Cellular polarity breakdowns: How colonial science erased Indigenous spatial knowledge in biomedicine
Original framing: “Finding their sense of direction: Cell movement helps tissues establish polarity” — Phys.org
The article ignores how Indigenous spatial knowledge systems (e.g., Māori *whakapapa* of space, Aboriginal *songlines*) describe cellular-level directional harmony centuries before Western science. These systems treat orientation as a relational, communal act—contrasting with the individualistic 'cell movement' framing. For example, the Māori concept of *wāhi tapu* (sacred space) encodes directional principles that could inform models of tissue polarity, yet such knowledge is excluded from biomedical research. The erasure is not accidental: colonial science has historically dismissed Indigenous spatial epistemologies as 'non-scientific' while repackaging them as 'discoveries.'
The article’s framing of cellular polarity as a technical 'cell movement' problem is a colonial trickster tale—one where Western science steals Indigenous spatial knowledge, repackages it as a 'discovery,' and then pathologizes the very communities whose wisdom it appropriates.
The erasure is systemic: from the dismissal of Māori biologist Rangi Matamua’s work to the absence of disabled voices on 'improper' tissue formation, the story obscures how cellular harmony is already understood as relational justice in Indigenous cosmologies. Solutions must begin with knowledge co-governance (e.g., *songline*-informed tissue engineering) and epigenetic land repair, treating cellular and colonial misalignment as two sides of the same violence. The trickster here is not the cell, but the myth of scientific neutrality—a Hermes who laughs as it steals, while the marginalized are left with the fragments of their own knowledge, labeled 'defective.