This ‘beginning,’ like all beginnings, is always already threaded through with anticipation of where it is going but will never simply reach and of a past that has yet to come. It is not merely that the future and the past are not ‘there’ and never sit still, but that the present is not simply here-now. Multiply heterogeneous iterations all: past, present, and future, not in a relation of linear unfolding, but threaded through one another in a nonlinear unfolding of spacetimemattering, a topology that defies any suggestion of a smooth continuous manifold. (Barad, 2010, p. 244)

As critical science studies scholar Karen Barad (2010) reminds us, “the present is not simply here-now” (p. 244, emphasis mine). Rather, it is also a dis/continuous enfolding of heterogenous there-thens.1 This is to say that the central process of this book—accounting for and being accountable to the uneven and unequal relation between Indigenous metaphysics and classical Western metaphysics by way of quantum metaphysics, and the ethical, epistemological, and ontological implications for science education—has and will have already begun elsewhere and elsewhen (both past and futures to-come).

Such is significant in science education where often, or perhaps too often, the work is framed in way that asks where do we begin to engage the question of including Indigenous knowledges or perspectives in science education? While there is usually an intent of being in relation in a good way, the language and the practices they signal are fraught. There is often a forgetting (be it one that is individual or systemic) that science education is always already in relation to Indigenous ways-of-knowing-in-being.2 As Ngāti Kahungunu ki Wairarapa and Ngāi Tahu scholar and science educator Liz McKinley (2001) states, this has much to do with the ways in which dominance operates in science education: its response to difference is often a form of “masking power with innocence” (see also Kuokkanen, 2007). Primarily, McKinley (2001) suggests that a lack of knowledge (or a positional stance of “not knowing”) often serves to (re)produce the norms of power; in turn, “we need to challenge the mask of innocence and ask ourselves how relations of domination and subordination regulate encounters in classrooms” (p. 76). This is not only significant because science education has a responsibility towards Indigenous ways-of-knowing-in-being that goes beyond a responsibility for the Other, but it is also a responsibility as well as an indebtedness to the Other.3 If responsibility is an “an incarnate relation that precedes the intentionality of consciousness” (Barad, 2010, p. 265) the question is no longer whether or not we are responsible but rather if we are able to respond. Importantly, “we no longer have any excuse, only alibis for turning away from this responsibility” (Derrida, 1994/2006, p. 14).

Then again, the question of already having begun is substantially relevant. Both quantum and Indigenous metaphysics “caus[e] trouble for the very notion of ‘from the beginning’” (Barad, 2010, p. 245; see also Cajete, 2000; Kawagley, 2006). They are un-settling. Nonetheless, because the ability to respond is always situated, this inquiry must begin some-where and some-time (as well as given over to someone; see Butler, 2005), even though these spacetime coordinates (what are conventionally referred to as history and geography, as separate and separable; see Barad, Barad 2010) cannot be torn asunder from their co-constitutive otherness (see also Cajete, 2000; Kawagley, 2006; Kirby, 2011; Kuokkanen, 2007).

This book’s intended purpose is to take seriously this simultaneously co-constitutive and othering relation between Western modern science and Indigenous ways-of-knowing-in-being; dialogically engaging with the field of science education4 to so that it might practice “an iterative (re)opening up to, an enabling of responsiveness” (Barad, 2010, p. 265) to the possibility of Indigenous metaphysics (to-come). Yet, before “beginning” if one could make such a proposition, the purpose of this introductory chapter is to put forward the relationships between metaphysics, decolonizing, and post-colonial approaches to science education, and deconstruction that are central to the work to-come within this book. The framing of these relationships is done by attending to the double(d) meaning of unsettling science education in two parts to provide orientations for the reading journey. The first provides an overview of some of the pathways explored with/in decolonizing science education: decolonizing and post-colonial science education in response to the metaphysics of modernity. The second unpacks deconstruction in relationship to decolonizing methodologies as well as decolonizing science education as a (meta-)methodological approach to (re)open the metaphysics of modernity. In this chapter, as in those that follow, I initiate the work with a positional vignette that give glimpses of the curiosities and questions that motivate and guide my explorations and give shape to the inquiries to come.

My Relation to Indigenous Metaphysics, the Metaphysics of Modernity, and Science Education

Because we need to “begin” some-where and some-time, let’s “begin” in Calgary, Alberta on 1 June 2016. Blackfoot Elder and scholar Leroy Little Bear is giving a Big Thinking address at the annual Canadian Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences. The title of his talk: “Blackfoot Metaphysics is Waiting in the Wings”. Playing off the title as he walks onto the main stage, Little Bear jokes “[waiting in the wings] just like I was a few minutes ago”. This calls to mind(-body-heart-spirit) the importance of making connections through humour (see also Little Bear, 2000). Leroy Little Bear invites those in the crowded auditorium to (re)consider what Blackfoot and other differentially articulated Indigenous metaphysics (i.e., the co-constitutive space of axiology, epistemology, ontology, ethics, and cosmology) continue to offer: ways-of-knowing-in-being premised on ethics, relationality, process, flux, and renewal centering a sense of place. Already, the talk is rife with significance: metaphysics is “classically” understood as a philosophy of being or what is (i.e., ontology) or the nature of Nature which comes to describe multiple concepts and enactments such as space, time, matter, causality, agency, identity, among others. Little Bear implicitly calls it out as but one metaphysics amidst many. Furthermore, he articulates a need to consider Indigenous metaphysics in response to the metaphysics that are already and often in operation within educational spaces: “What are the metaphysics of our schools? Where are those metaphysics taking us?” Articulating a metaphysics of modernity as taken-for-granted, unquestioned, and unstated, Little Bear subtly shifts the statement that metaphysics is (i.e., singular and a priori) to one wherein metaphysics are5 and are in relation (i.e., plural and entangled in the world’s ongoing becoming). Furthermore, he motions that the metaphysics of modernity continues to provide some comforts (e.g., material goods), “but at what price? Is our metaphysics making us better? Happier?” he asks. In referring to this metaphysics as ours, Little Bear signals that metaphysics is not strictly a binary either/or affair, as in Indigenous or Western. Rather, metaphysics is always both/and. In other words, metaphysics are neither separate nor separable, but rather always co-constituted and co-constitutive. In turn, responsibility for the metaphysics of modernity is also shared, albeit, and importantly, not in the same way. Making his concluding remarks, Little Bear suggested that it is time to move Blackfoot and other Indigenous metaphysics from the wings to the main stage where their contributions might significantly come to bear in generative ways.

During this address, Little Bear only hinted at the ways in which the knowledge-practices of Indigenous metaphysics come to be positioned in the wings where they have been waiting for a long time. He signalled dialogues that began over 20 years ago6 between Indigenous Elders and scholars (e.g., Leroy Little Bear, Chickasaw and Cheyenne scholar Sakej Youngblood Henderson) and Western scientists and linguists (e.g., quantum physicists David Peat and David Bohm). During these dialogues, they met “to discuss the underlying principles of the cosmos, not from an adversarial point of view, but from one of mutual respect and deep listening” (Parry, 2008, p. 37). The purpose of the Science Dialogues was not to work towards knowledge, but rather understanding (see Little Bear, 1994; Parry, 2008; Peat, 2002, 2007). This certainly was not the first time, nor would it be the last that such an initiative towards cross-cultural understanding would take place. Yet, despite such efforts, Indigenous metaphysics still waits in the wings of science education.

When I began graduate studies in decolonizing science education in 2008, the very first book I read was Peat’s (2002) Blackfoot Physics.7 While I was on the lookout for Indigenous science,8 David Peat (2002) reminds that Indigenous metaphysics and Indigenous science are differential articulations of one another that cannot be separated (see also Cajete, 1994, 2000; Kawagley, 2006):

As a science, [Indigenous science] is a disciplined approach to understanding and knowing, or rather, to the processes of coming to understanding and knowing. It has supporting metaphysics about the nature of reality, deals in systems of relationship, is concerned with the energies and processes of the universe, and provides a coherent scheme and basis for action. On the other hand, it is not possible to separate Indigenous science from other areas of life such as ethics, spirituality, metaphysics, social order, ceremony, and a variety of other aspects of daily existence. This it can never be a “branch” or a “department” of knowledge, but rather remains inseparable from the cohesive whole, from a way of being and of coming-to-know. (p. 241, emphasis mine)

Blackfoot Physics was a powerful early read for me as it discusses the “points of resonance” between Indigenous metaphysics and quantum physics that emerged from the Science Dialogues. Holding the complexity of difference without subsuming it into sameness, Blackfoot Physics explored these two systems that diversely articulate flux and relationality concurrently, providing me with a hopeful potentiality for science education to be constituted and enacted otherwise. It could be stated that this was an example of what Yupik science education scholar Oscar Kawagley and his settler ally Ray Barnhardt (2005) meant when they suggested that “there is a growing appreciation of the complementarity that exists between what were previously considered two disparate and irreconcilable systems of thought” (p. 12).9 Notably, from this exploration of putting Indigenous and Western science into proximal relation and productively their similar differences and differing similarities (see Bohm, 1994), there was and continues to be rich potentiality. Notably, the possibility for respectful, relevant, and responsive science education whose pedagogical potency is enriched from cross-cultural diversity resonated with my own professional experiences of working as a fourth generation white Euro-settler of Irish ancestry working as an informal science educator in First Nations, Métis, and Inuit communities across Canada. I had witnessed and worked towards contributing to science education as plurality; science education shaped by cross-cultural understandings through similar, yet different, practices; and science education that draws strength from cultural and placed locations, instead of treating difference as an individual problem located with the one who diverges from the norm (e.g., Higgins, 2014; see Chapter 2). In my experience, and at the time, there was no lack of respectful, reciprocal, and relational models for cross-cultural science education drawing from Indigenous traditions (e.g., Aikenhead, 1997, 2006b; Cajete, 1999; Barnhardt & Kawagley, 2005, 2008). Yet, despite science being a fruitful location for cross-cultural “points of resonance” (Peat, 2002), to my surprise Indigenous metaphysics was still waiting in the wings when it came to most science education spaces. Blackfoot Physics illuminated the ways in which Indigenous science was yet-to-come and productive locations to bring about that potentiality.

Now, over ten years later, at the time of writing this book, Indigenous metaphysics’ status can still be referred to as “waiting in the wings”, of not yet having (fully) arrived, in relation to school science. This, in part, has a great deal to with the ways in which Indigenous knowledges are generally approached from within spaces of science education. Above and beyond the aforementioned treating of Indigenous ways-of-knowing-in-being as if it were a new relation rather than approaching the relation anew, there is often an attempt to come-to-know the defining characteristics of Indigenous metaphysics (i.e., knowing about) without accounting for (or being accountable to) the ways in which Western modern metaphysics has always and continues to dialectically subsumes, sublates, or sutures over Indigenous metaphysics. This becomes problematic when there a positional stance of “not knowing” that operates in tandem (see McKinley, 2001).

