A colonized sky Medicine for the Resistance

Patty Krawec  so I just finished reading The Disordered Cosmos by Chanda Prescod-Weinstein so then when I came across Hilding, came across Hilding a few weeks ago about Indigenous stargazing. Mi’kmaq astronomer and tell us about yourself and about Indigenous stargazing.
Hilding Neilson 
Yeah, so I'm Hilding, I'm Mi’kmaq and settler from a group in Newfoundland. That's where my family's from the west coast of the island. Got my PhD at the University of Toronto in astrophysics, did some research back as a contract backdating astronomer, working in the Department of Astronomy, just next door to AW Peet. And I've been really interested in trying to bridge a lot of initiatives in astronomy that we don't really talk about that much, which is Indigenous knowledges. 
If I were to show you a textbook, you know, like a 500 page tome of astronomy knowledge from cosmology, the exoplanet, there'd be two pages on Indigenous knowledges. And we'd be sharing those two pages with Stonehenge, and New Grange in Ireland. And they'll be talking about perhaps the Mayan Astronomy, or maybe Hawai’ian navigators. And it will be spoken about as if we're past tense, as if Indigenous people don't exist. And then it will be like, “now on to the real science.” 
And, you know, a few years ago, I got to attend a national meeting of Canadian astronomers, and a Cree astronomer educator, Wilfer Buck, was presenting, and he gave a talk to the audience, discussing all these Cree stories, beautiful Cree stories. The Bear constellation with three dog constellation. And us seeing all this knowledge that we don't talk about in academic spaces. And I'm just sitting there wondering like, WTF is our knowledge? Where's Indigenous wisdom, Mi’kmaq knowledge? Where are the constellations? Why don't we talk about that? And so this sort of became of this giant rabbit hole that I've been going through trying to find different knowledges and Indigenous methodologies, and trying to create new space in academic astronomy for more Indigenous knowledges, though, granted, that mostly focused on the North American Carolinian peoples. There's just too much out there to try to do everything. 
And so hopefully now in the fall, we'll be launching our new course on Indigenous astronomy, that will be a senior level course talking of issues around colonization and astronomy, whether that's dealing with telescopes on Earth or going out to Mars, talking about knowledges, and then Indigenous methodologies. You know, how would an Indigenous, how would Indigenous peoples think about the concepts like the Drake Equation. Like we asked the question, how many advanced civilizations are there? And, noting that “advanced civilization” has its own problems with terminology, are there in our galaxy? And, you know, some dude named Frank Drake in the 1960s came up this whole way of kind of thinking about this through an equation. And all the assumptions presently require things like, what's intelligent life? How does life form? What is a civilization? And if we just step back and think back to, you know, how different Indigenous communities would think about these things and what does that mean? And there are ways of going through these kind of thought processes. One of the simple aspects of the Drake Equation is, you know, how long civilizations sort of last that can communicate. And Frank Drake, you know, was doing this during the Cold War. So, you know, the biggest fear was nuclear bombs. So he was suggesting maybe a century to 1000 years that's the length societies exist Now that we're in the era of climate change, probably, the same numbers apply. But, you know, I remember when seeing this meme a few years ago of “Canada- 150;  Mi’kmaq- 13,000.” 
Patty Krawec: Right. 
Hilding Neilson: So you know, if Western civilization’s got about a century, perhaps Indigenous civilizations have 10s of 1000s of years.
Hilding Neilson 
And you know, that's tens of thousands of