Despite their admiration of the Pueblos, early anthropologists more often bolstered the image of the vanishing Indian than challenged it. . . . Early observers were convinced that the cause of science and the immenent disappearance of tribal cultures justified their actions. . . . They sustain and foster the idea of Indians as a vanishing race by referring only to their past. We must question the assumption that change means the loss of something essential and find ways to discuss cultural differences without encasing them in value-ladened descriptions. Indigenous science begins with an apprehension of the Whole, only very carefully and on close inspection reaching tentative conclusions about any Specificity.
Indigenous science is based on a profound immersion in and awareness of the whole circumstance.
Rather than mistrusting personal experience, Indigenous science has learned to thrive on it. . . . The basis of learning, the basis of the pedagogy, is to cease preventing people from learning things for themselves. This way of thinking, what goes on in here, can really be taught from the inside out. When it's taught from the outside in, someone else comes between you and yourself, and that's not considered a wise idea. That's the tradition.