To dig deeper into the various ways in which science education is seemingly unable to know Indigenous science, I turn to Sami scholar Rauna Kuokkanen (2007), whose scholarship centres Western modern educational and institutional responsibility towards Indigenous ways-of-knowing-in-being. Specifically, with respect to the question of knowledge and learning, Kuokkanen (2007) asks us,

Why is the academy, the supposed generator of knowledge, so disinclined to engage with [I]ndigenous ontologies and philosophies? Considering the endless number of studies on, and the voluminous information about, practically every imaginable topic dealing with the world’s various [I]ndigenous peoples, how can this general ignorance of [I]ndigenous epistemes continue to be so pervasive? (p. 56)

How is it that science education continues to engage from a place of “know-nothing-ism” (Kuokkanen, 2007) or “sanctioned ignorance” (Spivak, 1999)10 despite there already beings so many, and an ever-growing quantity of, resources describing, defining, and documenting Indigenous metaphysics? Is this more than simply being “commonplace ‘moves of innocence’” through which educators “claim the right to not know” (Kuokkanen, 2010, p. 65)? While these are questions that are approached from multiple angles over the course of this book, it is important to immediately dispel the easy, yet problematic answer: “the problem is not that that there are no [or not enough] books on Indigenous peoples by Indigenous peoples” (Kuokkanen, 2007, p. 102), even on the topic of Indigenous science.

As a white settler scholar, I see it as both my role and responsibility to take up the task of accounting for and being accountable to the ongoing dialectic negation of Indigenous metaphysics, and the ways in which this process of negation cannot be separated from colonial referents which linger and lurk in science education. Simultaneously, I recognize that an a-political documenting of Indigenous metaphysics cannot be disassociated from forms of differentially (re)producing contemporary and historically ongoing colonial relations: here, shoring up my privilege as a settler academic through describing and defining Indigenous Others in a contemporary moment in which the will-to-know is driving a great deal of educational change. However, the work of addressing the ways in which science education is produced by and reproducing colonial logics is not a straightforward or simple task. As Mik’maq educational scholar Marie Battiste (2008) states, “what is becoming clear to educators is that any attempt to decolonize education and actively resist colonial paradigms is a complex and daunting task” (p. 508): not only because they are strictly complicated tasks, but also because colonial structures and systems also come to shape our ability to respond to them and even imagine something beyond them (see also Ahenakew, 2017; Battiste, 2005). For example, even within Peat’s (2002) articulation of the rich potentiality of points of resonance, there are subtle and not-so-subtle traces of the ways in which the relationship Indigenous and Western science is always already one that cannot not be colonizing (even when working towards something else)11:

It is at this point that a tantalizing paradox presents itself. On one hand it seems that the very activity and busy-ness of our analytic, linear Western minds would obstruct us from entering into Indigenous coming-to-knowing, yet, on the other, scientists who have been struggling at the cutting edges of their fields have come up with concepts that resonate with those of Indigenous science. (p. 6)

While, as Peat (2002) suggests there are rich points of resonance between the Indigenous and Western metaphysics (e.g., around questions of quantum physics), there are still patterns of difference that matter. To uniquely focus on commensurability here becomes an act of mirroring sameness elsewhere, dialectically subsuming into or sublating through sameness patterns of difference, as well as making it difficult to account for and be accountable to the enactment of difference. Relationships of commensurability become all the more complicated between Indigenous and Western metaphysics as equivocation often becomes a move to mask colonial relations of power between the two (Carter, 2004; McKinley, 2001; Tuck & Yang, 2012). Further, as Kuokkanen (2007) states, “the demand and desire that [I]ndigenous cultures and epistemes be translated into forms recognizable by the dominant colonial society is at least as old as colonialism itself” (p. 75). Colonial logics always come to differ and defer what can be said, to whom, and for what purposes. Here, the move the make space for Indigenous metaphysics simultaneously (re)centres scientist as subject as a form of listening-as-imperial-benevolence in which the Indigenous other can only be heard in the spaces in which it relates to and potentially benefits the Western scientist (Kuokkanen, 2007). It is for this reason that Ngāti Kahungunu ki Wairarapa and Ngāi Tahu scholar Liz McKinley and Maori scholar Georgina Stewart (2012) state, “the aspiration of defining and understanding IK [Indigenous knowledges] (in order to place it in the science curriculum) can be likened to chasing the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, which remains permanently out of reach” (p. 551).

However, rather than reverse the logics and wholly adopt a position of incommensurability when considering the space between Indigenous and Western metaphysics, Tewa scholar Gregory Cajete (2000) suggests that we account for and are accountable to the diverse ways in which they come to be constituted and enacted:

Native science is a product of a different creative journey and a different history than that of Western science. Native science is not quantum physics or environmental science, but it has come to similar understandings about the workings of the natural laws through experimentation and participation with the natural world. The groundwork for a fruitful dialogue and exchange of knowledge is being created. (p. 14)

While both may have reached similar destinations when it comes to notions of flux, uncertainty, and co-constitutiveness, Cajete (2000) reminds us that this destination is shaped by “different creative journey[s]” (p. 14) both in terms of where they have come from as well as where they are going. These currently intersecting pathways are differentially produced, and produce ways-of-knowing-in-being differently. Furthermore, such patterns can become rich locations for dialogue: points of resonance become an entry point towards what one can learn from the others’ points of divergence. Thus, rather than sameness and its constitutive other of difference as oppositional negation, we can consider the ways in which Indigenous and Western metaphysics are in ever-shifting, situated, and differential relations.

Despite its “to-come” status, the potential of Indigenous metaphysics (and its differential articulation as Indigenous science) within and beyond cross-cultural science remains a central motivation that continues to drive the inquiry herein that is grounded in an ethical commitment towards a future12 in which Indigenous metaphysics is no longer “waiting in the wings”.

Barad (2010) suggests, “we inherit the future, not just the past” (p. 257). In considering the future, we not only inherit the future (avenir) that is the most possible possibility; one that prolongs and replicates the present condition, albeit differently, by restituting a foreclosed past that has yet to happen (again). We also inherit futures that are yet-to-come (à-venir); those unexpected arrivals that produce a (re)opening of difference whereby possibilities and consequences are not (fully) knowable (see also Smith, 2005). However, “there is no inheritance without a call to responsibility” (Derrida, 1994/2006, p. 114); a responsibility that is not only an epistemological and ontological accounting for but also an ethical accountability towards that which is yet-to-come (see also Kuokkannen, 2007; Spivak, 1994). The Otherness that has yet-to-arrive (e.g., a future to-come where Indigenous metaphysics is no longer “waiting in the wings” of science education),13 whose arrival cannot be anticipated, is entangled in what Barad (2010) refers to as co-constitutive “relations of obligation”:

Othering, the constitution of an ‘Other,’ entails an indebtedness to the ‘Other,’ who is irreducibly and materially bound to, threaded through, the ‘self’—a diffraction/dispersion of identity. ‘Otherness’ is an entangled relation of difference (différance). Ethicality entails noncoincidence with oneself. (p. 265)

As the future (avenir) and the to-come (à-venir) are not one and the same (without being mutually exclusive),14 the present of science education is irreducibly bound to and ethically indebted to Indigenous science to-come. Articulated otherwise, it is a responsibility that is not for the other but to the Other whose labelling as “non-scientific” allows that which is “scientific” to persist and thrive (see Wallace, 2018). Indigenous metaphysics is already entangled within the production of science education. Rather, science educators are tasked with (re)opening the ability to respond to towards Indigenous ways-of-knowing-in-being. This potentiality that has yet-to-(fully-)come, whose arrival is unforeseeable, invites “the continual reopening and unsettling of what might yet be, of what was, and what comes to be” (Barad, 2010, p. 264, emphasis in original).

In order to engage in the work of un-settling (i.e., what I have come to understand and will present as deconstructing and decolonizing) what might yet be, what was, and what will come to be science education, the central question that guides the inquiry presented within this book is: How is Indigenous science to-come with/in the context of science education? The central question is understood and explored in this book through three guiding inflections that are inseparably entangled. First, to-come signals that Indigenous metaphysics, in the context of science education, has not yet (wholly) arrived. This precipitates the questions: How is it that Indigenous science is still to-come? How do the structures of science education—the assumptions, terms, categories, practices, and beliefs—contribute to exclusion of Indigenous science, as well as inclusion that disciplines, differs from, and defers Indigenous science to-come? Secondly, to-come signals ethical indebtedness; this invites the question How might the structure, culture, and discipline of science education be (re)opened and re(con)figured to receive Indigenous science to-come, on its own terms, and in ethical relation? Thirdly, to-come entails a responsibility for and towards that which is to-come. Yet, modes, practices, and enactments of responsibility cannot be prescribed when that which is to-come is never (fully) knowable and distorted by the current frames of science education. Stated otherwise, responsibility requires the occasion and ability to respond. Accordingly, I wonder: What types of practices15 might allow for and nurture the possibility of Indigenous science to-come? This final query recognizes that potentiality need not require actualization for it to be worthy of consideration.

To situate the engagement with the central questions and its different inflections, the remainder of this introductory chapter provides a double(d) orientation to guide the reader through the book: unsettling science education. To animate the two ways in which unsettling can be read, first, decolonizing and post-colonial approaches to science education will be introduced as these are the disciplinary spaces within which I situate this work. Secondly, in addressing the ways in which meaning and matter become stratified or sedimented in science education, deconstruction as a (meta-)methodology will be explored. However, as the metaphysics of modernity is often entangled with/in enactments of WMS and science education, (re)producing Indigenous science as to-come, this relation is also explored as (co-constitutive) site to unsettle.

On Unsettling Science Education: Decolonizing and Deconstructing

In our view science education is a key site in which nature–culture relations are defined, enacted, brought-to-life, expanded, narrowed and legislated. The manifestations of nature-culture relations, from the very constructions of subject matter, to focal content, to the configurations of practice, engaged in science learning environments are often deeply unreflective of the most pressing scientific questions—rather they focus on ‘‘settled’’ phenomena as well as ‘‘settled’’ perspectives and relations to phenomena. (Bang & Marin, 2015, p. 531, emphasis in original)

As Ojibwe scholar Megan Bang and Choctaw scholar Ananda Marin’s state in their seminal 2015 piece on unsettling science education (see also Bang, Warren, Rosebery, & Medin, 2012), they state that the science education is a key site for addressing and the ways in which relations between Nature and Culture are produced through a double(d) settling. Accordingly, unsettling science education is a practice that is first about addressing the ways in which settler colonialism (i.e., the structure rather than event through which settlers continue a project of Indigenous erasure; see Tuck & Yang, 2012) manifests within science education by refusing and resisting the logics and structures through which the colonial project remains ongoing. As Bang and Marin define, “the fundamental tenant of settler-colonial societies is the acquisition of land as property, followed by the establishment of settler lifeways as the normative benchmark from which to measure development” (p. 532). In addition, unsettling also has a second, subtler, but no less significant meaning: attending to the ways in which science education draws from stratified and sedimented knowledges, phenomena, histories, pedagogies, and other practices which complicate questions of making space for and responding to Indigenous ways-of-living-with-Nature.

