(gentle music) - Welcome back to Conversations at the Perimeter. Today Colin and I are excited to bring you a conversation with Hilding Neilson. Hilding's research is at the intersection of science, astronomy and indigenous knowledge. He studies the physics of stars and he works to incorporate indigenous knowledge into all of the work that he does. - Yeah, Hilding grew up in Newfoundland, where he would stare up at the starry night sky and dream about what the stars were made of.
And now as a grown up, he studies their inner workings for a living. And that professional pursuit of astronomy has also led him to reconnect with his own indigenous roots as a Miꞌkmaq person. And that has inspired him to look into indigenous astronomies and how they compare and contrast to sort of our Western astronomies. - You know, I was looking at Hilding's website and I think that the subtitle he has on there really says it all. He writes, every star tells a story.
So let's hear some of those stories from Hilding. So Hilding thank you so much for joining us today. One thing that I'm hoping you might be able to help us with is something that's a goal of mine for this series in general, which is to just maybe shed some light on the meaning of some words or expressions that we hear a lot in popular culture or the media, but maybe not everyone is so sure exactly what they mean.
So I thought we could start with a really fundamental one in I think everything that you do, which is the word astronomy. So could you just tell us what it means to study astronomy? - Thank you for inviting me and thanks for starting with the easy questions like astronomy, from my perspective, astronomy is just the study of everything that we look up and see in the sky.
Scientists have some artificial construct that where our atmosphere ends and space begins, astronomy is, from the moon to the sun, to the planets. - And how does that differ from astrophysics? - The story I usually tell is if I'm on a plane, I wanna have a conversation, I say I'm an astronomer. If I'm less interested in conversation, I say astrophysicist. (laughing) I think in reality today, there's no real difference.
There's some historical context where people, there were astronomy groups with telescopes doing observations. In the physics department, there were scientists doing the maths and the experiments related to astrophysics. Those were the distinguishing features of the two fields. But today, it's all the same as far as I can tell. - And I really like the definition you give too, because I think it seems to me like a pretty all encompassing definition.
But since you're saying that astronomy is defined by what you look up and see, it depends so much on where you are, I guess both physically, but also in time, is that true? - I think if we talk about astronomy as what we can see then, yeah, it depends on who's doing it depends on our relationship to the night sky. Whether we can see the north star or the Southern cross, whether we see the imagine line clouds or Andromeda and all these different things. And it does depend on time.
We somehow could observe the universe a second after it was born, it would look very different, but you know, it depends on when and where we are. - And I know you specifically are interested in studying stellar astronomy. What really draws you to focusing on stars? - 'Cause stars carry so much of the information that we use in astronomy and astrophysics. Almost the entirety of our field is defined by using light to understand the universe.
Today's a little different thanks to Neutrino experiments and gravitational waves and the hunt for dark matter, but almost everything else is light. And almost all that light come from stars. We wanna understand things like the shape of our Milky Way. We look at stars, shape of a halo over galaxy, we look at stars, we look for exoplanets, we're looking at stars. I think when we look at stars, it shares all these stories, 'cause no star, no two stars are the same really.
So many science is looking for stars like our sun, but it's hard to find one exactly alike. It's like trying to understand people. - You mentioned the only star that a lot of people are really familiar with. The one that keeps us alive and heats us, keeps us warm. What kind of star is our sun compared to some of the other stars that you're studying? Is it a run of the mill star? Is it an extraordinary star?
- I think all stars are extraordinary in some way, but I think for many situations, our sun is sort of the average. It has a perfect mass. If it we're much more massive, it wouldn't live very long. So we wouldn't be able to be here or much smaller, it would live a very long time, but it wouldn't generate that much heat. It would be very red and cool, like cool as saying 3000 degrees Celsius. So in many respects, our sun is sort of the average. Doesn't really stand out.
Doesn't have like a whole bunch of other stars orbiting it, 'cause we're the only planets we know of with life. I guess in that respect, our sun is very special. - What are the other types of stars out there that you're studying? How do they sort of compare to our sun? - I tend to jump around different stars, but I like also trying to understand the most massive stars, stars that are 10 times more massive than our sun and stars that are even a hundred times more massive than the sun.
'Cause these are these really hot. We call them O type stars. They look very blue. They live fast, die young, go out with an explosion. They're kind of rock stars. We get to learn so much about these stars because they're doing all these different things. 'Cause they're so massive that when they spin, they can deform their shape when they spin fast enough, we get to learn about how they rotate. We learn about the fluid dynamics, magnetic fields.
On the other hand, I also like studying super giant stars like Betelgeuse. Betelgeuse is this great red super giant star that sits in Orion and so beautifully when you see it on the night sky. But for most astronomers, all we're waiting for is for the thing to explode. 'Cause we know it's going to explode soon. - Relatively soon, I assume, not tomorrow necessarily. - Although not tomorrow, but within 100,000 years ish. - Ish relatively soon.
- Yeah. - Do you have any idea of when in those 100,000 years or it's just any time. - I have lots of ideas. None of them are really that good or any better than any others. The unfortunate reality is we just don't know enough about the start to be able to predict the exact time is going to explode, but we know it's getting close. - Can you tell us why it's going to explode and how you know that?
- We know that pretty much every star that's more massive than eight times the mass of our sun will end up exploding as a supernova. And this has to do with how stars form elements in their core. Stars like our sun generates energy, give us our light from taking two hydrogen atoms, banging together to eventually create helium. And that get off a little bit of energy that turns on the photons that eventually reach us, but more massive stars.
