Yahoo News Rio Tinto blasting a sacred Aboriginal site should make scientists ask ‘am I being a good ancestor?’
What does it take to blow something up? My field, mathematics, is certainly useful. Computer science, and the numerical methods it allows, is handy. Several years of chemistry and physics are essential. Geology and operations management will go a long way too. Many other topics will also be helpful but hopefully my point has been made: the best tool to blow something up is a university.
And yet, as universities proudly tout their Reconciliation Action Plans (RAPs) little thought is given to their complicity in the destruction of sacred sites. We equip students with the skillsets to destroy places such as the Juukan Gorge cave, which was blasted by Rio Tinto in May, but not with the ability to reason ethically. Or indeed, it appears, even to ask the simple question: is this wrong?
I can already hear my colleagues in the science faculty moaning at my suggestion of their inadequacies: “We give students tools, what they do with it is up to them!”, “I teach chemistry; why should I care about Indigenous culture?” or even, “I’m a mathematician, why should I discuss ethics with my students?”
To all of these questions, and other rabble, my response is this: you should do it to be a good person. But of course, not all of you are good people. Or perhaps, I might better say not all of you had exposure to ethics in your education. So instead I say to university management: if you are serious about RAPs, ethical and moral reasoning needs to enter the science, technology, engineering and mathematics (Stem) curriculum.
Alone, however, this is not enough if we wish to minimise injury inflicted upon First Nations folk. Hypothetical right or wrong is useless if you do not understand that you are doing serious harm – our traditional belief systems are, after all, fundamentally different. For this reason, Stem staff and students also need to understand, even superficially, Indigenous cultures.
Let me demonstrate the value of this with an example. In Gamilaraay culture, my Garruu taught me that when we die we may return. Perhaps not as a person but as a bird or fish or tree. Perhaps even as a river or watering hole. We may return perhaps not as a person but instead as a place. Here lies a fundamental barrier between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people: the line between animate and inanimate. Where a non-Indigenous person may see destruction of art, I see death. Worse still, it is death that is planned. Which is to say, it is death that is preventable.
Here is my point: while the engineers that destroyed the Juukan Gorge cave may have been OK with destroying art, I question whether they would so easily commit an act that others consider murder.
The value of ethics and Indigenous world views in Stem is, however, not limited to the case of mining. Indeed, 60 years on, British nuclear testing at Maralinga is a timely reminder of the moral negligence of physicists. More than this, it is a reminder of the harmful delusion of terra nullius, a distinctly western tool.
An example in biology can be found in the way some geneticists still talk about race: the reduction of people to fractions is not only contrary to our cultural understanding of identity, it also contains real colonial violence. More directly, assigning Indigenous people percentages is no less than an attempt to dilute us and, by extension, our claim to land.
Perhaps most pressing, however, is machine learning in policing. From facial recognition and gait analysis in order to target people in crowds, to controversial prediction of so-called pre-criminals in New South Wales – none of this is devoid of the very racial bias, profiling and brutality that is currently being protested the world over. Indeed, a 2017 report showed that 44% of targets of predictive policing in NSW were Indigenous, despite the fact that we make up less than 3% of the population. An individual with even a slither of understanding of our lives would never design a tool so rotten from the get-go.
Related: Rio Tinto apologises to traditional owners after blasting 46,000-year-old Aboriginal site
Stem graduates, it is overwhelmingly clear, seldom pause to think of the ethical consequences of the techniques they develop. But then again, the faculties that taught them do not seem to place much value on this variety of deep thought either.
When making a decision my Gunii encourages me to ask “am I being a good ancestor?” Really, what she means is “how will this affect those that come after?”
By skipping the part of education that is about responsibility – ethical and moral thinking – science and engineering classes across the continent are failing stupendously to ask this question.
They are, in short, creating bad ancestors.
It is time to fix this. The curriculum, to my mind, seems a decent place to start.
• Jared Field is a Gomeroi man from Moree way but grew up on Darug land, and is a McKenzie Fellow at the University of Melbourne in the School of Mathematics and Statistics. @JM_Field5
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