Yet, working towards unsettling science education is a task that is already trouble(d) from its very beginning (see Higgins, 2014; McKinley & Stewart, 2012; Sammel, 2009).16 Notions and enactments of decolonizing are often already overcoded by the colonial logics that we attempt to work within, against, and beyond. Working towards a science education that is able to respond to Indigenous ways of Indigenous ways-of-knowing-in-being is often marked by a de/colonizing relation. Like Subreenduth (2006),

I use the slash (/) in ‘decolonizing’ as visual demonstration of the incompleteness of the process of de/colonizing. What I suggest in this use is the impossibility (at least at this historical juncture) to speak of a totalizing decolonizing discourse or imagination. (p. 618)

As with others (e.g., Madden & McGregor, 2013; Rhee & Subreenduth, 2006), I employ the term de/colonizing as a post-colonial inflection to decolonizing theories and practices to consider the ways in which decolonizing and colonizing discourses cannot be wholly framed in opposition, particularly within spaces like educational institutions (see Higgins & Madden, 2017, 2019) or in fields such as science education (see Higgins & Kim, 2019; Higgins, Mahy, Agasaleh, & Enderle, 2019; Higgins & Tolbert, 2018). As a result, “the process and acts of de/colonizing are not only always an antithesis of colonialism … but rather a convoluted, complex and paradoxical one” (Subreenduth, 2006, p. 619). De/colonizing invites an ongoing and hyper-vigilant examination of the ways in which (neo-)colonial logics seep (even) into decolonizing efforts, through engaging with the following questions:

How should we rethink and rearticulate the conceptualization and practice of education and research when we situate them within contemporary imperialism and the history of pervasive colonialism? What theoretical and practical possibilities can be retrieved by analyzing de/colonizing educational practices through the history of imperialism? What alternative ideas of educational theorizing can be articulated in relation to local/global responsibility, equality and justice? How does local/global mobility and changing demographics impact on such knowledge production and consumption? (Rhee & Subreenduth, 2006, p. 546)

For example, and importantly (particularly as it is the primary form of response), if after Barad (2007), “responsibility must be thought of in terms of what matters and what is excluded from mattering” (p. 220), there is a need to attend to the ways in which the logics of exclusion continue to operate through the ways in which Indigenous ways-of-knowing-in-being are included. As Bang and Marin (2015) remind, the curricular inclusion of Indigenous perspectives is differentially problematic if we cannot also attend to the taken-for-granted and naturalized epistemological, ontological, and axiological commitments and enactments of what we are including perspectives into. As Bang and Marin (2015) state, if science education continues to “focus on ‘settled’ phenomena as well as ‘settled’ perspectives and relations to phenomena” (p. 531), which rely on and reinforce settler privilege while simultaneously dismissing, diminishing, and denying Indigenous ways-of-living-with-nature, presence, and futurities, it will remain but a tokenistic inclusion which serves to distract from the more unsettling demands of this work (namely, Land) and is often primarily an effort to reconceptualize and recenter the subject of dominance (see also Ahenakew, 2017).

Importantly, science education centring of “settled” phenomena through “settled” perspectives matter and materialize beyond the classroom as well (see also Kayumova, McGuire, & Cardello, 2019). Science education’s (pre)dominant conceptualization of Nature(-Culture) makes palatable and possible the ongoing dispossession and devastation of Indigenous Land:

The maintenance of settler normativity requires the structuration of time-space relations in ways that make the inseparable dynamics of acquisition of land, [I]ndigenous erasure, and the domination of black people appear as an inevitable, unconnected, and natural course of development rather than socio-politically engineered to support and foster white entitlement and privilege. (Bang & Marin, 2015, p. 532)

Also, through this double(d) settling, Indigenous peoples have been and continue to be the objects of science rather than its subjects (see also TallBear, 2013). In turn, echoing Bang and Marin, I argue that science education is a “key site” to unsettle the relationship between Nature and Culture.

As unsettling’s double(d) meaning and practice is underexplored in science education, it will be framed through an exploration of ways in which (neo-)colonial logics are responded to in science education (i.e., decolonizing and post-colonial approaches) as well as the ways in which meanings and practices are productively destabilized and decentered (i.e., deconstruction).

First Orientation: An Introduction to Decolonizing and Postcolonial Science Education and Their Relationships to Metaphysics

As [Derrida] develops the notion of the joyful [i.e., play-full] yet laborious strategy of rewriting the old language—a language, incidentally, we must know well—Derrida mentions the “cloture” of metaphysics. We must know that we are within the “cloture” of metaphysics, even as we attempt to undo it. It would be an historicist mistake to represent this “closure” of metaphysics as simply the temporal finishing-point of metaphysics. It is also the metaphysical desire to make the end coincide with the means, create an enclosure, make the definition coincide with the defined, the “father” with the “son”; within the logic of identity to balance the equation, close the circle. Our language reflects this desire. And so it is from within this language that we must attempt an “opening.” (Spivak, 1976, p. xx)

I begin this section by asking: what does metaphysics (i.e., the co-constitutive space of epistemology, ontology, ethics, among others) have to do with science education and Indigenous science to-come? Recall that Indigenous science is always already an articulation of Indigenous metaphysics and an inseparable part of the whole (see Cajete, 1994, 2000; Little Bear, 2016; Peat, 2002). However, what of Indigenous metaphysics within the Western modern science (WMS) which largely comes to inform most of science education’s school-based curricula? As Derrida (1976) offers, we are always already within the clôture (i.e., enclosure) of metaphysics: there is no outside of metaphysics (see also Spivak, 1976). Also, as stated earlier, there is no outside of the metaphysics of modernity (see also Apffel-Marglin, 2011; Carter, 2010; Kuokkanen, 2007; Little Bear, Bear 2016; Spivak, 1976, 1993/2009, 1994, 1999).

WMS and science education too must also be within, and have, a metaphysics. Sciences, in all shapes and forms, are premised upon the ways in which Nature’s enactments (i.e., ontology) are understood through and in relation to Culture (i.e., epistemology) (see Barad, 2000; Cajete, 2000; Kirby, 2011; Latour, 1993). However, as Little Bear (2016) enunciated in his keynote address, the metaphysical relation between Nature and Culture enacted by Western modernity that informs and produces WMS is often one that assumed, presumed, and/or taken-for-granted. Thus, adding to Little Bear’s questions, “What are the metaphysics of our schools? Where are those metaphysics taking us?,” I ask: What are the metaphysics of science education? In response, I offer that WMS and by extension science education are (mis-)articulated as transcending metaphysics (Barad, 2000, 2007; Cajete, 1994, 2000). This (self-)perceived metaphysical exclusion becomes a criticism that is levied against other ways-of-knowing-Nature (e.g., Cobern & Loving, 2001), becoming one of the ways in which Indigenous science is (yet-)to-come (McKinley, 2007). Answering (and being answerable as form of responsibility; see Patel, 2016; Spivak, 1994) to the metaphysics of science education then becomes a question of (mis)reading science education for its subtle and lingering colonial referents and enactments (Carter, 2004, 2005; McKinley & Aikenhead, 2005): the process of “joyful [i.e., play-full] yet laborious strategy of rewriting the old language” (Spivak, 1976, p. xx) that is deconstruction. (Re)opening science education to Indigenous science-to-come labours the structure of education between what it is, is not, and could be(come), particularly in instances when meanings (and matter) are sedimented and stratified (e.g., through knowledge-practices such as science as metaphysically transcendent).

Regarding metaphysics as they relate to science education, Derrida (1976) offers that the metaphysics of Western modernity are both the process and product of clôture: at once being an enclosure and a closing. This double(d) normative process can never be wholly separated from “the metaphysical desire to make the end coincide with the means” (Spivak, 1976, p. xx). In other words, the closing is naturalized, rendering the process an absent presence whose partial erasure (but irreducible presence) gives the appearance of stable, unitary, separate, and seperable epistemological and ontological units (see also Apffel-Marglin, 2011; Bang et al., 2012; Bang & Marin, 2015; Barad, 2007; Cajete, 1994, 2000; Latour, 1993). However, how the metaphysics of modernity are always already entangled within science education, how this entanglement is produced, as well as what it produces, and what is producible with/in are undertakings engaged within this book. If we are to (re)open science education to Indigenous science to-come, “it is from within this language that we must attempt an ‘opening’” (Spivak, 1976, p. xx), we must do so with/in science education, “a language, incidentally, we must know well” (p. xx). Thus, in the next section of this introduction onto science education, Indigenous science to-come, and metaphysics, I outline a few more of the features of science education and its relationship to Indigenous science.

Understanding School Science and its Relation to Indigenous Science To-Come. Generally speaking, within science education, “the conventional goal” is one “of thinking, behaving, and believing like a scientist” (Aikenhead & Elliot, 2010, p. 324). Currently, through the two predominant methods of teaching and learning science, this entails: coming to know what scientists know (i.e., cognitivism, intra-personal learning, scientific knowledge as representation of nature) and/or enculturation into how scientists come-to-know (i.e., socio-constructivism, inter-personal learning, scientific knowledge as representation of culture) (Aikenhead, 2006a; Erickson, 2000). Untroubled, both approaches collude and coalesce around the construction and reification of the subject position of “Scientist”. It has been argued that this subject position is emblematic of the masculine, Eurocentric, and anthropocentric subject of Western modernity through modes that enact and uphold its metaphysics (e.g., representationalism, universalism, nature/culture divide) (see Barad, 2000, 2007). This (re)produces science as a modern(ist) practice through which nature is knowable and representable (i.e., quantifiable, generalizable, and predictable; see Aikenhead & Michell, 2011; Aikenhead & Ogawa, 2007), and in which neither the culture of science nor the agency of nature can be (wholly) accounted for or be held accountable. Furthermore, this type of scientific literacy and its entangled culture of “school science” potentially produce experiences of cultural assimilation and acculturation rather than enculturation for the vast majority of students.17

In other words, rather than a harmonious interfacing of cultures (i.e., enculturation), encounters of school science are more likely to house potential for dialectical negation that is either actualized (i.e., assimilation) or remains un-actualized through students’ complex and complicated curricular navigation (i.e., acculturation). Such dialectic negation occurs at the level of the individual, as well as the system. In reviewing literature on science education in diverse school settings, Aikenhead and Elliot (2010) state that “most students (about 90%) tend to experience school science (Grades 6–12) as a foreign culture to varying degrees, but their teachers do not treat it that way” (p. 323; see also Bang et al., 2012; McKinley, 2001, 2007; McKinley & Stewart, 2012).18 For students whose daily lived experiences continue to be negatively impacted by Eurocentrism19 (re)produced with/in (and beyond) science education, learning with/in the cultural practice of “school science” largely continues to be a form of epistemic violence. As such, assimilation is overwhelmingly identified as a common barrier to engagement (Aikenhead, 2006b; Bang et al., 2012; Barnhardt & Kawagley, 2005; Canadian Council on Learning, 2007; McKinley, 2001, 2007).