When the core runs out of hydrogen, they're able to defuse helium, they're able to defuse carbon and oxygen. And so on you reach our iron or most people who study climate, we realize that when irons tries to fuse, it's a problem because it takes energy away from the star as opposed to creating energy. So when that happens, there's no way for the star to support itself anymore. It collapses onto itself, creating perhaps a neutron star or a block hole. And then a shock wave creates the explosion.
And because we know Betelgeuse is much more massive than eight solar masses or eight times mass in the sun, we can be fairly certain that it's going to explode eventually. And because we know it's cool, it's only about 3000, 3500 degrees Celsius. And the amount of light it emits, we can guess that it's very well beyond fusing hydrogen and is probably burning helium or maybe burning carbon, but it's getting very much closer and we know the time scales for burning these heavier elements.
It gets shorter and shorter and shorter. And by the time it gets to like oxygen, last a year burning oxygen or few tens of years. And so we know it's getting close, but we don't know enough precisely about the star to be able to say exactly when. - And is that partly because we don't have enough other examples that we can compare it to?
- No, I think it's more of the fact that we can only know about the stars so well, to be able to figure out exactly how old it is and how much longer we'll have, we need to know very precisely exactly how much light it's emitting. So we need to know how far away it is. And we can do things like stellar parallax, where you survey the stars and just see how they move relative to each other. But even that doesn't work very well. We don't have a very good certainty of how far away Betelgeuse is.
Even though it's one of the closest stars, we don't necessarily know how massive it is, 'cause it's a single star and we measure the masses stars by gravity. So we need to see them interacting with other stars to do this. And so we have to sort of guess what this mass is, based off its amount of light and amount of temperature we see it sort of fitting our solar evolution calculations or doing computer modeling. So we can't do that very precisely. So we have very limited knowledge.
We know Betelgeuse is more than eight solar masses, but we don't know whether that's means that's 10 solar masses or 20 solar masses or 25 solar masses, the lifetime starters between 10.5. It could be very different. - And how far away, you say it's relatively near, but again, everything's relative. How roughly distant is Betelgeuse? - I always wanna say this in light years, but I never remember in light years, but in Parex is about a thousand parsecs.
- I was gonna ask if it does explode tomorrow, when will we find out about it? - And about the time it takes the light to travel our of parsecs, sorry. (laughing) - That's the homework challenge for the listener, calculate the light years. - But it's far enough away that we probably, we'll see it at night for sure.
If the explosion's bright enough, we might even see during the day, which has happened historically where you actually, you could see light from stream over during the day, it's that nice place where it's just gonna be in very nice light show. - I'm looking forward to it if I live long enough. - And I wanna go back to a word you said before, which is exoplanets. Can you talk about what an exoplanet is? And some of the processes we would use to find them.
- Up to about 1990 or so, the only planets we knew in our galaxy were the ones orbiting our sun, big problem with that is why should we be the only place with planets? So stronger started coming up with techniques to look at other stars and try to find ways to find other planets. And one is through radio velocity, where you take the light from a star, you break into a spectrum, like it's rainbow.
And you're what you're looking for is the lines, the chemical fingerprints of the star, because as a planet is going around a star, the star is exerting gravity onto the planet, planets gravity in the star. So the star is actually moving wobbling on its center of access. And so one of the ways was to try to find that motion. A Nobel prize was given for that a few years ago, method and that first results. That's a very hard way to find planets.
An easier way to find planets is if you take your telescope and you just stare at a star long enough, you just wait for the light. As you're watching the light with time, light to drop just a little bit. And that little drop in light could be due to a planet passing in front of the star, casting a shadow. When we do it that way, we can actually find a lot more planets, a lot easier because we don't need to break into the rainbow. We just need the stare at stars long enough.
And so we did this with great experiments, like the Kepler Space Telescope, which found thousands of exo planets. Today we have the transit exoplanet survey satellite, which is finding thousands more. There are currently proposed a handful of other missions ready to go up and keep looking for more exoplanets. And to begin trying to characterize these in greater detail, see if we can try to measure the atmosphere of these exoplanets.
- You wrote, I think on your website, by better knowing stars, we can better know the planets they host. By studying a star, how can you know anything about the planet, aside from that it's there? - Both these techniques requires understanding the light from the star, but for a transit, when it passes by at one wavelength, the light is going go through the planet as well. Or the atmosphere of the planet, heading on the wavelength.
The planet might appear a little bigger or smaller and using the thread, the planet will appear bigger because the infrared light is scattering off its atmosphere. So if we observe these trends in all these different wavelengths, we can sort of piece together the spectrum of the planet.
The problem is that as soon as we understand the life from the star enough, that we can actually remove that signal from the planet, given that the light from the star is about a thousand times more contrast than what we see from the planet or what we're moving from the exoplanet, that kind of work means we have to understand the start to that much more precision like 0.1%.
In astronomy, this is kind of a very difficult challenge 'cause we tend to pride ourselves on if we're right within a factor 10, we're having a good day. This level of precision is somewhat new to us. - If there were an alien civilization with the same tools we had and they were looking at our sun, could they glean something about planet earth and perhaps our residents on it, from looking at these same signals?
- Probably not about the same technology we have, but if we fast forward maybe 50 or 100 years to what we think we're going be able to do in astronomy, answer's probably yes. - What do you think you're gonna be able to do in 50 to 100 years? - Have James Webb Space Telescope. That's gonna be launched very soon and it's gonna be able to use infrared observations to do that kind of atmospheric characterization.
