314-3 The Indigenous Science Toolbox: Using the Medicine Wheel to Teach Geoscience Through Two-Eyed Seeing

Abstract:

Indigenous scientists remain significantly underrepresented within the geosciences, a gap that stems in large part from a curriculum built entirely around Western scientific epistemology. Historically, there has been little room for alternative ways of understanding and knowledge systems in Earth Science classrooms. Here, we present the Indigenous Science Toolbox (IST), a K-12 curriculum grounded in Etuaptmumk, “two-eyed seeing,” which teaches Westernized and Indigenous scientific methods side-by-side rather than positioning one as a lens through which to interpret the other. The IST’s central organizing tool is the Medicine Wheel, which functions as a systems-thinking framework rather than a linear one. Its four directions (observation, connection, interpretation, and reflection) correspond to stages of the scientific method. Rather than moving students through these stages sequentially, the wheel requires them to hold multiple components of a system in view simultaneously and consider how those components interact. This structure opens investigation to more complex, less bounded questions than a linear method typically accommodates, and creates space for multiple contributors and multiple epistemologies to inform a single line of inquiry.

We developed and piloted the curriculum in partnership with the Quileute Nation at LA Push, Washington. The IST comprises two volumes: a foundational volume introducing the premise that Indigenous storytelling and scientific observation are not distinct enterprises, and a second volume applying the framework to tsunami physics, sediment stratigraphy, and coastal hazard mapping along the Cascadia Subduction Zone. This systems-based, two-eyed approach allows the IST to treat Indigenous knowledge as a constitutive framework for geoscience inquiry rather than a supplementary addition, with implications for broadening participation in the discipline and for how geoscience education more broadly might be restructured around non-linear, relational modes of inquiry.

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