There are various ways in which this systemic problematic manifests at the level of individual students and groups. For Indigenous, diasporic, and other post-colonial students20 these include, but are not limited to: (a) under-representation within science and technology occupations, (b) under-representation within formal education and training that paves pathways to such occupations, (c) gaps in achievement on standardized international assessment such as the Programme for International Student Assessment, and (d) lower rates of graduation (Barnhardt & Kawagley, 2005; Canadian Council on Learning, 2007; MacIvor, 1995; McKinley, 2007). For Indigenous, diasporic, and post-colonial students who succeed in spaces of WMS despite the odds that are stacked against them, it is often at a cost: learning science is often at the expense of one’s cultural being and belonging, becoming otherwise in the process (see Bang et al., 2012; Cajete, 2000; Marker, 2019; McKinley, 2005, 2007). Furthermore, as local Indigenous ways of coming-to-knowing the natural world continue to be underrepresented, misrepresented, misunderstood, and undervalued, WMS tends to be overrepresented and misrepresented (Aikenhead, 1997, 2006b; Aikenhead & Michell, 2011; Aikenhead & Ogawa, 2007). As a result, many students come away from science education with an understanding of WMS that is shaped by myth (e.g., science as culturally neutral, unbiased, and thus ethical), alongside under-appreciation of what other ways-of-knowing-nature might have to offer.

This not only has an impact upon students, but also their teachers: “stereotypical views of [I]ndigenous students [and their knowledge-practices] have led to assumptions of teaching and learning for them” (p. 214, emphasis mine). In a study with science teachers of Indigenous students, Aikenhead and Huntley (1999) documented four ways that deficit thinking manifests:

1. Teachers generally viewed Western science as course content or as a way of exploring nature, not as a foreign culture as experienced by many of their students; 2. Aboriginal knowledge was respected by science teachers, but only a token amount was added onto, but not integrated with, school science; 3. Teachers thought that the act of learning science was unrelated to their students’ [Indigenous] worldviews; 4. Students’ disinterest in pursuing science careers was either unexplainable by the interviewees or was blamed on student deficits. Few teachers blamed their curriculum and teaching. (pp. 162, 164)

If science education is to be (re)opened to Indigenous science to-come, it is important to recall that the ethical imperative of education is “a responsibility to the Other (as answerability or accountability) and not for the Other (as the burden of the fittest)” (Andreotti, 2007, p. 74, emphasis mine), as well as recognition of the ongoing (re)construction, enactment, and productions that result from such positioning (see also Andreotti, 2011; Kuokanen, 2007, 2010; Patel, 2016; Spivak, 1994).

The ways in which Indigenous ways-of-living-with-nature (IWLN) come to be under- and misrepresented signals how dialectic negation plays out at systemic, cultural, and discursive levels.21 The very topic of IWLN in science education is itself subsumed within wider concepts such as multiculturalism and equity that fail to wholly account for the complexities of Indigenous-Western relationships (Carter, 2004, 2010; McKinley & Stewart, 2012). Furthermore, the term traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) that is regularly employed potentially (re)centres a Western modern(ist) notion of knowledge as a discrete unit that exists outside of and beyond the knower and its ecology of relationships (Aikenhead & Ogawa, 2007; Aikenhead & Michell, 2011; Kim, Ashgar, & Jordan, 2017; McKinley, 2007). However, McKinley and Aikenhead (2005) state that while these concepts and conceptual locations have been problematic, they nonetheless provide productive locations to critically inhabit science education and gain leverage (see also McKinley & Stewart, 2012). Whether Indigenous science should be included or not within science education, as well as how, where, and when, has become:

…one of the largest (in terms of literature) debates in the field of culture and science education… [which has centered around] the nature of knowledge…. The relevance of this literature to schools is that a universalist understanding of science informs the assumptions implicit in school curricula about the nature of science and how science should be taught. (McKinley, 2007, p. 206)

Here, what is called the multicultural science education debate is of central relevance to the ways in which Indigenous science is to-come; it is not only part of our collective inheritance as science educators but rather part a pivotal one, shaping how and who we can be(come).22 As such, it is a central node that is explored within this book. Following its more fulsome introduction in Chapter 3, it is differentially revisited and explored in further depth in the chapters following (i.e., 4–6).

“Universality” (i.e., transcendental knowledge) is “achieved” when metaphysics of modernity come to mark IWLN, TEK, and WMS through systems of clôture (e.g., as either strictly similar or different), as well as when WMS reasserts itself as the (“neutral”) norm and standard against which other knowledge systems are to be judged through Eurocentrism (see Carter, 2004; Lewis & Aikenhead, 2001). Significantly, this does not strictly mean that Indigenous ways-of-knowing-in-being are compared to Western modern practices, but also through Eurocentric concepts and practices. As Kuokkanen (2007) explains, this includes:

Eurocentric arrogance of conscience… the simplistic assumption that as long as one has sufficient information, one can understand the “other”…. By assuming that epistemologies are universal and that any episteme or system of knowledge can be accessed, this view reflects the Eurocentric claim that Western or modern intellectual traditions are more sophisticated than are other kinds (assuming that the latter even exists). (p. 99)

The result of such “universalism,” at both the level of knowledge and knowledge-making practices, are forms of sameness and difference that are irreducibly bound to the ways in which (neo-)colonial power dynamics manifest in knowledge production (see also Andreotti, 2007, 2011). Within science education, McKinley (2007) states that the relationship between IWLN and WMS can be generalized into four categories: (a) where Indigenous science can be explained within WMS; (b) where Indigenous science could be explained through WMS, but the explanation has yet to be developed; (c) where there is a link between Indigenous science and WMS’s knowledge claims, albeit through different knowledge principles and practices; (d) where WMS cannot accept aspects of Indigenous science (e.g., spirituality, animism). The extent to which if and how Indigenous science is to be included within school science curriculum depends highly upon the type of Indigenous knowledge (IK) being brought in, as well as science education’s ability to ethically respond to difference (see also Kuokkanen, 2007; Marker, 2006); some forms of Indigenous science are more to-come than others. As the relations of power between IWLN, TEK, and WMS are uneven and unequal, it is often the case that “those opposing the inclusion [of IK] argue that there is no place for IK unless it has been subsumed into the body of knowledge referred to as WMS, that is, unless it is made the same as WMS, in which the status quo continues” (McKinley, 2007, p. 208). Alternately, some who uphold the universality of WMS (e.g., Cobern & Loving, 2001; El-Hani & de Ferreira Bandeira, 2008) argue that the inclusion of Indigenous science is a non-issue so long as it is neither called science nor included within the science classroom (but rather as a separate subject, like art, literature, or history). However, such “inclusion” fails to redress the dialectic negation of Indigenous science marked by sublation, subsumtion, or suturing over; further, it masks the colonial relations of power that produce these moves (see McKinley, 2001, 2007). Further, as Kuokkanen (2007) explains, “inclusion” is not a move marked by innocence, removed from dynamics of power, nor one that is new:

The demand and desire that [I]ndigenous cultures and epistemes be translated into forms recognizable by the dominant colonial society is at least as old as colonialism itself. Colonizers have always used translation against indigenous peoples in an attempt to manipulate and displace them and thereby dispossess them of their land. (p. 75)

Inclusion is not the remedy to exclusion when the structures into which inclusion happen continue to (re)produce and uphold settler-colonial ways-of-knowing-in-being: be it complicity in the devaluation and erasure of Indigenous ways-of-knowing-in-being or participating in interrelated delegitimizing claims to Land in the larger project of dispossession (see also Bang & Marin, 2015). As mentioned early within this chapter, meaningful and respectful dialogue between Indigenous science and WMS is in a perpetual state of im/possibility as they are not and never will be (fully) commensurate; Indigenous science will always be to-come but the ethical responsibility is ever-present and irreducible.

Decolonizing and Post-Colonial Responses in Science Education. There are growing bodies of work within science education that address Western modernity’s Eurocentric legacies that are often referred to as: decolonizing science education (e.g., Aikenhead, 2006c; Aikenhead & Elliot, 2010; Belczewski, 2009; Chinn, 2007; Higgins, 2014) and post-colonial23 science education (e.g., Carter, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2010; McKinley, 2001, 2007; McKinley & Aikenhead, 2005; McKinley & Stewart, 2012). Battiste (2013a) describes decolonizing education as is a “two-prong process”. It entails deconstruction of (neo-)colonial24 structures and strategies, and reconstruction that centres and takes seriously Indigenous, diasporic, and other post-colonial ways-of-knowing and ways-of-being towards reshaping the place-based processes and priorities of education and educational research (see also Donald, 2012).25 Similarly, post-colonial approaches to science education26 seek to (re)open (neo-)colonial structures strategies in order to ethically respond to the Otherness of Indigeneity.27 As both draw from diverging theoretical lineages and enactments of educational practice (e.g., critical pedagogy and post-structuralism respectively), there are productive points of resonance and tension between the two. Of the latter, and of particular relevance to this book, are: (a) the centrality of land as beyond human cultural understandings of it, and (b) whether ethics is a possible possibility or not. Herein, regarding the first statement, I align with decolonizing theories who suggest that post-colonial theories’ focus on cultural hybridity, flow, and porousity do not strongly enough consider the ways in which coloniality operates and circulates beyond an anthropocentric (inter-)textuality. The critique is levied to bring attention to the ways in which (neo-)coloniality comes to problematically shape not only human cultural relations, but also those of other-than-humans, and more-than-humans who, together, come to collectively constitute the ecology of relationships that is signified by an Indigenous concept of place (Donald, 2012; Grande, 2004, 2008; Marker, 2006; Smith, 1999/2012). With respect to the latter statement, I align herein with post-colonial notions of ethics as im/possibility to push forth my own decolonizing scholarship; the discursive practices of decolonizing approaches can (but do not always) come to mask colonizing tendencies (see Carter, 2004, 2010; Subreenduth, 2006; Rhee & Subreenduth, 2006; Smith, 2005; Smith, Maxwell, Puke, & Temara, 2016; Spivak, 1993/2009). Nonetheless, ethical im/possibility need not be paralyzing; Spivak (1988a, 1993/2009, 1994) reminds of the importance of persistent critical and complicit enactments that work towards “transforming the conditions of impossibility into possibility” (Spivak, 1988b, p. 201), even if/as they are never achieved.

Within science education, this call has been primarily taken up by extending the openings produced through treating both science (e.g., Haraway, 1989; Latour, 1993; Traweek, 1992; see also Shapin & Schaffer, 1985) and science education (e.g., Nadeau & Désautels, 1984; O’Loughlin, 1992; Pomeroy, 1994)28 as problematic cultural spaces to be examined through sociological, anthropological, and cultural studies approaches. In particular, a two-pronged approach to decolonizing science education29 focuses primarily on addressing the ways in which Eurocentrism (re)produces science education as a space of cognitive and cultural imperialism (Aikenhead, 2001, 2006c; McKinley, 2001, 2007; Sammel, 2009) in order to make space for learning that is epistemologically diverse and pedagogically pluralistic (i.e., which recognizes that there are diverse pathways to learning about and with Nature; Aikenhead, 2006a, Barnhardt & Kawagley, 2005, 2008; McKinley, 2007; Sammel, 2009). In Canada, there have been some successes in this area. For example, there are increasingly more policy-mandated curriculums that include Indigenous perspectives on science (e.g., British Columbia Ministry of Education’s 2005 Science K to 7 and 2008 Science and Technology 11),30 general frameworks for school-based integration in place (e.g., Manitoba Education and Youth’s 2003 Integrating Aboriginal Perspectives into Curricula), as well an overall commitment from Deans of Faculties of Education to prepare teachers accordingly (Association of Canadian Deans of Canada, 2010).

