Indigenous Science With Jessica Hernandez

with other people who were interested in the environment. But when she started studying marine science, things weren't so simple all of a sudden. As an indigenous immigrant woman at a university in the United States, the knowledge she brought to the classroom was mocked or dismissed. Her professors had no interest in what she and, by extension, her family

and her community had to say. Still, Jessica knew that she belonged any place where the environment was being discussed, not just for her love of nature, but because she had seen how being shut out of the conversation had been so harmful to her Suppotheic and Mayachorti communities. So she finished her degree, but didn't stop there. She got a master's and then a PhD in environmental and forestry sciences.

She learned the formulas and specialized terms used in academia, and she confirmed what she had always known, that what her grandmother and father had taught her was also a form of science. Jessica collected her family's stories, historical accounts, and other case studies in her twenty twenty two book Fresh Banana Leaves, Healing Indigenous Landscapes through Indigenous Science, which she hopes will change how we think about environmental science.

It's a message that we're happy to bring back to you today, dear listener. In her own words, here's doctor Jessica Hernandez.

One of my fondest memories is just being able to go visit my grandmother in Wohaka, Mexico, and she just taught me a lot about our environments. She liked to go walking when she was able to walk, and she would just teach me about the landscape, the mongols, and also about the animals. My dad loved fishing, and because he was a fisherman, that's how he was able to sustain his family in the Salvador, because he was the

eldest and he used to fish. And I think that I always thought my dad was like really smart because like we went fishing, he didn't need a rod, right, Like he could make his own rod out of the materials that he could find. He could make fish nets also,

and I always thought that that was really cool. And I noticed that when I was like in elementary school, my dad was learning how to read with me, and that always made me question, like, oh, my dad is learning, Like what does that mean, but my dad sharing that journey with me as I was learning how to read kind of inspire me to be like, oh, and my dad is like doing this with me, maybe I should,

you know, look into school. And I think that that's what motivated me to love education, because my parents had been denied and they instilled in me like, oh, you know, if you can get education, go for it. Being introduced to the environment from the lens of my grandmother and my father, it kind of fostered that interest in me

to want to learn more about your environments. I always noticed how my communities and my relatives back in my ancestral lens were always dismissed, right, Like if they wanted to advocate for something in the environment, they'll be like alsos indios, no savin, Like they don't know anything. They're

you know, ignorant, Like what are they talking about? And I think that that's something that my grandmother staled in me because she was like, oh, you have the opportunity to pursue education, even my parents, right, Like my dad didn't get any Western education, right because he was busy as a child trying to support his family after his father passed away, so he never stepped foot in a classroom, and I guess I will be my naiveness because I thought,

you know, like oh, I bring in my family's teachings into the curriculum. I could bring it to the professors, They're gonna really accept it. But when I went into the classrooms, oftentimes, you know, I was ridiculed by professors because there will be like, oh, you need to cite this, you know, you need to go towards peer review articles, or you know, is this Jessica's theory? Where is this

information coming from? When I was sharing testimonies or lift experiences that will hint towards the topic we were discussing, but because it wasn't published or it didn't have any scientific credibility, it was like dismissed and oftentimes ridiculed by

my professor's right. Even as a graduate student, I had to sit in classrooms while they were laughing like I had just like set a joke or something, and I was like, okay, but that just shows you how professors, you know, especially why scientists can be dismissive towards indigenous peoples, right, And that was me, somebody who had privileged to be

in that classes. So I could just imagine how they would treat our communities if they went to our communities, and they will share all these stories as well, right, they'll probably laugh.

Studies or the Department of Ethnic Studies. But it wasn't necessarily within the College of the Environment or the departments of the Environments. But my grandmother always told me, like, if you can learn how the colonizers, so you know, the Gringo speak, you can help us advocate for our environments. Right because now, like they're not going to dismiss our

way of no, because we can use that Western terminology. Personally, I prefer to use the term indigenous science as opposed to traditional ecological knowledge, because oftentimes I think that traditional ecological knowledge has this connotation that it's knowledge that no longer exists, or that it's kind of like traditional in the sense that it belongs to a museum, as opposed to it's alive and has adapted over the years. Our

knowledge systems are a form of science, if anything. They're like the longest living in science on planet Earth because it has been kind of created or passed down through generations. It has also adapted as our environments adapted. Because you know, our indigenous science that probably our great grandparents had, it's not the same that you know we have because our environments have drastically changed because of climate change, ury and

everything that colonialism introduced to our lands. And I think that one of my biggest push is that indigenous peoples are scientists, and that oftentimes we are told, because we live in under this Desettler frameworks, that we have to obtain degrees for our knowledge to be validated. But you know, all of indigenous peoples who have that knowledge to steward their lands, to co manage their resources with their entire community tribes or pueblos, hold on to that science that

is the foundation of our existence and resistance. They might not be peer review or published as much as you know, the Western sciences, but it holds as much credibility as the Western sciences do. I was always interested in trying to write a book that boys my father's story, especially history as a child soldier who fought in the Civil War, and I think that once I was able to get him to sit down and tell me his whole story, it kind of like spark an interest for me to

write it. I wanted to be able to share his story, but I also wanted to be able to tie in the stories of my mother, my grandmother, my aunts, my relatives, my community members, and other people that I'm in community with, so that we can amplify how indigenous rights, even if we're talking about immigration rights, are all interconnected to our environment.

