Emerging Strategies for Indigenizing Science at Tribal Colleges

Over the past two decades, new ways to teach science have emerged at tribal colleges and universities (TCUs). These ideas build on the two missions of TCUs, which are to preserve the history, language, and culture and to increase economic development. The foundational idea for these new approaches harkens to the calls for Ethnoscience in the 1990s, which argued for the importance of connecting science to the tribal worldview. Our survey of TCU science instructors and federally funded science projects indicates that the chemistry course at Turtle Mountain Community College was among the earliest science courses to use Ethnoscience principles. Their major product was a lab manual that made connections through the use of materials with a tribal connection. Since then, TCU science faculty at a number of other institutions have been making tribal connections in and out of the classroom, relating to microbiology, climate change, chemistry, and medicinal plants. These projects show the myriad ways to connect science to tribal community topics.