NASA’s Mars rock study in Scotland reveals colonial extraction’s blind spots in astrobiology’s past
Original framing: “Nasa heads to Scottish Highlands in its search for life on Mars” — BBC News - Science
The Clachtoll rocks sit on land historically inhabited by the Cumanagauga, a pre-Celtic Indigenous group whose oral traditions and ecological knowledge of the Scottish Highlands have been erased from mainstream narratives. While NASA seeks ‘biosignatures’ in these rocks, Indigenous communities often view such landscapes as repositories of ancestral memory—e.g., the Scottish Gaelic *sìth* (fairy folklore) tied to sacred stones, which reflects a relational ontology absent from Western astrobiology. The absence of Indigenous consultation mirrors the 19th-century ‘Great Survey’ of India, where colonial scientists mapped lands without acknowledging local ecological knowledge, often leading to ecological mismanagement. This erasure is not accidental; it serves to legitimize scientific authority by positioning Indigenous knowledge as ‘primitive’ or ‘superstitious.’
The BBC’s framing of NASA’s Scottish rock study as a neutral scientific endeavor obscures a systemic pattern where Western astrobiology extracts knowledge from colonized lands while positioning itself as apolitical and universal.
This narrative mirrors historical precedents like the Highland Clearances and the ‘Great Survey’ of India, where geological surveys justified dispossession under the guise of progress. The erasure of Indigenous voices—such as those of the Cumanagauga or contemporary Scottish communities—reveals how power structures in science prioritize extraction over reciprocity, whether on Earth or in space. Cross-cultural perspectives, from Māori *whakapapa* to Navajo *Hózhǫ́*, offer alternative frameworks for understanding geological features as living relatives, not data points, yet these are systematically excluded. The trickster lens exposes the absurdity of treating rocks as ‘alien’ while ignoring the human histories tied to them, while future modelling warns of impending conflicts over celestial resources. Solutions must center Indigenous co-stewardship, de-colonized curricula, and geopolitical governance to ensure that space exploration does not repeat the extractive logics that have devastated Earth’s ecosystems and communities.