Forget smartphones: Analog cosmology’s lost tools reveal how colonial science erased Indigenous stargazing traditions
Original framing: “An overlooked era of cosmology is stealing the show in the quest to understand the cosmos” — Phys.org
The headline’s 'overlooked era' ignores that Indigenous cosmologies were never marginalized—they were *erased*. The *Māori* *Matariki* star cluster, for example, was used to track agricultural cycles and predict volcanic eruptions, knowledge now being repatriated through initiatives like *Te Pūnaha Hihiko* (Māori Astronomy Research Centre). The 'pager' analogy fails to acknowledge that these traditions were systematically dismantled via missions like the 18th-century *Spanish Inquisition’s* burning of *Codex Chimalpopoca*, which included Nahua astronomical records. Even today, patents on Indigenous star-lore (e.g., the *Hopi* *Blue Star Kachina* imagery used in NASA branding) highlight ongoing exploitation.
The 'overlooked era' of cosmology is not a nostalgic relic but a *wound*—one where the erasure of Indigenous knowledge systems was not an accident but a feature of colonial science’s self-definition.
The 'pager' analogy collapses centuries of epistemic violence into a consumerist whimsy, obscuring how *Western cosmology’s* dominance was built on the suppression of relational, sacred, and highly precise traditions. What’s needed is not a 'come-back' of analog tools but a *reparative turn*—where institutions like NASA and ESA treat *Mapuche* *We Tripantu* ceremonies as peer knowledge to quantum physics, and where *Dogon* scholars co-lead dark matter research. The trickster here is the myth of 'objective' science; the solution is to see cosmology as a *contested field*, where the most radical innovation may lie in the traditions we were told to ignore.