But if we had a telescope that's 10 times bigger in space and we're staring at a star like our sun for five, 10 years, so that you get multiple transits of the earth, right, passing in front of the sun, you might be able to look for things like small signals of changes in carbon dioxide and methane and the infrared wave lengths, changes in the water vapor. So you might see clouds, you might even see, depending on where the moon is relative to the transit.
You might see a variable blip in the transit light curve that shows there's a moon. - Even the moon, wow. - So it's very much possible that they can kind of see what we're doing on earth, largely in terms of pollution, unfortunately, as opposed to, you know, winning the cup or something. - Well, that's not gonna happen. - Astronomically speaking. - Astronomically.
- Hey everyone, you may have heard that Hilding just mentioned that James Webb Space Telescope, and we wanted to share with you that we recorded this conversation just before the James Webb Space Telescope was scheduled to launch. It did successfully launch on Christmas day 2021. And it has now reached its orbit, roughly 1.5 million kilometers from the Earth's orbit of the sun.
So we reached out to Hilding again after we recorded this conversation, to get his outlook on astronomy now that the incredible new telescope is in place. And when we did, you'll hear that he spoke about the amazing things we may learn about the universe from the telescope, as well as some things that we can learn about ourselves here on earth. Let's hear what Hilding has to say. - I wish I got to watch the launch of the JWST.
I was in Newfoundland for the holidays to visit my family and they did not have wifi. So I was not able to really keep track the launch directly. I had to use social media and keep my eye on Twitter. And I can't wait to see what it's gonna do, now that it's in place at the L2 Point, we're gonna be able to see this great opportunity to learn about exoplanets, learn about stars, learn about cosmology, and while that's great, we still live in a system of astronomy and physics that is not inclusive.
Its name is still very controversial and I think leaves many people out of the field. It leaves many people having to do the work in astronomy and live with that offense of having to see that name all the time and the peoples who are harmed by that person that's being honored. So I'm glad to see that the launch was successful, but in this current form, I have trouble buying into the hype and to the excitement. 'Cause we're doing so many great things.
And then we still honor people who probably should not be honored. - To give a little bit of extra context, the namesake of the James Webb Space Telescope was the administrator of NASA for much of the 1960s. And Webb has become somewhat of a controversial figure for his alleged complicity in the persecution of federal employees who were members of the LGBTQ community, when he was under secretary of state.
So Hilding's enthusiasm for the scientific mission, James Webb Space Telescope, is somewhat counterbalanced by a deep commitment to making positive change in science, overcoming barriers to entry and really holding everyone accountable to ensuring that great science really represents everyone. I'm really thankful that Hilding shared this perspective with us today. And now let's get back to the rest of the conversation.
(gentle music) I wanna go back to something you said just a second ago, which is about how in astronomy, if you get something right to an order of magnitude, you're doing pretty well. So this was something that really struck me when I first took a course in astronomy in my undergrad. And I remember really specifically that we were looking at an equation and it had Pi in it and they just said, oh, well, you know, Pi is approximately 10.
And I just couldn't believe that, I had never seen that before, and it's it stuck with me since then. And I guess I have a pretty general question, but is that something that is generally okay in astronomy? Are there any exceptions to that? - I think in a lot of times like saying Pi or four Pi is about 10 is okay. Particularly if you're just trying to understand what's happening in principle.
I think we wanna do things like lab astrophysics, where we're building instrumentations and have to worry about cooling infrared cameras after a Pi can mean the difference between burning out the camera and not. And as you know, a chemist friend once said, being right within an automated means your lab's blown up. (laughing) And there are people who do astrochemistry as well. So we have to be very careful about that.
The order of magnitude is really only valuable when we wanna sort of understand the principles of what we're observing, in our theories, when we wanna do real predictions, then we have to keep that factor of pi in there. - So, you know, we were talking about exoplanets and I know that a more even specific question we could look at is how many planets out there might host intelligent life. And I know that Drake equation is something we might look at to help us predict that.
So can you talk about this Drake equation and some of the different insights you have on that? - So the Drake equation is this great historical thought experiment by Frank Drake. Not that Drake that we're all thinking about. This was in the of radio astronomy when it was being born. We're building telescopes, we're broadcasting TV signals out in the space.
And he's kind of thinking, well, if we use radio for communication and we can broadcast radio into space, how many civilizations could we like fire a signal to? And they can fire a signal back and we have a conversation with, and so he broke this down to the parts, like a nesting doll where he is like, well, how many stars are there in our galaxy? How many stars can host planets? Not all stars are gonna form planets.
How many of those stars that have planets, could have planets that could potentially support life and if they could potentially support life, then how many go on to support life, then how many have intelligent life, planets with intelligent life, how many of those go on to form civilizations with technologies capable of communication? And the final part of that discussion was, well, if they go on to form these civilizations that can communicate, how long do they last?
And you know, this was the height of the cold war. So when they were thinking about how long they would last, it was more along the lines of how long would it take before they blow themselves up. Today, we might talk about it, how long will it take before we messed things up enough with climate change.
When Frank Drake did this, we had no real information, 'cause we only had ourselves look at and so asking how many stars could have planets, while we only knew at the time only one star with planets. We only knew one star that had life. And so the numbers were very small and he was thinking five, 10 kind of civilizations throughout our galaxy. Today, while we know that planets are actually fairly common, but 20% of stars have planets, but we still only know of one planet with life.
We still only know one planet with intelligent life. I'm sure there are people who listen to this, who may question even that assumption. And we only know of one planet with possibly having a civilization. And we don't know how long that civilization will last. Frank Drake's whole idea is built on this premise that civilization, intelligent life, being human and being human in this technological world that was the 1950s US or 1950s Canada.