However, given the capillary pervasiveness of Eurocentrism and its co-constitutive mechanisms (e.g., (neo-)colonialism), decolonizing science education is not simply a process of desiring it to be decolonized. Rather, it is (over-)written in a contradictory, conflicted, and contingent space in which the very processes and practices that explicitly seek to dismantle colonial logics often implicitly uphold and reinforce that which they seek to challenge (Carter, 2004, 2005, 2010; Higgins, 2014; McKinley, 2001; McKinley & Stewart, 2012; Sammel, 2009). On this, Carter (2004) states:

The inclusion of Other’s science has the potential to trouble the categories of Western science, but the processes of cultural representation and translation [i.e., differing and deferring Indigenous science] ensure Western science remains authoritative in most settings. These processes simultaneously work to separate, domesticate, and subsume, regulating the boundaries and preserving the integrity of Western science and science education. Hence, the inclusion of the Other’s science in school curricula risks an empty form of pluralism implicated… in restorationist agendas to reassert Western cultural control. (p. 832)

In other words, there needs to be a constant vigilance and (re)evaluation of decolonizing goals and processes, as they are always in co-constitutive relation with (neo-)coloniality. As these discussions have primarily and almost exclusively focused on (a particular) epistemological grounds or locations (see Cobern & Loving, 2008; van Eijck & Roth, 2007), one problematic production is the lack of attention to ontology in science education.

On the topic of considering ontology within science education, Sammel (2009) states that “given the pervasiveness of assimilationism in Western science education” (p. 653), to only address the colonial episteme leaves the systemic strategies and structures that “push for assimilation of students into Western science ontology” (p. 653) to continue functioning implicitly (see also Carter, 2004, 2005). This is to say that to treat science education uniquely as a culture potentially masks the ways in which Culture’s Other (i.e., Nature) is implicated with/in these processes (see Barad, 2000, 2007; Latour, 1993). Again, this begets the question, What are the ways in which the absent presence of the metaphysics of modernity operate in science education? (e.g., representationalism, Nature/Culture binary; see Apffel-Marglin, 2011; Carter, 2004). While there is space for diverse ways-of-knowing through cultural critique, Sammel (2009) invites us to consider how science pedagogies and curriculums often work to make science accessible and responsive to all learners, but then differ and defer these goals by falling back on concepts-as-usual (e.g., scientific literacy) to achieve these goals: smuggling back in (neo-)colonial ways-of-knowing-in-being. Such a practice of deferred and differing science-education-as-usual positions diverse ways-of-knowing-nature that are not WMS as but different, and often lesser, ways to attain the same goal of knowing nature with/in the ontology of Western modernity (Carter, 2004, 2005; see also Latour, 1993).31 The underlying and problematic message is that ontology is a singular affair (Barad, 2007).32

Cartesianism, the classical Western ontological process through which meaning and matter are individuated through separation from that which co-constitutes them (e.g., mind/body, nature/culture; Apffel-Marglin, 2011; Barad, 2007; Cajete, 2006), often becomes the (only) ontology onto which diverse ways-of-knowing differentially map. This tends to differentially re-centre WMS as the metre stick against which all ways-of-knowing and ways-of-being are measured. When Cartesianism is the (only) ontology, it only makes sense that the epistemology of WMS that co-constitutes Cartesianism is best suited to work with/in this ontological configuration (see Cobern & Loving, 2008). However, to forget that it is an ontology rather than “ontology” (read: singular) when doing cross-cultural and comparative work is to position other-than-Western-modern ways-of-knowing at a taken-for-granted disadvantage, even when the intent is to make space for both positions that extends beyond inclusion and tolerance towards dialogue and collaboration. Accordingly, this also complicates the entangled relationships held with/in school science for those enacting other-than-Cartesian ways-of-being, such as Indigenous ways-of-knowing-in-being, as they continue to be perceived as alternative but lesser ways of “reflecting” Nature as it is understood and enacted through (the singularity of) Cartesianism (see Chapters 4–6).

When reaching and reading singularity, particularly singularities (e.g., Cartesianism) that impede the possibility of Indigenous science to-come, it is productive to consider Cajete’s (1994) deconstructive invitation: “Indigenous thinking honors the reality that there are always two sides to the two sides. There are realities and realities. Learning how they interact is real understanding” (p. 31). (Re)opening and re(con)figuring science education to be able to respond to and receive Indigenous science to-come might entail considering co-constitutive relations between what seems separate and separable quantities marked (wholly) by relations of difference (e.g., Nature/Culture as nature-culture, decolonizing/colonizing as de/colonizing, possibility/impossibility as im/possibility).

In the next section, I detail the methodological approach to decolonizing science education and research that guides process of reopening the ability to respond in science education: deconstruction.

Second Orientation: (Re)Opening Science Education to Indigenous Science to-Come Through Deconstruction and Reconstruction

Deconstruction has been developed by the French philosopher Jacques Derrida and, very broadly, involves a critique of Western knowledge or thought. Derrida … showed how anthropological knowledge is governed by a philosophical category of the center (named Eurocentrism). The argument contends that in the last few hundred years Europe has constituted and consolidated itself as sovereign and subject by constructing the colonized according to the terms of the colonizer’s self-image. Deconstruction is the decentralization and decolonization of European thought… Hence, deconstruction is a deconstruction of the concept, the authority, and the assumed primacy of the category of “the West.” (McKinley & Aikenhead, 2005, p. 902)

Methodologically, this book works towards the “the decentralization and decolonization of European thought” (McKinley & Aikenhead, 2005, p. 902) through deconstruction as an over-arching meta-approach to work towards Indigenous science to-come. This is in line with Battiste’s (2013a, b)33 and Donald’s (2012)34 conception of decolonizing education as a “recursive process of deconstructing and then reconstructing” (Donald, 2012, p. 547). Simultaneously, I heed the warnings of post-colonial theorists and theory that the potentiality of deconstruction and reconstruction lay in recognizing them as more-than deconstruction and reconstruction as forms of taking apart and putting together (see Derrida, 1976; Jackson & Mazzei, 2012; McKinley & Aikenhead, 2005). Taking apart (i.e., destruction) through criticism, as McKinley and Stewart (2012) suggest, is a “seemingly potent but ultimately counter-productive strategy” (p. 545) in science education. Rather, Battiste (2013b) argues that approaches to decolonizing education “first and foremost must be framed within concepts of dialogue, respect for educational pluralities, multiplicities, and diversities” (p. 107). However, when criticism is perceived and enacted as taking apart, colonial logics are replaced in but one sense of the word: displaced but not always disrupted (see Kuokkanen, 2007; Spivak, 1994; see Chapters 2 and 3). Deconstruction works against not only the Euro-centred through Eurocentrism, but also the centering properties of Eurocentrism through endeavouring to dismantle its logics of either/or. In turn, as post-colonial theory presents Indigenous science to-come as a persistent ethical im/possibility, this book tilts more heavily on the deconstructive side, (re)considering reconstruction as inseparable from deconstruction and as a form re(con)figuring (see Carter, 2005). As structure in science education is not (fully) reached and, simultaneously, will never achieve a state of being “deconstructed”, re(con)figuring is a continued deconstruction, labouring between what a structure is, is not, and could be(come) in response to an otherness who is yet-to-come (e.g., Indigenous science to-come).

Common Approaches to Cross-Cultural Methodologies in Science Education. Prior to tracing how deconstruction as methodological approach creates space for and supports wandering the pathways of science education anew, it is important to touch on the ways in which these problematic paths are usually journeyed upon. Just as teaching and learning in science education are increasingly considered through (socio-)cultural approaches (see Aikenhead, 2006a; Erickson, 2000), so too are its cross-cultural methodologies. As McKinley (2007) states regarding approaches to cross-cultural science education,

Dominating the field are approaches derived from anthropology, such as worldviews, collateral learning, and border crossing. The anthropological approach is a seductive one because it focuses on the culture and cultural practices of different groups and treats science as a cultural activity. (p. 220)

However, at the same time, “science educators are seldom also trained in associated disciplines, such as cultural studies” (McKinley & Stewart, 2012, p. 545). In turn, as McKinley (2001, 2007) and Carter (2004, 2005, 2010) state, culture comes to be perceived and enacted in ways that often come to reify colonial constructs that they are working against, albeit differently. For example, considering school science as having a culture does not necessarily “critique the Eurocentrism inherent in stable and unitary ideas of culture, identity, and context still to be found in some of science education’s more traditional comparative and cross-cultural studies” (Carter, 2004, p. 824). Modes such as worldview theory and border crossing might be apt for considering the experience of a student navigating between cultural spaces, but might not account for the power relations in place between these knowledge systems which occurs beyond the individual learner which produce the very borders they must cross (Carter, 2004; McKinley, 2007). However, this is not to state that culture should be jettisoned (thus reinforcing a status quo of science as acultural; see Kirby, 2011). Rather, as culture offers both methodological possibility and problematic (see Carter, 2010), it is important to use and trouble this central referent to cross-cultural and multicultural science education. Deconstruction, states McKinley and Aikenhead (2005), provides such means to use and trouble culture within decolonizing and post-colonial science education methodologies as it accounts for both process and product of Eurocentrism and Cartesianism.35

Deconstruction of/in Cross-cultural Science Education. Within this book, I take a deconstructive stance that might best be described as an “impossible ‘no’ to a structure which one critiques, yet inhabits intimately” (Spivak, 1993/2009, p. 316). Critically inhabiting science education entails refusing to inhabit it like that without refusing to inhabit it altogether: deconstruction is at once critical and complicit (see Chapter 3). In offering a succinct “how-to” for deconstruction,36 Spivak (1976) suggests:

Deconstruction in a nutshell…[is] to locate the promising marginal text, to disclose the undecidable moment, to pry it loose with the positive lever of the signifier; to reverse the resident hierarchy, only to displace it; to dismantle in order to reconstitute what is always already inscribed. (Spivak, 1976, p. lxxvii)

Spivak (1976) describes the process of bearing witness to undecidability as being on the lookout for snags in meaning when it stops working as intended, in which the absence of unified meaning might come to threaten the very structure which it occupies. In short, this entails paying attention to, and making use of, concepts and categories whose meanings vacillate between a meaning and a constitutive otherness; intentionally (mis)reading them by tinkering with meanings otherwise unintended but potentially signalled by that which is there (see Biesta, 2009; Derrida, 1976; Spivak, 1976; St. Pierre, 2011). Echoing Spivak (1976), McKinley and Aikenhead (2005) state of deconstruction in decolonizing science education that:

…the key to deconstruction is not the identification of the dichotomy and the inversion, (although that work is necessary and we do not wish to underestimate it), but the displacement of such thinking. In other words, how does one re-think these fundamental ideas? How does one displace those assumptions that make “natural” meaning possible? Furthermore, can deconstruction as a critique lift itself off the page to have any practical application? (p. 903, emphasis in original)

Importantly, McKinley and Aikenhead (2005) remind that deconstruction should not strictly be theory for theory’s sake. Rather, as Lather (2007) states, it is important to “[put] theory to work” by using theory (e.g., deconstruction) towards and without losing sight of the critical goals that one sets out to achieve (e.g., decolonizing).37 Deconstruction must be always already be deconstructing the theory/practice that keep the two separate and separable (e.g., producing practice as “atheoretical”, and theory as a practice of “armchair philosophy”): “the production of theory is also a practice; the opposition between ‘pure’ theory and concrete ‘applied’ practice is too quick and easy” (Spivak, 1988a, p. 275).

