicine because it is part of nature. I used to live in a large city of millions of people and I would sit outside, have a clear view of a lot of a significant part of the city. But if you look at to the sky, you could see nothing. Even on a clear night, it would, it would just look kind of orange.
That was disconnecting, anxiety inducing. But then you go out and you get to a dark spot and you see all the stars, thousands of tiny lights. Each one of those lights, you know, what you're seeing is a photon that's traveled for years or decades across the vastness of space, just to reach your eye.
And that is a tremendous gift. And that helps us connect back to nature, connect back to our path, to our stories. And just to think about how my ancestors used to navigate or traveled by the stars, what their constellations and stories were for all of them, because I only know a few stories. To worry or to know that those stars will be there generations in the future is reassuring. You know, it's comforting to know that something is constant in our lives or mostly constant. And I think that is its own medicine.
Kamea Chayne: Yeah, it seems like they can be very grounding reminders and affirmations. And speaking of dark skies, we've had three past interviews on protecting dark skies. And one particular subtopic that came up was this idea of broadband internet and satellite, where initiatives to expand technological access to broadband connection kind of do so in the name of inclusivity and accessibility.
But at the same time, the increase in satellites in our planetary orbit contributes to space litter and light pollution, which gets in the way of how other cultures and communities and species turn to night skies as their accessible form of advanced technologies. So how have you thought through these forms of inclusivity politics that seek to define inclusivity and privilege with very specific lenses, as in: some perhaps believing in expanding access to internet connection as being more inclusive as we quote unquote “advanced society”. Whereas others might wish to have inclusivity referred to more people maintaining access to the technology and navigation tool and cultural stories of stars and dark skies. So how can we think through these things together as we consider how progress and advancement in astronomy typically gets defined and envisioned?
Hilding Neilson: Yeah, that's a very hard question. And being in what is a very rural area of Canada, I know a number of people who use satellite internet because it is more or less the only internet they can avail of. And so they have an accessibility issue, particularly in the last few years when so many people had to do work and education over the internet. It is a very valuable tool.
But at the same time, one of my colleagues, Dwayne Hamacher, he wrote about how light pollution is colonization. And light pollution is in that if you can't see the stars, how can you tell your stories? If you can't see the stars, how do you navigate and live your way of life as indigenous peoples? In a similar manner, these satellites, some of them are so bright. The recent Blue Walker III, remembering it correctly, you know, was for brief time or is one of the brightest stars in the night sky now. This is its own colonization.
If light pollution is erasing our stories, then these satellites can rewrite them. And that's unfortunate because these satellites are controlled by a very small fraction of privileged, essentially all white men. And why should they have the right to choose? I think, you know, going back and forth over how we do satellite internet, you know, some of these companies are very good at delivering service. But do they need as many satellites as they're putting in the low Earth orbit? Can we do this in a way that creates accessibility by serving communities and regions that don't have access to broadband and having specific satellite constellations for them while at the same time, you know, having low reflectivity, having accessibility to the night sky maintained? I believe the answer is we can do that.
The reason why these satellites are taking over is not an accessibility question, but a profit question. A lot of this is really just a new version of capitalism, just in higher orbit.
A lot of this capitalism is being enabled by the new Artemis Accords, which effectively privatizes space.
Even though they claim you cannot claim anything in space, but effectively it's private usage in space. And I think we need to have a rethink about how we do this, how we have these agreements like the Artemis Accords, like we have the satellite companies dictating what goes up and what doesn't go down, or what doesn't go up. And most importantly, I think we need to have more indigenous peoples at the tables in making these judgments, whether it is at the United Nations, whether it's in the US government and NASA, whether it's in the Canadian Space Agency or so on. Because we don't have these community voices really apply here or involved, we have largely settler white men dictating what our skies are going to be like. And that just is another form of colonization.
Even if we get internet on places that don't normally have it for indigenous peoples, they're gonna be asked to pay hundreds of dollars a month for it, for access. So affordability still becomes an issue, not an option. And does that create accessibility either? So I think in the end we need to restructure how we operate in space and be more inclusive of the voices of Indigenous peoples, peoples in places that don't have voices in the space industry like countries in what gets called the global south, and bring them to the forefront and have the companies that are dictating things now and NASA and US governments take a step back for a moment so we can have an international dialogue that is a bit supporting a place in space and not conquering it.
Kamea Chayne: And when you talk about the challenge being more so the profit motive rather than questions around accessibility, I just want to clarify, is that kind of like, let's say a satellite in its technology could service a whole region just through that one satellite. But because of the private interests that are at play, there might end up being like four or five different satellites all in privatized competition over trying to profit from this same area. So maybe the actual technological advancement could allow for a lot less satellites orbiting the Earth, but because of these privatized interests, instead of us approaching space as more of a shared commons, there ends up being a lot more than what is actually needed technologically to meet people's needs. Does that make sense or?
Hilding Neilson: Yeah, I think you're right. I agree with the sense that having competition space, having five companies trying to do the same thing with five satellites each helps pollute the space. But it's also that these companies aren't seeking to be accessible to people who don't have access to ground-based internet. They're seeking to compete with ground-based internet and therefore trying to dominate a whole new market.
And by competing with ground-based internet, then they put up all these more of these satellites and trying to take business away for nothing more than profit for them and not for these other companies. You know, not a huge amount of profit for any internet company, but, you know, the fiber optics don't pollute as much as space-based satellite internet.
Kamea Chayne: And then the final thing I wanted to chat about with you is space exploration and how the language and approach and incentives behind it relates to colonial mentalities. What do you find to be pertinent to share on the subject right now as space exploration and space technologies continue to develop and receive disproportionate levels of funding to do so?