And so it was very much based on this very Eurocentric Amerocentric kind of perspective at the height of science in the US. I think today we can actually broaden this out. 'Cause we live in Canada, Canada is indigenous lands. Indigenous people have been here since time and Memorial, whether it's Mississaugas, Haudenosaunee,Anishinaabe and so on. And they were civilizations. And when we talk about intelligent life, well humans might not be the only intelligent life.
There may be other paths to intelligence. We talk about intelligent life being used tools while we know crows and whales and monkeys all use tools. We talk about intelligent life through emotions and self-awareness, well, we know of killer whales who carry their dead children along with them, you know, who mourn. We know that dolphins can laugh. And so self-awareness seems pretty common.
So our definitions kind of have to broaden and even the definition of what is life, from many indigenous perspectives can be very important and very crucial to think about because we tend to think of, NASA tends to define life by something that consumes material and reproduces and various other things. But no matter how well NASA defines life, there's always an exception like a virus doesn't reproduce without a host. Self replicating robots aren't necessarily self-aware, but they replicate.
But for many indigenous peoples life sort of comes from relationships, being in relationships with the salmon, the bear, the elk. So on, that's part of being alive. Where I'm from in Miꞌkmaq, we're connected to the bear very much as part of our cosmology or we're connected to the cod and lobster and the other fish as part of our ways of living, being a life form is part of being in that relationship. In that respect, maybe life goes beyond carbon base and becomes something more broadly defined.
- It seems like as every year passes, as we discover more exoplanets, more stars, we've realized how huge the universe is and we have new perspectives on what life is and what life isn't, does it seem like the Drake equation just becomes more and more applicable to the conclusion that there must be life out there. - Yeah, I think definitely we have to conclude there's life out there.
I mean, I think just a philosophy that there's billions of stars in our galaxy and we're the only life forms that's well, boring. - Boring doesn't make it false though. - Doesn't make it false, not much of playing poker, but those are really bad odds. I think assuming that we're the only life forms in the galaxy is a very difficult pill to swallow 'cause just it's just so unlikely. - And you say the galaxy, - Yes, there are billions of galaxies.
plans Andromada and in the mag line clouds potentially. And so on. I mean there are questions of whether, how easy it is to form planets when you have less iron and carbon and oxygen. So you sort of have to have some level of cosmic evolution perhaps, but almost certainly other galaxies will have life as well. - In your research, in the signals that you're looking at, the data you're looking at, are there signals that could identify that there's life on this exo planet? Or are we not there yet?
- I don't think we're there yet. Right now, we're just sort of at the point of finding out whether there's water or no water or lot of carbon or not much carbon, I think we're very much in the qualification of whether there's actually these elements in these atmospheres around these planets. To be honest, we still haven't actually found a planet where we can actually safely assume that it's very much like earth.
When we say we find an Earth-like planet, what we're saying was we're finding a planet that's roughly the same size and radius as a sphere as the earth. That doesn't mean it's not made of a diamond or is a ball of gas or something else. We are just at the point of getting bulk properties. I think in the next generation, we'll be getting to the point where we can start asking, are we seeing oxygen? If we see oxygen, that's a good sign of life.
'Cause we know on earth, the oxygen in our atmosphere was created by life forms being here, anaerobic life forms. If we see lots of methane or something, maybe that says something about life or maybe it's a natural process. And we saw this controversy with things like the idea of the anomal signal on Venus, where they saw the signal of this one kind of molecule that they couldn't explain away. And to the other script, didn't really say it was necessarily life, but that it could be.
When the data analysis done by other people, sometimes that signal came, went away. And so it's hard, we're not re even really at the point of having a signal where we can be sure that we're getting it right. - Like in general too, thinking what you were saying about how we just often need to remind ourselves to broaden our definition. So if we're just looking for a planet that's like ours in as many ways as possible, we're gonna miss a lot of things out there.
But I feel like that advice can apply many places in science, but maybe just life in general that if we're looking, if we're really restricted in what we're looking for and we're gonna miss some other possibilities. And I guess I'm just wondering if maybe there's other examples where kind of changing that way of thinking could help us scientifically.
- I think with the search of life in our solar system, we tend to focus on Mars and Venus because they're in the habitable zone, where we're just the right distance from the sun, where we know that water can exist as a liquid and a solid and a gas, but probably the best place to find life in our solar system, outside the earth is around the moons of Jupiter.
We know those moons like Galileo or, it's solid core, ice shell, that seems like a very good spot to find life because has all the ingredients with ways of mixing minerals in the water. So therefore may be forming DNA. And I think that's actually the better place to search for life. Like Mars might have life, but it's gonna be hard to find. But I imagine if we could go to Europa and ganymede we could probably go ice fishing and find life. So I think that that's one kind of possibility.
- Is that one of your motivations behind the research, is to determine whether there is life or not life out there or is it you're more interested in sort of the stellar astrophysics and those kind of questions are a bit more philosophical for others to ponder? - I think it depends on which day of the week it is. Some days I'm very much about the stellar astrophysics side of trying to understand the properties with stars and the details there.
And sometimes I really like the astrobiology and the idea of trying to understand the idea of life in our galaxy and the universe, because we're part of that. One of the funny things about sciences and astronomy is that we tend to think of ourselves as being very objective and we're not really part of our observations and all that stuff.
But fact that we live in this universe where we can actually see these things and have some interaction, so wonderful, because if we do discover life on another planet, then we have to reevaluate our own place, in the world, in the galaxy. If we find microbial life on Mars or some sort of fish life on Europa, then we have to sort of rethink all these different things about our understanding in the universe and our place into it and our relationships with it.