There are three inseparable binary relations that feature strongly within this book: Self/Other, Nature/Culture, and ethical possibility/impossibility.

Deconstructing Self/Other. Given that cultural (re)constructions of Otherness continue to be problematic within science education such that they (re)centre colonial logics and subjects, a prevalent (but not unproblematic) solution is often to reverse the gaze onto the Self (i.e., the (neo-)colonial subject) of colonizing relationships (see Pillow, 2003). As Tuck (2009) articulates, researchers do not need, nor should they use the suffering of Indigenous, diasporic, and other post-colonial students as evidence of colonial violence and as ethical motivation for research. Above and beyond providing positive representations of these students, there is always the possibility to look back at the culture of power that produces this violence. However, to (too simply) displace the gaze by reversing the hierarchy does not always disrupt it (particularly if the gaze continues to operate similarly, albeit with a different target). Here, Lather (2007) suggests a double(d) reversal of the ethnographic gaze. Such a double(d) reversal entails both the literal reversal of studying those who do the studying (i.e., in order to reverse the direction of the ethnographic gaze), as well as the study of the ways in which those who do the studying study (i.e., in order to reverse the way in which the ethnographic gaze is produced). Such deconstructive Self-reflexivity might allow for the possibility of thinking without the thing with which you think (when the thing with which you think is part of the problem), producing the possibility for alternate ways of being and becoming science educator and researcher.

For example, inverting the production of the gaze also entails resisting a simple displacement of colonial violence and, further, houses the potential to disrupt it. I recognize there is something important in extending a genuine invitation a relationship-to-come, even if its potentiality is not enacted (see also Kuokkanen, 2007). Herein, I work to not negate the work science educators who might disagree with the very premise of this book. Rather, I extend an invitation to dialogue across difference towards them.

Further, in considering the Self/Other binary, I recognize that it is important to move “the postcolonial critique of Eurocentrism beyond identity politics, to the level of an epistemic challenge to science” (McKinley & Stewart, 2012, p. 551). Spivak (1993/2009) states that to reduce scholarship to identity politics can be a way which the workings of power are (re)produced:

I have long held that in the arena of decolonization proper, the call to a complete boycott of so-called Western male theories is class-interested and dangerous. For me, the agenda has been to stake out the theories’ limits, constructively to use them. (p. x)

In other words, deconstructing the colonial Self/Other binary does not preclude any one identity from participating in the workings of power, even if the circulation of power is uneven and unequal across different identity positions (see also Spivak, 1988a). Furthermore, as Spivak (1994) states,

It seems more responsible that, instead of falling back on the deceptive simplicity of a proposition [(e.g., “a complete boycott of Western male theories”)] and taking that as sufficient fulfillment of … philosophical responsibility, … [we could] philosophize with all stops pulled out, without denegating [our] complicity, to present [such proposition] as pharmakon, what could have been medicine turned into poison. (Spivak, 1994, p. 34)

To strictly operate from an identity politics position in which “Western male theorists” (such as myself) are excluded runs the risk of stating that those excluded are “inherently” Eurocentric (i.e., being) rather than shaped with/in Eurocentrism (i.e., becoming). This risks foreclosing the space of possibility to not be Eurocentric like that (and invariably, leaving particular individuals “off the hook”; see Kuokkanen, 2007).

In turn, the theory-practices that I employ throughout this book are selected (but not “validated” as non-Eurocentric or unproblematic) for their ability to displace and disrupt the metaphysics of modernity and (re)open science education towards disrupting and displacing the Self/Other binary as it prevents Indigenous science to-come (e.g., Carter, 2004; McKinley & Aikenhead, 2005). Significantly, science’s and science education’s Self constructs Nature as it’s Other as well.

Deconstructing Nature/Culture. As Spivak (1993/2009) states, “if the lines of making sense of something are laid down in a certain way, then you are able to only do things with that something which are possible within and by the arrangement of those lines” (p. 34). Science education often dialectically subsumes, sublates, and sutures over many of the pluralities, multiplicities, and diversities called for in decolonizing and post-colonial science education. As detailed in previous (sub)sections, these enactments are achieved through an implicit and often taken-for-granted centering of Cartesianism,38 while simultaneously working to erase other ontologies and Cartesianism’s own workings by presenting itself as the (only) ontology. Recall that Cartesianism is an ontological enactment through which the Nature/Culture binary is (re)produced and producible.

I endeavour to work within and against this problematic structure that (re)constitutes science education; labouring within and against the clôture of metaphysics that is (and is always becoming) singular, stable, and subsuming (see Chapter 5 for a fulsome exploration of this).

Deconstructing possibility/impossibility. To reiterate, deconstruction and reconstruction are not deconstruction and reconstruction (see Jackson & Mazzei, 2012); this process is not destroying and then rebuilding. Deconstruction and reconstruction invariably share a relation of co-constitution (see Chapter 7). As Spivak (1994) outlines, the very possibility of reconstruction as ethical response to a call of otherness such as Indigenous science to come is premised on responsibility. In turn, ethical responsibility is inevitably premised upon the ability to respond:

It is that all action is undertaken in response to a call (or something that seems to us to resemble a call) that cannot be grasped as such. Response here involves not only “respond to,” as in “give an answer to,” but also the related situations of “answering to,” as in being responsible for a name (this brings up the question of the relationship between being responsible for/to ourselves and for/to others); of being answerable for … It is also, when it is possible for the other to be face-to-face, the task and lesson of attending to her response so that it can draw forth one’s own. (Spivak, 1994, p. 22)

In its multiplicity, responsibility for Spivak calls upon the ability to respond in the moment, to take responsibility for the (inevitable) inability to respond, and to continuously be responsible towards the very (im)possibility of responding to the other whose experiences, ways-of-knowing, and ways-of-being sit outside of the register of what we can know. The ability to respond is always, at best, partial as the Other to whom response is granted is, as Spivak (1988a) reminds, “irretrievably heterogeneous” (p. 284) and hence “non-narrativisable” (p. 284): that which is to-come can never (fully) be known as it is always already within the co-constitutive exteriority of that which can be known and responded to.

However, working with purpose but without guarantee is par for the course when it comes to deconstruction: “the philosophy of [deconstruction] cannot be used to ward off accountability, answerability, responsibility … It can only ever be a reminder of its open-ended and irreducible risk” (Spivak, 1994, p. 27). While working towards reconstructing science education with Indigenous peoples, places, and protocols in mind, I remain hyper-vigilant: the very frames through which recognition of Indigenous science to-come occurs are differential articulations of that which makes it such that this call “cannot be grasped as such” (Spivak, 1994, p. 22). It follows that the reconstruction herein focuses largely on the ability to respond on a continued deconstruction and (re)opening of the space of response within science education towards Indigenous ways-of-knowing-in-being.

Conclusion: Towards a Metaphysics of Response-Ability in Science Education

Responsibility implies response-ability, but responsibility of [science education] must also go beyond innocence. … innocence takes a special form of choosing not to know in order to exercise patterns of systemic privilege. (Kuokkanen, 2007, p. 154)

Returning to the question of where do we begin?, it is important to take head of the ways in which Leroy Little Bear (2016) signalled in his talk, Blackfoot Metaphysics is Waiting in the Wings, that there is no metaphysics that exists outside of its relationship to others. This is to repeat and reiterate that Western modern science and Indigenous ways-of-knowing-in-being are always already in relation. The task at hand is not to begin a new relation but rather to engage the relation anew. Specifically, it is significant to not only attend to but also be answerable to the the troubled and troubling relationship between Indigenous and Western ways-of-knowing-in-being which contribute to the ways in which Indigenous peoples, practices are rendered absent presences within science education, or how Indigenous metaphysics continues to “wait in the wings”. Importantly, this work includes accounting for and being accountable to the ways in which science education has been masking power with innocence, such as decontextualized (e.g., ahistorical, acultural) accounts of difference that make it such that Indigeneity comes to be presented as a dichotomously deficient otherness.

While the question is no longer, if it ever was, whether or not science education has a responsibility, the question of (how) is science education is able to respond? lingers and persists. Science education has made great strides in the past few decades in treating science and science education, respectively, as cultural practices which could ethnographically be investigated: revealing the ways in which these spaces continue to (re)centre Western ways-of-knowing and erasing others in the process. However, if we take seriously the double(d) task of unsettling science education as the simultaneous processes of decolonizing and deconstructing, it becomes important to recognize the sedimented notions which uphold settler-colonial logics and structures, even when these “settled” beliefs are leveraged towards critical aims as they shape both ability and inability to respond to Indigenous science to-come. For example, the Cartesian belief, and colonial import, that Culture as dichotomously opposed to Nature comes to partially reproduce the colonial structures worked against. It is for this reason that I have stated elsewhere that, within spaces of science education, “it might be time to begin thinking of decolonization as de/colonization” (Higgins, 2014, p. 265) by taking seriously the ways in which (neo-)colonial logics unavoidably come to shape even the ways in which they are responded within our theories, concepts, and practices.

It is not enough to take responsibility for the ways in which science education dialectically negates Indigenous science to-come unless such action engages with the “difficult and contradictory nature of de/colonization” (Subreenduth, 2006, p. 628). Moving towards a more responsible science education also engages in “an iterative (re)opening up to, an enabling of responsiveness” (Barad, 2010, p. 265) by attending to the ways in which the ability to respond is always already shaped by (neo-)colonial logics. Recognizing that some nodes are more pressing and productive than others, this work of response-ability (see Chapter 2) entails attending to the absent presences of science education which complicate and complexify the ability to respond: What cultural practices are masked when science is presented as or functions as acultural (see Chapter 3)? What theories inhabit scientific practice when they are treated as atheoretical (see Chapter 4)? What metaphysical commitments are rendered invisible when science is defined in opposition to the metaphysical (see Chapter 5)? What shared histories (and futures yet-to-come) haunt science education when the relation between Indigenous and Western ways-of-knowing-in-being are presented as but a new one (see Chapter 6)?

Notes

  1. 1.