Hilding Neilson: Yeah, that's an important question. I think it relates also to the discussion around the 30 meter telescope. It's very interesting to note that astronomers reacted negatively to Indigenous peoples protesting a telescope. But as the satellite constellations and number of satellites have exploded in the last few years, astronomers have gotten together and cited indigenous knowledges as a reason to support a dark and quiet skies.
Various reports have been written citing indigenous knowledges like wayfinding in the Pacific, even without indigenous peoples involvement. So it's very, why I find that interesting is because in the same way where indigenous peoples were considered a problem and it was science versus religion when it didn't serve astronomers, now that it's where the indigenous peoples might align with the astronomers, the astronomers are using the same arguments to support themselves. This is part of that ongoing colonialism and somewhat negating, in my opinion, the rights and perspectives of Indigenous peoples. To the point where in many of these groups, such as groups organized by the American Astronomical Society, currently there is the International Astronomical Union Center for the Protection of Dark Skies—for which I'm a member—they all seek to use the language of Indigenous knowledges and Indigenous peoples as ways of preventing ongoing uses of the night sky by these companies and brightening of the night sky.
I think in terms of what's going on in space, space exploration has always been a colonial endeavor.
Wernher von Braun in the 1950s wrote the manual for colonizing Mars at the same time as he was helping build the space program in the United States. And in that manual, he talked about settlements on Mars, living on Mars, in the same way that Mars is the frontier of exploration. And if Mars is the frontier of exploration tomorrow, it's the same way that the Canada and the US and other parts of this world were the frontier of exploration centuries go; where Indigenous peoples were removed, nature was removed in favor of a Eurocentric colonialism. And in that respect, so much of the language is just repetition of the language of colonization. If we have a sub-land on Mars, that's part of that colonization and terraforming is part of that colonization. You know, when it did, when people came and removed the indigenous peoples from the lands of Canada, the United States, those settlers terraformed the land in different ways, whether it is terraforming by dredging harbors, building dams, killing bison and so on. That was a form of terraforming. When we talk about terraforming in Mars, it is the same thing, particularly since we haven't even know that Mars does not have life on it yet.
When we talk about going to the moon with the, under the new Artemis Accords, which is designed to build in the next mission, a space station orbit the moon and begin experimenting with extracting water for fuel, as well as building constructs on the moon, you know, this is another form of colonization. It's one that is about harming for what many people see as either a grandmother or a grandfather. And their response is of course, to that is to protect sites of cultural heritage, which from most perspectives probably only means the Apollo landing spots. So all we're doing is invoking the same heritage of manifest destiny that dominated the expansion of the United States or the expansion of Canada and other countries to now being manifest destiny on the moon and manifest destiny on Mars.
We are also turning this into a sense of doctrine of discovery where if there's no living beings or humans, you know, you have the right to claim it. While the outer space tree says you can't claim anything in space, the Artemis Accords basically means you can do wherever you want once you're on a piece of material, whether it's part of the moon or an asteroid or something else. And so we're having the same conversations again in space that we had on earth. This may not lead to a genocide of peoples in space, but it is the same thing. And a lot of it gets to exist because we think of the moon and Mars as dead objects, just things that are resources. In the same way we think of water as a resource in many parts of the world or trees as a resource or you know, the ground as a resource or snow as a resource when it is actually part of an ecosystem. So when we're beginning this exploration now in the next 20 years, we're just doing the same thing we've done for centuries as the same colonial framework just dressed up as heroic exploration.
Kamea Chayne: And perhaps to offer some inspirations as to alternate paths forward. I'm thinking about this question of whether the idea of space exploration itself or the practice of space exploration itself is colonial by nature or like whether there are decolonial ways of exploring space. Yeah, I wonder what your thoughts are on that.
Hilding Neilson: I think as it is, space exploration is inherently colonial because we've ever only done it from a colonial perspective. The U.S. really only went to space because the Russians went there first.
And so I think we should step back and think about maybe from a different perspective, let's think about from exploration on earth. We all learn in schools in Canada, the US about people from Europe who explored the various parts of the world, whether it is sailing the oceans, mapping the land of Canada and US or so on without naming names. But, Indigenous peoples are also explorers. People traveled across the Pacific as explorers. Indigenous peoples traveled up north and south across the continents of the American continents for centuries. Peoples have traveled around exploring and learning about the lands and giving back for centuries. So I think we, maybe instead of, I think instead of the way we look at space exploration as a continuation of the history of European sailors or European explorers, or even the Europeans who traverse the Arctic or the Antarctic.
Maybe we look at space exploration through the lens of how indigenous peoples have explored the lands that we're on or the waters that we're on, largely as a framework of being a guest.
So maybe instead of going space and being the dictating what we do there, maybe we think we're going to space as we're a guest here in space as a different land or a different home. And when you're a good guest, what do you do? You give gifts you support it you make an offering. I don't know what it means to make an offering to the moon when you land on the moon, but I don't believe that we have to give up the space exploration to be decolonial. I think we just have to start over and ask instead why we want to go to space. Do we want to exploit water on the moon? Do we want to have the largest satellite internet company in the world? Or do we want to learn how to grow and be a species that can engage on the moon or in space?
And we can use that for things like medicine or using things like that for maybe building energy plants that we need and so on, or ways of solving the climate change. And at the same time, think about how we get back. Maybe not, so instead of going to the moon and taking from it, maybe we leave something behind.
Kamea Chayne: Well, Green Dreamer, we are coming to a wrap here, but we will have more links and resources from this conversation in our show notes at greendreamer.com. And for now, Hilding, thank you so much for this really fascinating and vital conversation. It's really been an honor to speak with you. As we close off, what final words of wisdom do you have for us as Green Dreamers?
Hilding Neilson: If you have a chance to look in the night sky, find a constellation or a star and find out what the people of the land you're on call that star or that constellation.
