Immune system duality in regeneration: How colonial science repeats past failures by ignoring ecological and cellular symbiosis
Original framing: “The same immune cells play opposing roles in tissue regeneration's balancing act” — Phys.org
The study ignores Indigenous frameworks where regeneration is a *communal* process, not an internal 'balancing act.' For instance, the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) *Ganondagan* healing gardens demonstrate how plant-based medicines and ritual work with the immune system to regenerate tissue *and* restore social harmony—a holistic model absent from biomedical research. Even in modern contexts, Indigenous scientists like Dr. Lynn Teodoroz (Tlingit) have shown how salmon-based diets in Alaska Native communities modulate immune responses in ways that align with regenerative goals, yet such knowledge is excluded from lab-based studies. The omission reflects a broader erasure of Indigenous health sovereignty, where Western science claims universality while extracting knowledge without reciprocity.
The study’s framing of immune cells as 'opposing' in regeneration is not just a scientific oversight but a symptom of deeper systemic failures: the erasure of Indigenous knowledge, the repetition of historical reductionist mistakes, and the exclusion of marginalized voices that have long understood healing as a relational, not mechanical, process.
Western medicine’s insistence on dichotomies—good vs. bad, inflammation vs. regeneration—mirrors colonial patterns of control, where complexity is simplified to justify intervention. Yet, as trickster figures like Coyote remind us, what appears as opposition may simply be a reflection of our own limited perspective. The path forward lies in *restoring* the ecological and cultural contexts of regeneration—whether through Indigenous-led research, microbiome-integrated medicine, or artistic-spiritual labs—that treat the body not as a machine to fix but as a living system to understand. The real innovation will not come from 'balancing' cells but from *reimagining* what regeneration could be when we listen to the voices and knowledge systems that have been systematically silenced.