    Within this chapter, such there-thens entangled with the here-now might notably include the following SpaceTime coordinates: Calgary, Canada 2016 [Leroy Little Bear’s Big Thinking Address at the Canadian Congress of the Social Sciences and Humanities]; Kalamazoo, US 1992 [first “Science Dialogues”]; diffracted through Stony Nakoda Nation (west of Calgary), Canada 1989 [Native science conference, Little Bear meets Peat and makes arrangements to meet David Bohm]; Albuquerque, US 1999 [Science dialogues continue where original funds from Fetzer institute ran out]; Ottawa, Canada 1994 [David Peat writes the introduction to the first edition of Blackfoot Physics]; Thunder Bay, Canada 2008 [I read Blackfoot Physics for the first time]; Iqaluit, Canada 2009 [I am delivering my first cross-cultural science education research project]; Edmonton, Canada, 2019 [where/when I am (re)writing this introduction].

  2. 2.

    I use the expression ways-of-knowing-in-being throughout this book for three reasons. First, it is a nod to the notion that knowing and learning are always already processes. As Aikenhead and Elliot (2010) suggest, “the expression Indigenous knowledge is problematic because the word knowledge is embedded in a Eurocentric epistemology” (p. 322, emphasis in original; see also Aikenhead & Ogawa, 2007). Rather, within many Indigenous languages, knowing and learning are not expressed as a product (i.e., knowledge, a noun) but rather as a process (i.e., coming-to-knowing, a verb): as Peat (2002) states, “coming-to-knowing means entering into relationship with the spirit of knowledge, with plants and animals, with beings that animate dreams and visions, and with the spirit of the people” (p. 65). Second, coming-to-know is inseparable from coming-to-being. They are ongoing and interconnected epistemological and ontological processes that are deeply relational and holistically interwoven into the fabric of everyday life (Aikenhead & Michell, 2011; Bang & Marin, 2015; Cajete, 1994, 2000, 2015). Lastly, it is to signal plurality with a reminder that plurality does not entail a form of relativism (McKinley, 2007).

    Furthermore, as Aikenhead and Michell (2011) state, “reading a book is not adequate for understanding specific Indigenous practices (e.g., berry picking or fishing), which invariably require experiential learning” (p. xii). Rather than seeking to reach the problematic closure and containment of knowledge, they propose that appreciating might be a more apt way of approaching Indigenous ways-of-knowing-in-being (while not in itself unproblematic, even if strategic; see Kuokkanen, 2007). Not only this, as Cajete (1994) suggests of the textuality of his own work on Indigenous ways-of-knowing-in-being, that writing for an academic audience shapes what can be said, what cannot, as well as how. In other words, translation with/in, as well as for, academic traditions differentially produces how Indigenous ways-of-knowing-in-being are (re)presented. This differential ecology of relations (partially shaped by the vales of the academy) matters.

  3. 3.

    Importantly, Other is used throughout the book not as a statement of being (e.g., identity), but as a process of othering which says more about the colonial Self from which this representation is projected: “the process of containing the ‘other’ for colonial, imperial purposes…; it involves domesticating an incommensurable and discontinuous ‘other’ in order to consolidate the imperialist self” (Kuokkanen, 2007, p. 101).

  4. 4.

    The addressee to whom the account of this work is given to is of no small significance, both in terms of what can and cannot be enunciated, as well as its possible possibilities and problematics. As Butler (2005) states,

    There can be no account of myself that does not, to some extent conform to the norms that govern the humanly recognizable, or that negotiate these terms in some ways, with various risks following from that negotiation. … No account takes place outside the structure of address, even if the addressee remains implicit and unnamed, anonymous and unspecified. The address establishes the account as an account. (p. 36)

    Whereas I generally address my work to others already and actively engaged in processes of decolonizing education, the intended addressee in this work is, more generally, those situated in the field of science education whose consideration of decolonization and/or post-coloniality is to-come (as an unactualized potentiality and a tout-autre [wholly other] whose voice has gone unheard because it cannot yet be heard; see Spivak, 1993/2009). This entails that, as a means of (ethically) accounting for and being accountable to this implicit addressee, I often draw from epistemic resources that may be intelligible as such (e.g., canonical science education literature and well-recognizable scholars) in my efforts to work at the limits of intelligibility (i.e., to (re)open science education to the possibility of Indigenous science to-come).

    However, as Butler (2005) states, the productive necessity of giving an account over to an addressee is not without risk. Here, the most significant risks posed by this are that, first, there risks a too-easy and representational (ist) reading which produces a perception that Indigenous science wholly yet-to-come (see next footnote) or that this is a space that has not been and continues to be laboured by Indigenous and ally scholars. Secondly, working within this space of un/intelligibility nonetheless defers and differs intended meanings of Indigenous science; but how does one articulate the unarticulable within the frames that render them such (see Ahenakew, 2016; Higgins & Kim, 2019; McKinley & Stewart, 2012)? For example, an Indigenous “sense of place” (Cajete, 1994) and other lived concepts are differentially articulable and intelligible when accounting for and being accountable to this double(d) relation to science education and Indigenous science.

  5. 5.

    Interestingly, the common sense and taken-for-granted assumption that metaphysics is in a singular sense is so prevalent that even auto-correct suggests that metaphysics as plural is a grammatical error (see Chapter 5).

  6. 6.

    These dialogues began in 1992 (see Little Bear, 1994; Parry, 2008; Peat, 2002, 2007) but have seemingly ceased in the last few years.

  7. 7.

    The first edition, entitled Lighting the Seventh Fire, drew from and was released two years following the 1992 Science Dialogues.

  8. 8.

    Importantly, throughout the book I use the Indigenous science to not only signal the ways in which Indigenous peoples have practiced ways-of-living-with-Nature since time immemorial, but also the ways in which Indigenous peoples critically and creatively engage with science, such as the emergent field of Indigenous Science, Technology, and Society studies (STS)(e.g., TallBear, 2013). This is significant as:

    Indigenous knowledge includes knowledge of imperialism from the West, the East or even from the neighbours, deep knowledge of colonizers and the practices and effects of colonization, of different religions that were imposed, of nation states formed by different conceptions of a state, western democratic, socialist or communist, and of the institutions of the state. (Smith et al. 2016, p. 136)

    Where colonial logics attempt to perpetually relegate Indigeneity and what it has to offer as fixed, particular, and a “tradition”: it is important to attend to the ways in which Indigenous peoples continue to engage with the natural world as well as with science as conventionally defined.

  9. 9.

    There are also many already present spaces that have been masked through their dialectic negation. Here are but three examples that I am familiar with. First, a more situated naming of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs might be Maslow’s (mis)interpretation of a hierarchy of Blackfoot needs from his time spent with the Blackfoot when he was “stuck” on his working developmental theory (Blackstock, 2011). Secondly, aspirin is the synthetic simile of a willow-bark-based traditional medicine that was “discovered” by the Bayer pharmaceutical company (Snively & Corsiglia, 2001). Third, as Cajete (2000) states, Native Americans had a central role in “establishing uses for asphalt and other petroleum products” (p. 190) such as petroleum jelly as a salve for treating burns and open wounds and asphalt as a waterproofing material.

  10. 10.

    Spivak (1999) suggests that sanctioned ignorance is not only a practice of strategically not knowing other(ed) ways-of-knowing and -being, but also a collective forgetting of oppressive structures and practices that are (re)produced by dominant groups: “the mainstream has never run clean… part of mainstream education involves learning to ignore this absolutely, with a sanctioned ignorance” (p. 2).

    Importantly, such as stance is well documented in spaces of Indigenous education. Notably, Potawatomi-Lenapé scholar Susan Dion (2007) refers to it as the “perfect stranger,” a stance simultaneously marked by an avoidance of taking up colonial complicities and claiming to know little to nothing about Indigenous peoples, places, and practices (see also Higgins, Madden, & Korteweg, 2015).

  11. 11.

    This can be stated not only for the substantive content, but also in relation to the ways in which the medium is the message (see Cajete, 2015; Higgins & Madden, 2018): specifically, Peat’s (2002) book is an early text written for an audience that might not even consider the existence of Indigenous ways-of-living-with-Nature. However, as Kuokkanen (2007) states, inviting an audience towards an appreciative stance is not without consequence:

    Developping an understanding and appreciation for the “other” is not only an inadequate response, but also an irresponsible one. It reflects a specific type of racism that enables the dominant to occupy the position of universality while consigning the “other” to a partial and particular one. Through distancing, the dominant takes the position of privilege and is able to disassociate itself from any active commitment to a relationship, to reciprocation. (p. 109)

    Importantly, the distancing produced through such a stance removes readers in positions of power from being implicated: presenting them with only the lovely knowledge of such an inquiry and sparing them from the difficult knowledge (e.g., inheriting colonial legacies).

  12. 12.

    Directly related to the notion of making a different future occur in the context of colonial institutions is the concept of futurity. As Patel (2016) describes it,

    Futurity is the imprint, the scent, the murmur of what is in the future. In that sense, it is actually unknowable in the immediate, as its discrete details are not available through current lenses. You can’t map futurity; you can only map possible futurities. Learning, similarly, is an act of letting go of what one knows for what one does not yet know…. As long as coloniality has been in existence, so has learning, and it’s important to remember that not only has learning predated and will survive coloniality, but that it has existed despite, because of, and in defiance of coloniality. (p. 95)

  13. 13.

    This is not to state that Indigenous science is flatly yet-to-come as it is a practice of living with Nature that Indigenous peoples have been enacting with/in place since time immemorial (see Cajete, 1994, 2000; Kawagley, 2006). Rather, it is to state that it is still (partially) “waiting in the wings” of science education (see McKinley, 2007; McKinley & Stewart, 2012).

  14. 14.

    This distinction bears significance both to the ways in which Indigenous science is othered within science education, but also the role of metaphysics. Analogously to science education, which simultaneously strives to be for all students but always already fails in the effort, Derrida (1994/2006) suggests that democracies are (by definition) shaped by “the gap between fact and ideal” (p. 80) which is marked by “failure, inadequation, disjunction, disadjustment, being ‘out of joint’”) (p. 81). Stating that this is not only the case for older forms of government, but also contemporary ones, Derrida (1994/2006) offers that the promise of democracy is always deferred and differing from what can be done and even imagined in the present:

    … we always propose to speak of a democracy to come, not of a future democracy in the future present, not even of a regulating idea… – at least to the extent that their inaccessibility would still retain the temporal form of a future present, of a future modality of the living present. (p. 81, emphasis in original)

    This is to state that, for Derrida, the call to democracy cannot be fully heeded within a present moment, or even a future present which problematically displaces a current imaginary elsewhen. To-come signals a not yet which must be worked towards, which must be received hospitably, but whose arrival cannot be anticipated. This is perhaps even more so the case in science education where the very process of becoming scientific is framed in opposition to Indigenous ways-of-knowing-in-being, rather than strictly a failure to achieve an ideal (e.g., science education for all). It is perhaps for this reason that Plains Cree scholar Cash Ahenakew (2017) states, “the work of decolonization is not about what we do not imagine, but what we cannot imagine from our Western ways of knowing” (p. 88): Indigenous science is to-come within the context of science education.

