Meet the Writer and Activist Fusing Indigenous and Western Science

Hersha Tuhe! Greetings, I’m Gregg Castro. I’m T’rowt’raahl Salinan, Rumsen and Ramaytush Ohlone. The Ramaytush are the original people of the San Francisco peninsula, which includes this place—the Academy—where I’m sitting right now.

Between myself and the Academy, we have now developed a different kind of collaborative relationship, rather than a “give-and-take” approach with distance. We’ve jumped in, so to speak, and I’ve gotten to know exhibits specialists and work more closely with people like you [Shannon Tushingham] at the Academy. Developing confidence and trust in our relationship is important, because I know I’ll be taken seriously, even if an idea for an exhibit or project is rejected.

Even here, with the Academy’s Tusher African Hall exhibition, taxidermy is considered part of “tradition.” When cultural institutions try to make change, they have to talk to certain parts of their community that are used to older ways of showing animals and collections, such as taxidermy. It’s hard to address that, but it’s also a generational thing. Much has changed since I was a kid and since I started getting deeply involved in the Native community in the 1990s.

To younger people, for example, it’s a no-brainer to just talk to Indigenous folks, give them credence for their viewpoints. To them, that’s just the way we do things—but it hasn’t always been that way. There has been slow change, but there are still a lot who are not open to challenging “tradition.”

I always laugh when I hear the phrase, “Traditional Ecological Knowledge.” It’s an acronym, so that’s how I know Western scientists will treat it as official. It describes traditional, ancient knowledge. It’s Indigenous Science, and I prefer that term.

Elders have always said that Indigenous Science is not any better or any worse; it’s just different. Modern science is all about dissecting, taking things apart, distilling things down to the smallest molecular level—that’s how you guys thought up weird things like quarks. It comes from Western science, that idea of being a detached observer standing above nature looking down.

But we put things together: Native people see things in aggregate, in a network, in relationship to each other. We aren’t apart from nature, either. That’s a fundamental viewpoint that we’re working on with the Academy: You can’t detach yourself from nature. You’re a part of it. So why don’t we just dive in, and learn what it means to be a part of that network?

In this urgent time of climate crisis, we need to act fast but be thoughtful. In Pescadero, for example, I was involved in a project where locals reintroduced endangered salmon in the creek after 15 years of work. Farmland surrounded the creek, pesticides often flowed into the water, and drought and flooding hurt the salmon population. When Pescadero eventually released some 10,000 salmon into the creek, they hoped, statistically, that just 300 would survive.

Within the umbrella of California: State of Nature, one of the Academy’s upcoming exhibitions, we’ve been scheming: The exhibition will feature information about the Association of Ramaytush Ohlone and Indigenous perspectives, including my own. My grandson Matthew is also making a necklace for the exhibit.

With Wander Woods, we’ve been developing an interpretive strategy for that outside area. We’ve had ideas to grow native plants, maybe even some edible plants there. To me, that’s even more exciting: To have native plants grown on the native land that it used to grow on, in this specific area. And maybe, we can even offer them to the public so they can know what we ate, and see what they think.