'Cause it's very much a problematic, we're currently in a world where we're slowly burning it up with fossil fuels, where we got rich people sending rockets into the space all the time on some sort of weird rich competition. I think it's the relationships between our solar system and us as a society and as a species, is very valuable and as part of our makeup. So I think is also about understanding us.
- I'm really curious to follow up on what you were saying about space exploration, 'cause it seems like this is an area that's just gonna continue growing. And so do you have ideas on maybe some things that we just as a society should be keeping in mind as this field is growing? - One of the big issues right now with space exploration is that it's very much dominated by a few people. And to be honest, those people are more privileged. They're white, they're almost entirely men.
There's a very certain power dynamic in play here. And there's a lot of voices in the discussion space, exploration and settlements that aren't there. And this is a problem because we all see the night sky. It's part of everyone's being.
Indigenous peoples, peoples from other countries share the night sky and we all have our relationship with it, whether it's our stories, stories of the moon and the stars, whether it's our use for navigation, having all these satellites, particularly lower earth orbit satellites that you can see with the unaided eye and dark spots or the idea of mining on the moon. These are all being dictated by people with certain levels of power.
So right now, my biggest concern with space exploration is being dictated by people with bigger wallets, as opposed to people with more wisdom. - Another place where I know I've heard you refer to these power dynamics, is within a term that I think you refer to as Astro colonialism? I know this is a slightly different thing, but can you also talk about what that is? - When we talk about astronomy and space science and space.
We have all these kind of knowledges and understanding and we talk about them in terms of a certain perspective and that perspective tends to be Eurocentric. So for instance, let's talk about the constellations. In the Northern hemisphere, we have the big dipper or Ursa major if you prefer. We have Cassiopeia, Cepheus, we have Draco. They all come from this one historical context, largely Greek and Roman astronomy, and the Greek Romans told great stories about these things.
And as you travel through time, those constellations sort of get maintained through star maps in European courts, they became part of navigation and the oceans. When we had first colonization in the Americas and then the slave trade, and they kept existing until the 20th century when the International Astronomical Union formed, which was great. That was a way of supporting astronomy worldwide.
But at the time, was essentially a bunch of white dudes from Europe and they formed a committee to let's simplify the night sky and we'll have 80 constellations, 'cause all these overlapping constellations. So they get together in a room and it's a British guy. It's a French guy and it's a German guy and they dictate constellations, and it's a bad joke.
There are people around the world, whether it's in Asian countries and Asian regions, in the Northern Europe, indigenous peoples, and then America's indigenous peoples, who have our own stories, own constellations, but we don't see them anymore. I open a textbook, I see ursa major, I do not see my constellations from Mi'kmaq or Haudenosaunee constellations or constellations, that's erasing our stories. And that's colonialism. We have colonialism today with how we deal with telescopes.
All of our telescopes that particularly Canada are part of are on indigenous lands. Across this country, Canada, whether it's in Hawaii, whether it's in Chile. And then we have the future of colonialism, which is going to space. The way we do space exploration and space settlement is the exact same narrative that we did when Canada, the US was being settled, the pioneer, the frontiersman ship, the man versus nature element.
- Can you tell us just a little bit about your own personal relationship with the night sky? You know, surely everybody has looked up and gotten fascinated and then your own interest, your growing interest in indigenous astronomies and the history of those. - Yeah, so from my own perspective, I'm Miꞌkmaq, from Taqamkuk. Taqamkuk is the island of Newfoundland. We didn't grow up in community, it was a lot of settlements. The Miꞌkmaq were spread out across the island.
So I grew up basically in suburbia, you know, watching Mr. Dress up and Much music. And so I didn't really have a strong connection with my heritage and where I come from. One of the best parts of Western Newfoundland, other than Gross Morne and skiing is clear night skies, seeing the Milky Way and all the stars, meteor showers, you see this blanket of stars, it feels like home. - And you don't get that in Toronto? - No, in Toronto I might see four stars and two of them are on the CBC.
That's kind of relates this mystery of everything we have relates to astronomy and understanding where we're from on earth. And more recently, I'd never really thought about what I meant to be indigenous and astronomy in physics until I attended a national conference of Canadian astronomers in Winnipeg and a Cree astronomer, who worked in communities across Manitoba. He stood on as podium and started telling us stories.
He's telling us the Cree stories of the bear and the hunters, the Cree stories of three dogs, told us Cree stories of the sweat lodge. And I was just dumbfounded. I didn't know my own stories, I knew nothing about it. And why didn't I? I was teaching history of astronomy, teaching about Aristotle and Galileo and Copernicus and Tolomi and Newton and every other white dude in past thousand years, where was the indigenous knowledges?
And that kind of inspired me to really dig in and start learning, so that not only so I can learn indigenous, but also reconnect to where I'm from, as I'm getting older, it's becoming more important to know where I come from. It's not just the stories anymore. It's indigenous methodologies, how do we do science?
That's not necessarily the same way, many indigenous peoples, and there's no one pan indigenous knowledge system, but many indigenous peoples don't necessarily use the scientific method to understand the universe, but different other ways through long observation, through learning and time and oral transmission stories and thinking about relationships and all these different possibilities. In my mind, all these different doors opened.
And it just felt like I was rewiring my brain from the traditional Western science to maybe something else. I really began to fall into that kind of behavior there and learning my own stories. And as today, I still don't know many stories other than one or two. - And what would you say are some of the maybe more Western practices in science that are quite different from some of these indigenous ways of establishing knowledge? - There are scholars who produce lists of these kind of differences.