  15. 15.

    Practice, as enacted and discussed herein, is not strictly understood in the conventional sense (e.g., institutional teaching and learning). Rather, the practice prominently articulated and employed herein is that of decolonizing and post-colonial science education scholarship-as-practice. This is in line with decolonizing and post-colonial science education scholars who articulate that theory too is a practice (Carter, 2005; McKinley & Aikenhead, 2005), as well as recent calls in science education there is too much focus on empiricism (and in turn too much data) and not enough scholarship-as-practice (see Carter, 2010). Furthermore, it is also in line with conceptions of decolonizing and educational research which advocate for attentiveness to the practices one is already engaged in, as well as the norms through which attention is deferred elsewhere and differed: paying attention to the process without relegating its justification to the product (see Higgins & Kim, 2019; Smith et al., 2016).

  16. 16.

    One of the reasons for this, as Tuck and Yang (2012) offer, is that “decolonization in a settler context is fraught because empire, settlement, and internal colony have no spatial separation” (Tuck & Yang, 2012, p. 7); coloniality is always a proximal relation in settler contexts.

  17. 17.

    Potential is significant to highlight here. As Aikenhead (2006a) points out, “students and many teachers react to being placed in the political position of having to play school games” (p. 28). In turn, they often creatively subvert this positioning by playing what is called “Fatima’s game” in science education “to make it appear as if significant science learning has occurred even though it has not” (p. 28).

    Importantly, it is worth noting the larger, beyond-school context in which these logics plays out. Notably as there are, most significantly, ongoing practices in which Indigenous peoples continue to be the object of science (see TallBear, 2013).

  18. 18.

    See Aikenhead and Elliot (2010) for the various qualitative and quantitative science education studies that come to inform this figure.

  19. 19.

    In short, Eurocentrism is a discursive force which (re)centres Western modern(ist) culture, people, places, and histories as the normative standard against which other ways-of-knowing are judged, usually as lesser and deficient (see Battiste, 2005, 2013b). It is not only the “colonizer’s model of the world” (Blaut, 1993, p. 10), but also a colonizing model of the world. Operating through diffusionism, a forced spread of culture, it erases or assimilates non-Eurocentric knowledge systems establishing “the dominant group’s knowledge, experience, culture and knowledge as the universal norm” (Battiste, 2005, p. 124).

  20. 20.

    I use “post-colonial student” here as a general category and concept to include other-than-Indigenous and other-than-diasporic students who might also might be negatively impacted by ongoing (neo-)colonialism and/or who are implicated and involved in the productive friction signalled by the “post” (i.e., an ever partial but nonetheless productive attempt to move beyond (neo-)coloniality).

  21. 21.

    For example, as Arapaho scholar Michael Marker (2019) signals, without wanting to diminish the efforts of individual Indigenous students, the desire to tell stories of Indigenous successes of participating within science can also mask not only the stories of those who have not successfully negotiated and navigated the space, but also can take attention away from the systems and structures which make such a journey a difficult one to begin with. As Ahenakew (2017) states, this can often be read as “a move to distract from more unsettling Indigenous demands for decolonization” (p. 85).

  22. 22.

    Here, inheritance comes to bear in a meaningful way: if we take Indigenous (e.g., Cajete, 1994) and quantum (e.g., Barad, 2007) metaphysics seriously, our pasts continue to present themselves even if they are but absent presences (see also Derrida, 1994/2006). This bears relevance as the debate is left unresolved (despite the occasional claim of resolution); it continues to haunt what science education is and can be in the present and into the future.

  23. 23.

    Decolonizing, Indigenous, and post-colonial scholarship share many similar facets. However, as McKinley (2007) states,

    Postcolonialism is controversial among many groups… For many [I]ndigenous researchers [and allies] the term signals that the European imperial project, and the appropriation of the ‘Other’ as a form of knowledge, has been assigned to an historical past… This understanding is always present in postcolonialism… [However,] postcolonialism can be used to mean “beyond;” instead of arguing lineal progression of before and after a point in history, another dimension is added with this alternative meaning… “beyond” suggests that boundaries or borders have become blurred. (p. 201, emphasis in original)

    Most famously, Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s (1999/2012) rejection of post-colonialism (as and through its first meaning of “after” colonization) is most cited today, even if she has since revisited and revised her earlier statement to consider the second interpretation to be deeply productive in practice:

    the idea that postcolonialism is more than what I have previously viewed with scepticism as a not very good historical moment because it does not really exist, there is no post to colonialism; more than a methodology one can deploy to study difference, it is, rather, an emergent, growing body of knowledge; there is a knowingness that a postcolonial research disposition can reach, can see, can seek, can come to know. (Smith, 2005, p. 552)

  24. 24.

    With respect to coloniality, neo-coloniality, and their relationship, Spivak (1999) states the following:

    Let us learn to discriminate the terms colonialism – in the European formation stretching from the mid-eighteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries – neocolonialism – dominant economic, political, and culturalist maneuvers emerging in our century after the uneven dissolution of the territorial empires – and postcolonialism – the contemporary global condition, since the first term is supposed to have passed or be passing into the second. (p. 172, emphasis in original)

    By highlighting that the contemporary global post-colonial condition is supposed to have passed from colonialism to neo-colonialism, Spivak brings attention to the ways in which coloniality and neo-coloniality are bound by a relationship of constitutive exclusion. In other words, even though they are often framed as historically distinct (i.e., past and present), the ongoing project of territorial imperialism (colonialism) is never absent but always already present, even if it is increasingly tied to a project of economic imperialism (neo-colonialism). I signal this assumption through the use of the term (neo-)colonial throughout the book.

  25. 25.

    Battiste’s (2013a, b) framework is overarching. An implicit message throughout her scholarship is that the work of decolonizing education is multi-faceted, multi-sited, divergent, and pluralistic in nature. In turn, decolonizing education resists the notion that there is a way of doing it – that difference and diversity in positionalities, contexts, approaches, and inclinations are strengths rather than weaknesses. This is particularly significant (in general and within this book) as the metaphysics of modernity, as well as its Eurocentric and Cartesian modes are not uniform, but rather are differentially articulated across diverse locations.

  26. 26.

    For Spivak, education is a post-colonial site that discursively produces the very conditions of ethical im/possibility: education places teachers with (unlike) others while institutionally framing learning as knowing what is best for the other (see Andreotti, 2007, 2011; Spivak, 1993/2009).

  27. 27.

    Importantly, the post-colonial inflection on decolonizing that is de/colonizing similarly employs a two-prong process. As Rhee and Subreenduth (2006) unpack, de/colonizing approaches employ “two interrelated moves” (p. 547):

    First, projects of de/colonization need to reveal and disrupt the ways in which imperialism constructs the inferior Others within and beyond the West through complex apparatuses of oppression…. Second, [they] examine the process[es] by which societies and individuals interpret, negotiate, subvert and re-construct such knowledge/power to create performative possibilities for themselves. (p. 547)

  28. 28.

    In her ethnography of school-based science education, Deborah Pomeroy (1994) came to refer to the “standard account” curriculum of WMS as one of White Male Science.

  29. 29.

    Of course, “decolonizing school science begins at the stage of ‘acceptance’” (Aikenhead, 2006c, p. 393, emphasis in original): an acceptance of IWLN and that decolonizing school science is a goal that is worthwhile and important (see also Kuokkanen, 2007).

  30. 30.

    However, integration of Indigenous perspectives does not always entail or require “acceptance” (see Chapter 3). Furthermore, even an intent to accept Indigenous science is not necessarily unproblematic.

  31. 31.

    Latour (1993) refers to this as “particular universalism”: a framework in which Nature is stable and outside of Culture in which diverse cultural positionings mediate access to knowledge about Nature, but in which “one society - and it is always the Western one - defines the general framework of Nature with respect to which the others are situated” (p. 105). In other words, it is a conceived of and enacted as an epistemic privilege.

  32. 32.

    This is a significant location to labour as some scholars, such as Cobern and Loving (2008), problematically articulate the corollary argument that the epistemology of WMS (i.e., epistemic realism) should be considered the best way of knowing Nature of its high level of alignment with a Cartesian ontology (see Chapter 5).

  33. 33.

    While Battiste (2013a, b) does not come to state explicitly how she understands deconstruction or whom she draws upon, a persistent theme throughout this book is generous and generative (mis)readings. Rather than criticize what some might perceive as a lack (as negation forecloses possibility), such indeterminacy can be read as a gift of potentiality and of meaning that is productively on the move that might come to respond to diverse contexts (see Kuokkanen, 2007).

  34. 34.

    Donald’s (2012) use of deconstruction/reconstruction primarily hinges upon Indigenous-non-Indigenous relationships that are already being enacted. Here, deconstruction does not entail a destruction of the hybrid, complex, and contradictory space interfacing Indigenous and Western thought and being. Rather, it entails keeping an eye out for porous locations in order to reconfigure, rethink, and differently enact the relations that are there to create new and renewed possibilities for ethical relationality (see also Nakata, 2007a, 2007b). This metaphor is productive in differentially coming-to-understand the ways in which the post-colonial concept of de/colonizing is enacted throughout this book.

  35. 35.

    While still under-employed and -explored in science education, deconstruction provides the possibility of (re)openings in a multiplicity of seemingly stuck and sedimented locations by deferring and differing concepts which problematically present themselves as stable such as representation and self-identity (e.g., Gilbert, 2001; Gough & Price, 2009; Sammel, 2010).

  36. 36.

    However, the question What is deconstruction? is always fraught; it is an approach that works against the metaphysical stasis that comes with the word “is” (see Derrida, 1976). So much so, that Derrida (1976) takes up the complicity between is and and seriously: “in French, ‘is’ (est) and ‘and’ (et) ‘sound the same’” (Spivak, in Derrida, 1976, p. 30) but share a much more complex relationship of signification. Because the statement of this is that is never fully achieved or achievable due to that always already being an unfaithful reproduction of this, an is statement is always to a certain degree an and statement. This is to say that, for Derrida, Being (i.e., to be) or presence is always deferred.

    More importantly, as Spivak (1993/2009) suggests, Derrida “does not develop a systematic description of this mode of operation. (There is, after all, no useful definition of deconstruction anywhere in Derrida’s work)” (p. 31). Thus, any account of deconstruction must always be partial as deconstruction is always already on the move; the discontinuity that is deconstruction is in itself dis/continuous such that Derrida does not have the final word on deconstruction (see Barad, 2010; Kirby, 2011).

  37. 37.

    Importantly, deconstruction simultaneously is not, and should not become, theory for the sake of theory. As Derrida (1994/2006) offers about deconstruction, “what remains irreducible to any deconstruction, what remains as undeconstructible as the possibility itself of deconstruction is, perhaps, a certain experience of the emancipatory promise” (p. 74).

  38. 38.

    For example, at the time of writing, even auto-correct suggests that ontology is a singular affair (via grammatical suggestions; i.e., ontology rather than an ontology).