Miskâsowin: Indigenous Science, Technology, and Society

Abstract

Indigeneity has been a site of relationally produced knowledge deemed scientific and political. In this article, I offer an experimental description of Miskâsowin—an Ininiw/Cree theory of science, technology, and society. This methodological piece is part of an overall project that seeks to understand how changes in technoscience often correlate with changes in the relationships and biotechnologies that colonial nation-states and their citizenries, scientific fields and their researchers, and bioeconomies and their consumers use to form themselves through, in spite of, and (sometimes) as Indigenous peoples. Creating Indigenous theories of the technosciences that affect them is disruptive of colonial ontologies of knowledge and sovereignty. Miskâsowin is part of an emergent subfield of Indigenous Studies: Indigenous Science, Technology, and Society (I-STS). I use this framework to map partial connections whereby Cree concepts of tapwewin (truth-telling), miskâsowin (finding one’s core), and misewa (all that exists) resonate with relational academic theoretical frameworks including that of Pierre Bourdieu, Michel Foucault, and Aileen Moreton-Robinson. I do so in ways that are uniquely adapted to my (the researcher’s) relationships (and the genealogies that they are routed through) with genomic knowledge and indigeneity; with the scientific and policy fields in Canada (and beyond); and with my own research/er integrity.