And I'm just trying to compile into a couple, the two most obvious, but one of most obvious is I think Western science, we have to be a objective. How often do we see this thing that if I have an experiment, you should be able to reproduce it from my notes verbatim, no matter what, and get the same result. That's not necessarily something many indigenous peoples do. Everything's big relationship, where I am, what I observe, what I experiment.
It's not gonna be the same thing that what you do, what you see, what you observe. As we're different people. So I think that relationality is very important for understanding where we are and where we're going.
And I think Western science kind of bumps up this in astrophyics when we talk about, the fact that the universe looks the same in all directions and that kind of bugs us or the fact that the universe is just too perfect, certain quantum mechanical properties change slightly, we can't necessarily exist. So therefore we have to like get out of that special realm.
And I think that's very much different between indigenous and Western, that we have to have that objective idea where indigenous peoples don't. A second one partly its hierarchical nature. We tend to think of humans as the apex of nature and the world. So humans are above the animals that are above the plants, that are above the bugs, that are above the dirt. And many indigenous peoples don't see that.
There are scholars who talk about the fact that we have treaties with salmon nation or bear nation Cedar nation. Thinking about these other species as having rights to the land equal to our own, which for astronomy might not be obvious how that affects us, but you know, if we think about environmental science and climate change, maybe we can see how that could be very valuable perspective. So those are two kind of probably the most obvious differences that come to mind.
- One thing that I kind of think of when you're talking about this hierarchy is maybe a related problem of labeling things. I know I've heard you say that some of these indigenous stories, you don't label that as being a story about astronomy or a story about ethics or a story about hunting. It's a story about many things at the same time.
And I feel like in Western society, we're so obsessed with classifying things into categories and labeling them so that we get to tell ourselves, do I have to think about that or not? And just wonder if there's maybe some cases you can speak to where that way of thinking might limit us. - When we talk about labeling, I really think of this as siloing of putting things in boxes. Like we love putting astronomy box. Like we started off by asking, what is astronomy?
And I just said everything above us, same physics I used to describe stars is not any different than the same physics I might describe to use oceans, same physics I use to describe orbits going around stars. It's the same gravity on earth. Where I think we kind of break down these kind of recognitions is when we talk about things like ethics or we talk about things like whether we should go to Mars, we tend to make that to religion. Respect for land is not necessarily religion.
It's also scientific. It is part of understanding the cycles of connection that support us for many Indigenous peoples knowledge, isn't cycled or isn't siloed. It's holistic. And we talk about knowledge. It can be used in so many different ways.
When I tell a story of the stars, not necessarily, I'm not saying that that star is X saying, or that star is a bear or that star is a bird, just telling you about how it relates to us, whether how we observe the star with respect to seasons, how we talk about ourselves, how we learn all part of our way of learning and gaining knowledge. In a way that's kind of more narrative and less direct fact base. I think that also helps us relate to these things and have a connection.
When I mentioned, our constellations are colonized, ursaa major is a bear with the tail. There's no way for us to relate to that. There are no bears with tails. Winnie The Pooh does not have a long tail, but that's our constellation. So we have to sort of state it as a factuality. Whereas in Miꞌkmaq we have a bear and seven bird hunters, almost the same constellation as the big dipper, the four stars of the bowl is Muan the bear. And it's called Muan 'cause that's it's name.
It's the name it tells us. 'Cause the sound is Muan, which is why, one reason why I love the Miꞌkmaq language. Most of the names are very, very similar to the sounds that they make, and when we tell that story, we tell it at the same time, every morning, couple hours before dawn, I'm not a morning person, but you know, you have to my word on that. And that's because, you know, the big dipper goes around the north pole every night.
But if we tell at the same time, every morning, it goes around the north pole once every year. And if we start in the spring, Muon is pointing downwards. And so when Muon wakes up from hibernation, after so much sleep, Muon is hungry. Like anyone would be, emerges from her den, starts looking for food. When Robin spies Muan, Robin knows that Muan would feed the community for a long time. It's meat, it's fat, it's grease would help sustain everyone. So Robin calls his friends.
First comes Chickidy, carrying a giant pot for cooking Muan. And we know this because Chickidy and the pot are two different stars. They're very close to each other. Following Chickidy is blue Jay and gray Jay and passenger pigeon and barn arrow and saw wet owl. And you know, the birds that begin this hunt and they start chasing Muan. We get into the summer, the Constellation's kind of flat.
And so they're running across, Muam is running across the land and Robin is trying to keep up with his bow and arrow and Chickidy's following behind. But they're starting to lose the path, Muan is starting to escape and as we get towards fall, some of the birds have fallen away from the hunt 'cause their stars are below the horizon at this time, but Muon is getting tired. So he stands on his hind legs and growls and Robin fires his bow and arrow, striking muon in the heart.
Blood goes everywhere, covering all the leaves red and covering Robin red as well. Robin flies into the trees, shaking the blood off, leaving one stain on his chest. Muan dies and passes into the spirit world. All the birds gather and begins celebrating, they've been cooking the meat. They tell their stories.
They dance into the winter and in the winter, Muan's in the sky, on his back, waiting for the spring and to reemerge, this story tells us, but you know, the motions of the stars, it tells us about properties of some of these stars. It tells us about the seasons and how we relate to them where we're telling the story in mi'kmaq in this case in will be Nova Scotia. And it also tells us about ethics.
Like you don't hunt the bear in the spring in the summer because you know, that's when it's mating and having cubs, you hunt in the fall and it tells us about community, that we share. It also honors our relationship relationships with the birds, passenger pigeons are now extinct, but is still part of our story and our narrative. So we honor the birds in that respect. And so there's so many different elements of science in here, it's not just a computer model of a star.
