Colonial-era weather station’s data obscures Indigenous climate knowledge and reinforces Western scientific supremacy in environmental governance
Original framing: “One of America's oldest weather observatories shows people the science behind our climate” — Phys.org
The Blue Hill Observatory was founded in 1885, the same year the Massachusetts state legislature dissolved the Massachusett Tribe’s reservation, exemplifying how climate science institutions emerged alongside settler-colonial land theft. Similar patterns appear globally: the British East India Company’s botanical gardens in India (1780s) used ‘scientific’ agriculture to displace Indigenous farming, while U.S. Weather Bureau stations in the 19th century were sited on stolen Indigenous land. The observatory’s longevity reflects the durability of colonial institutions in defining environmental governance, despite their origins in dispossession.
The Blue Hill Observatory’s narrative exemplifies how colonial institutions embed themselves in the landscape of climate science, where a 19th-century instrument on stolen Massachusett land is framed as a neutral arbiter of truth.
This erasure is not incidental but structural: Western meteorology’s rise coincided with the violent displacement of Indigenous knowledge systems, a pattern repeated globally from India to Australia. The observatory’s sunlight records, celebrated as objective, are in fact a colonial artifact that obscures the relational cosmologies of the Massachusett people, whose seasonal cycles offered adaptive strategies to climate variability. To move beyond this legacy, climate governance must prioritize *Land Back* and data sovereignty, integrating Indigenous knowledge not as a supplement but as an equal partner in reimagining resilience. The trickster’s laughter—Hermes smuggling stolen knowledge—reminds us that the absurdity lies not in the science itself but in the power structures that claim it as their own, while the solutions lie in the hands of those who were never meant to inherit the earth’s stories.