Through the book, I weave different scenarios or case studies of communities who have led that movement, and hopefully that also shows people and the readers that you know, it is something that they can support instead of co opting or stealing. Because I also tends to happen right in the Western framework where people are like, oh, that's a

great idea. Let me go steal it and name it something else and then pretend I'm the founder when it's like indigenous knowledgists that were shared to certain people and then they take that ownership. One of the examples that I can give is permaculture. So permaculture is this like holistic way of doing agriculture where you're not necessarily putting much labor into the agricultural system, but the agricultural system

is sustaining in itself. And when you look at the history of permaculture, it was founded, you know, and I quote that founded by a white man who went to Australia and learned from some Aborigine communities, and permaculture then became this like really expensive certificate that you can get.

That's one of the critiques that I make in the book on how we should dismantle the fact that Indigenous peoples are seeing as research subjects and areas of expertise rather than the scientists and experts themselves, even without degrees. There's a lot of research articles written about the Sample

Tape community. But when I have asked people in my community or did you know this and that you know that was written about our community, They're like, oh, I had never heard that, So that shows you how many of the times indigenous peoples are used as the research subjects and not the research experts. I'm really careful with like not sharing any medicinal remedies or sacred knowledge because it's kind of hard, right, because you don't know who

to trust. And I think that being exposed to all these stories of co optation, our knowledge theft made me a little bit more guarded on the knowledge I will share. So I feel like I always walked the fine line of sharing my Indigenous knowledge with other people because you know, it can either be copt this stolen, or it also

invalidated or dismissed. What I want readers to take away from this book is to learn more about the indigenous movements that are happening across the Americas, because oftentimes we fail to recognize how our certain identities contribute to sellar colonialism back in Latin America. In the United States, we focus more on being oppressed because we are oppressed as people of color. But when we go back to Latin America, is after indigenous, black and Indigenous people who are oppressed

by you know, some of us. And I think that hopefully that brings a new perspective to the whole narrative of the oppressed and the oppressor, and how we can

work together to undo that. One of the things that I talk about in the book is that conservation is a Western construct because in our languages, like if I were to try to translate conservation to the Sybotech language or the Miotority language or other languages that many Indigenous people speak, there is no word that directly translates to conservation. Most of the words that kind of tie or are interconnected to conservation focus more on protection, like protecting our environment.

Most of the words in our languages hint towards healing rather than you like conserving. Is not only that it cannot be directly translated to our languages, but sometimes it comes in conflict where a way of life and oftentimes in the name of conservation. There is this oppression used against indigenous peoples, especially when it comes to their inherited rights to have access to certain natural resources, and we

see that in national parks. When national parks were created, it was under this framework to conserve the natural, pristine wilderness, when in reality there was a lot of indigenous communities who lived in those lands that are now national parks that were exploited, oppressed, and kind of removed from their

ancestral lands. And I think that it kind of shows the nuances that need to be discussed in the national park system because a lot of these monuments have names of violent people that perpetated that violence against Indigenous communities that were violently ripped off or remove from their lands.

So the project that I conducted for my dissertation was to indigenize restoration in Discovery Park, located in Seattle, Washington, is the largest urban park in the state of Washington, and that's an interesting park because it has a really beautiful Indigenous history behind it. I decided to use my PhD to try to restore and heal some of those twenty acres of land. But in that way, what I decided to do was to amplify and center the Indigenous

ways of healing our earth. And one of the teachings that our elders were able to teach us to practice was that under Western conservation, in basis species, they're like known as pests or weeds, but for Indigenous communities, we should see them as displaced relatives because there are someone's relative tists that have been displaced, like many of us have.

I gotten a lot of fights with the Seattle Parks and Recreation Department because you know, even the way that they wanted us to take care of the weeds was different than the way we were told to take care of the weeds by our elders, because you know, for them, it's like their weeds they just have to be removed versus you know us. We will do prayers and we will ask for their permission to leave, you know, the

land so that native species can come back in. So it was a lot of like I wouldn't say, like really bad conflict, but a lot of like fights with Seattle Parks because of the way that we practice restoration wasn't aligned to their rule book. One of the interesting metaphors that I use in the book is that banana trees are invasive to Central America, yet we have embraced

them our relatives, right. And I think that that's a metaphor that I use for my lift experiences and the lift experiences of many displaced indigenous peoples that as banana trees, we have also been displaced from our ancestral lands, yet we adapt to our environments, and in this case, you know, sometimes we're welcome into those environments. Like in the case of banana trees, like you know in Central America, they have been used in our traditional foods to make our

tamalis platanos. We you know, we fry them. Yet they're displaced relatives, right, They're not native species. They come from Southeast Asia, but they were introduced. And I think, like banana trees, displaced indigenous peoples, we're forced to adapt to our new environments and hopefully, you know, for some of us,

we're working to become welcome into those new environments. One of the teachers on my grandma always told me was that anywhere I walked that wasn't my lands, I wasn't a welcome guest, right, because it was like, we're going into other people's homes, and those other people are the indigenous peoples whose lands were walking on. And I think that one of the things she always told me to think of about was how do you become a welcome guest, right?

Because I have to still navigate that as a displaced indigenous woman, and the same way that I want people to form those relationships with my communities once they're in Wahaka. One of the beauties of being an Indigenous instructor, especially in the college setting, is that I can support other Indigenous students. I want to inspire students to find that sense of belonging, because like I always crave to have an indigenous professor teaching me about the environmental sciences, but

I never got that. In a way, sometimes I question, like, oh, do I really want to become a professor? Go for ten years? But then I think about my younger self, and I think about that eighteen year old who crave that indigenous professor that she could approach after class and talk to them, right, And I think that being an Indigenous instructor now kind of allows me to cater to those students.

We have extended versions of our stories dropping every Friday and Sunday. Join us again on our next episode. Dear listener, in the meantime, I'll see you on social media. Estell approxima.