It's part of how we relate to it. - And do you have a sense of how long it took for that story to evolve into the form that you just shared with us? - This is kind of one of the issues with colonization, this story in many respects was rediscovered, maybe about 10 or 20 years ago.
Now elders in Nova Scotia and researchers from Cape Breton university came together and sort of rebuilt and reconstructed the story, versions of the story existed, but because of colonization, so many elements of stories and knowledge were lost.
And as the Cree elder, I mentioned from conference Winnipeg once told us, 'cause of colonization, you can imagine that if you had a hundred people in the community and every person remembered one word of a song, 80% of the people left the community for whatever or died or whatever, you know, you're trying to reconstruct your song from 20 words. It's hard to say how long the story lasts because so much was lost.
And I think we've been rebuilding our stories and reconnecting and rediscovering them at the same time. But also the story can be as old as time and Memorial, as we like to say. And so we don't know if there's what the beginning of the story is. There's evidence, there are stories that are probably tens of thousands of years old. We are all familiar with the Pleiades constellation, wherever you go in the world, that constellation is almost always seven stars.
Even though most places in the world, you can't see the seventh star, whether it's in Australia or north America, the stories are so similar. There's suggestions that the stories could be tens and hundreds of thousands of years old. I don't know how old these stories are, but a lot older than me. - You teach a course right, at the University of Toronto about intersections of indigenous astronomy and sort of Western astronomy. Can you tell us what you hope students take from that course overall.
- Being in Canada, it's so easy to sort of see indigenous peoples and the relationship between the nation indigenous peoples through a certain lens, whether it's through reserve and residential schools, whether it's through environmental actions like the protests in British Columbia at the moment, we kind of fall into these almost simplifications of stereotypes.
I think it's so easy in that respect for us to forget that in indigenous peoples have been here for tens of thousands of years, have had knowledges and societies and sophisticated relationships with nature and each other and other first nations around north America in ways that we tend to forget, ideally I'd like to see in the university is every department had some sort of indigenous knowledge kind of course, so that not necessarily the indigenous students,
but also students could come in and see the indigenous in their field, whether it's indigenous and astronomy, indigenous and physics, indigenous and math and so on. And so that when you know, students leave my class, if they're lucky enough to be in a place with a dark sky and they see constellations, they're not looking for Ursa major, or they're not looking for Draco they're looking for Haudenosaunee constellations or anishinaabe constellations.
And they're remembering those stories and doing so remembering whose land they're on and where this land came from. And also remembering that there's not just one way to learn about the universe. There's many indigenous ways, different groupings. And that thinking about the universe in different ways means we can probably come up with new discoveries. You know, western science has been a fantastic way to understand medicine nature, the universe and so on.
Indigenous knowledges are so helpful and so much doing it another fantastic way and as equal partners. And we brought them both together equally. We can do so much great science. - You wrote that doing this, looking into this work in indigenous astronomies, that has made you a better scientist. Can you speak to that in terms of as a professional scientist, how has it enhanced your approach?
- I think first and foremost, our hardest things for scientists trained in the Western system to do is to understand their biases and where we come from. Undergrad, PhD, 10 years, where you're doing nothing, almost nothing but Western science. And so you become sort of embedded in it, the fish in the ocean not knowing there's water kind of a problem. And I think relearning a lot of these indigenous knowledge things help has helped me see a lot of the biases.
A lot of our assumptions, how they're not all that good. It also helped me, I think, learn a lot more about our perspective and astronomy. We tend to think of astronomy as this benevolent science that we're learning with the universe for the betterment of all humanity, but we're doing so by building telescopes on indigenous lands, we're doing so using facilities on indigenous lands. We're funding it using money raised in various ways on indigenous lands.
And I think we need to recognize that obligation that comes with that. And it's not obvious that we always do. So I think it's helping me become a better scientist, 'cause it's kind of reminded me about the humanity of doing astronomy, that it is a human endeavor and as humans, whatever biases humanity has is gonna come out in our science in that respect. And we need to do better, whether it's dealing with issues around racism and sexism or anti indigenism and so on, we need to do better.
- The thing you've said too, is that, maybe in Western science, we tend to think one way, which leads to a certain set of decisions. And with indigenous knowledge, we would come to a different decision, but maybe really the solution forward is having a conversation altogether. It doesn't mean we have to be black and white and choose one thing or the other. And I think this maybe speaks to a concept I've heard you talk about, which is two eyed seeing. Can you talk about what that means?
- So two eyed seeing is a concept that was developed by elders, Albert and Medina Marshall, out Eastern Canada. They brought it to science with this idea, as I'm wearing glasses, it's very easy to see. That if you look through one lens, that's Western science and looking through one lens, you do really great science, 'cause it creates a clear picture with various understanding. The other lens is indigenous knowledges. You can learn about nature in our place and do great things that way.
If you're bring them together as equal partners, listen to each other and work together and we get a deeper, more fuller picture of nature in society. And that's the basic premise of two eyed seeing, is just bring them together as equal partners to work together. And I think we can do great things that way in science, it's very commonly applied to like environmental sciences, more so than astronomy.
But you know, in terms of learning about things like stellar physics and exoplanets and life in the universe, including indigenous knowledges and having that as an equal partner means we can think more broadly. Whereas if we're doing it from Western science perspective. We're simply gonna look for various chemical elements that we understand like oxygen or we're gonna look for things that are signs of RNA and DNA.
