While reading The Disordered Cosmos, Chapter 12, which discusses the lessons we can learn from Mauna Kea observatories, particularly stood out to me. Prescod-Weinstein correctly identifies that Native Hawaiians were the ones who identified the significance of the mountains to cosmology, and she explains how this history isn't included under Eurocentric conceptions of science, despite its contributions to science. But completely including this indigenous knowledge under the umbrella of “science” is difficult as it is clouded by religion, which is (oftentimes) inherently unscientific. Prescod-Weinstein dismisses the perspective that the debate is a manifestation of the greater conflict between science and religion as a “polite way of saying ‘modern versus primitive; instead, she frames it through a colonialist lens. But you cannot ignore that the opposition to the project stems from claims of the site being “sacred”, a label based in indigenous religion, and this opposition prevents advancements for the common good of humanity (as Prescod-Weinstein points out, it is not necessarily true that these telescopes are solely for the public good, but this is moot: any use of the site would spark opposition, not just uses sparked by the militarism of the US government). In the same way that Western science is laid on a foundation of unscientific white supremacy masquerading as science (in turn laid on a foundation of Christianity), so too is indigenous science laid on a foundation of indigenous religion. This doesn't mean indigenous knowledge should be discarded from science; rather, it is this symmetry that demonstrates the illegitimacy of many concerns about attempting to include indigenous knowledge into our conceptions of science. Prescod-Weinstein argues that attempting to decolonize “piecemeal” is not truly decolonization, but I would argue that this is an assimilationist position, sacrificing our preferred value of science (which motivates us to gather indigenous perspectives in the first place) for the oppressive cultural significance of religion. We can separate the legitimate knowledge of indigenous peoples from their religions in the same way that we should attempt to do the same with Western "science". This is a shared problem, so indigenous knowledge both is and isn't science, in the same way that Western knowledge both is and isn't science.
I've always thought of science, physics specifically, as a sort of ultimate study beyond humans. After all, it aims to learn what is beyond us, to help us understand what sort of universe we fell into. This is the sort of stuff I became interested in during my “why” phase as a toddler. As I've gotten older, I've come to realize that science is not independent of humans. Science is not a set of findings mirroring the actual state of the universe. Science is a method, which works to observe and interpret, on top of other people's work. One problem is that if even one person decides to throw an inaccurate paper based on white-supremacist, patriarchal junk, the effects of other people not thoroughly checking and working off of said paper can grow rapidly. We had (and in many ways still do have) an entire society of people throwing junk into the scientific canon; their effects spread far and wide, and they can't just disappear. Think of the effects of the paper falsely linking MMR to autism, not only false but praying on societal ableism. Less obvious are the different ways of interpreting a set of observations. If certain people are kept out of science, whether by explicit or institutional discrimination, perspectives are lost. The link of wave-particle duality to the gender binary by Prescod-Weinstein is a perspective unique to queer people. How to continue from here is the fundamental question Prescod-Weinstein establishes at the beginning of, and what she focuses on, in Phase 4. Platitudes of “diversity” and “inclusion” are inadequate when combating an oppressive scientific library that we continue to work off on.