In a FaceBook thread, a question was posed: “What is the difference between Western science and Hawaiian science?”
For me, it is this:
In my classes, programs, and lectures, I teach that science is not the tools and technology, but an organized method of questioning, testing, and examining the results.
Our ancestors have employed the scientific method for thousands of years. It is how we got to these islands. Hawaiian science “publishes” the results in poetic form, and incorporates a wholistic world view. Hawaiian science does not separate humanity from the rest of the world, but sees humanity as an integral part of it. We do not have the problem of Schrodinger’s cat, because we do not see ourselves as external to the question.
The great battle of Pele and Poliʻahu is seen in the glaciation and differentiated basaltic layers of Mauna Kea.
In our news today, reports are talking about water pooling in Kilauea. The Pele cycle of chants talks about the battle between Pele of the magma and Namakaokahaʻi of the sea causing cataclysmic eruptions before Pele headed north to Hawaiʻi. Then, after Pele reached Hawaiʻi and settled in, the battle between Pele and Hiʻiaka is described, including a description of the explosive nature of steam eruptions caused by magma interacting with the aquifer, and warnings of what would happen in the event of collapse below the fresh water lens, which would allow the sea to infiltrate the magma chamber.
Chants accurately teach meteorology, oceanography, botany, zoology, sociology, and record the migrations of various family lines.
But these thousands of years old records have been consistently dismissed out of hand in favor of theories like Heyerdahl’s lost fisherman drift voyages, now proven false. As a child, I was taught about Heyerdahl, and told that the ancient legends and migration records of my own ancestors were simply the imaginings of a primitive people.
In the 90s, as a professional journalist, I was told by certain astronomers (who shall remain nameless) that the astronomical sites built by my ancestors were mere superstition and should be bulldozed to put up telescopes.
Only now is Western Science starting to understand that Hawaiian practice, methodology, and recording have equal validity, and are a functional and useful method of exploring our world, and the universe.
Personally, I love the knowledge we gain through the use of the telescopes. It utterly breaks my heart that the telescopes were brought to our islands in the hubristic, dismissive, elitist, impositional manner which set the stage for the situation we have now.