And we're gonna go from this very prescribed Western scientific method, but together we can do, I think the two of them together do much better and much fuller science. - And in addition to maybe challenging the way we present history or different topics, we also have to challenge our actual scientific process. And that just seems like such a difficult and fundamental thing to change. 'Cause I think so many of us don't even know how to define the process that we follow. So how do we do that?
How do we start challenging our scientific process or even understanding what assumptions we're making? - Another very easy question, it's hard, you know, we're so trained in a certain way of doing science. And we tend to like to talk about it as a scientific method where we see something and then we hypothesize something and then we have an experiment and we have to falsify and always be falsifying.
It's important to recognize that that's one way of doing science, but even when we're doing science in our classrooms, we're writing on chalkboards or typing on our computers, we might not be using the scientific method in the same way and we might not even notice. So, you know, I think taking the time to reflect on what we're doing is one step, perhaps the most important what we need to do is to sort of seed some of our authority as scientists.
There are elders and knowledge keepers across Rhode Island in north America and the Americas, have great understanding of science and nature, from where they are at to where they're going and so on. And we need to spend more time listening and supporting them. And I think that would go a long way into helping us be better scientists and see the assumptions we're making. As a scientist, that's hard, you know, we're not used to being quiet and listening, at least I'm not.
- I mean, you must have gone through some of that process yourself. If you said that it was at this conference where maybe you first started to realize that there was a different way of thinking about things. Were there any things that you realized about your own thinking that have really helped you? I guess this must involve some unlearning of ways that we're used to thinking. - For you personally, if you had to unlearn some bad habits or old habits, maybe.
- Yeah, I think unlearning is a very good way putting it. I felt like I had unlearn a lot of my PhD, which was a little ironic, but. - Wait, why did you have to unlearn your PhD? - Because my PhD was defined on here's data, here's a computer, apply data fit, draw conclusions, repeat. - Get PhD. - Get PhD, get out.
But I think it was also trying to understand sitting there, instead of seeing it as data, seeing it as a story, seeing it as a relationship, part of my PhD was studying, variable stars called, in which are pulsating variables and their pulsation can be used to measure distances when doing cosmology. And so, so much of my time I spent understanding some of the physics and that doing the mathematical equations and trying to apply this as a theory and a test.
And I think part the unlearning, I was just coming back and asking, okay, is this reasonable? What is this telling me about the relationship between the star and the distance and all these things. It might not sound like there's a really big difference, but I think it's just the slowing down and sort of appreciating a lot more about the time issues and the constraints of what I was trying to do, as opposed to just plugging into computer model and being done and being happy.
- You shut up and calculate model. - The shut up. - Don't think too much about it, just do the math. - Yeah, so the math and trust the math, which we should trust our math when we're on the right track. But I think we also should understand what the math is saying, what the story is, and that doesn't make the results wrong, but I think it changes how I relate to them and how kind of important it is in some respects too.
'cause I think when we're doing a PhD, we all want to think we're gonna change our understanding of the universe. And I think it was a lot of it's also bit of unlearning about the tools we're using. Part of that thesis was using observations from optical interferometers in California or data from the Hawaii telescope. Part of that unlearning means I have to understand the history. If our telescopes are on, like Mauna Kea what are we doing there? And do we have that right?
And what is the local perspective on Mauna Kea, and which can be very different than us as astronomers and scientists from Canada. And so I think unlearning a lot of that sort of hierarchy and some superiority of science was very important. Also learning more to trust less the word doctor and trust more of the word elder. - We've asked a lot of questions. We also got some great questions from others. - Yeah, we have a couple questions. - Can we play those for you over the air here? - For sure.
- Sure. - You say you integrate indigenous knowledge in your physics research. Do you also integrate your scientific insights back into your indigenous community and thus reshape its worldview on stars and the universe? - That's a very interesting question. One of the things I try not to do is to bring too much Western science into indigenous communities.
We do that already, it's called being in Canada, but one of the things I do think is very important that we should be working towards is thinking about what resources and tools can we give indigenous communities to do science as they see fit in their community.
So what would it mean if we had a one meter telescope, class telescope with a nice, sitting in an indigenous community, where they can design their own experiments, their own observations, their own calculations and write their own journal articles. However they see fit. I think that would be kind of cool. And I think that's kind of where we should be going as scientists in engaging in communities is how we share our resources, not necessarily our results.
- I should have said too, that question was from Anna. And she's one of our master students in our PSI program. We have one more question for you from another one of our graduate students. - Hi, I'm Barbara and I'm a PhD student at PI. I was wondering if there is a star in the sky that first catches your eye when you look up. - Living in Toronto, there's only so many stars that can catch my eye at the moment. So probably if I can find it, it's usually a Betelgeuse.
When I'm in a darker spot, I always look for the north star. So much of my research, my PhD and so on, ended up working on the north star 'cause it's a cepheid variable. So I'm always sort of enamored by it 'cause it's also a guiding star. So it carries so much meaning to me, both science and personally, 'case it personally as a guide star, but also personally part of our language. Cause in Miꞌkmaq, we call it tatapn, and so it kind of connects all these different parts of my personality.
- Does that mean north star? Does it have a different meaning? - It's been so long since I did the definition, but I think it star of the stands still, so effectively north star. - Yeah. - Well Hilding thank you so much for sharing your time with us. I've learned a lot from talking to you and it was really a pleasure to sit down with you today. - Thank you so much. - Thanks for stepping inside the Perimeter. If you like, what you hear, please help us spread the word.
You can rate, review and subscribe to Conversations at the Perimeter, wherever you get your podcast. Every review really helps us a lot and it helps more science enthusiasts find us. Thank you for being part of the equation. (gentle music)