Indian Pipelines: science-based expertise as tools of liberation and oppression in Native America

Abstract:

Since the mid-1990s, American Indian communities have been enhanced through the science-based education of their children through local schools, special American Indian science programs like AISES (American Indian Science & Engineering Society), and colleges/universities that have (to some degree) provided increased attention to American Indian presence in STEM fields. There has long been an assumption that these American Indians students, who have been trained in science-based fields, would go on to help their communities or otherwise help address environmental and health issues in American Indian communities across the United States. However, since the early 2000s, the rise of the pipeline-industrial-complex has shed new light not only on the vulnerability of American Indian communities but also on the increasingly unarticulated presence of American Indian scientists and engineers in the corporations and institutions that place toxic pressure on Indigenous lands, waters, and environment. In this talk, I use my NSF and NOAA funded research in the Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina to continue a discussion of how American Indian braintrusts have been hijacked within the American corporatocracy. I begin with a discussion of Lumbee ownership of a growing electricity coop in southeastern North Carolina and the continued separation of the business of this coop from continued calls by national and global experts for increased use of non-fossil fuels. I shed light on how this growing division - between American Indian science/scientists employed within anthropogenic organizations and growing communities of American Indian scientists tasked with cultivating and moving knowledge of how to protect Indigenous lands/environments – is making it necessary to develop educational and policy tools that give new Indigenous-based purpose to science, engineering, and otherwise technical education. As an example, I highlight how energy companies like Duke Energy (which serves the electricity needs of the US Southeast) payoff local colleges to set up educational “pipelines” through which American Indian students are conditioned to work for and politically protect the financial and carcinogenic purposes of these companies.