When
12:30 – 2 p.m., Sept. 9, 2026
Where
Come join us on various Wednesdays this Fall semester for the History Lunch Lecture Symposium. We will gather in Econimics 406A to learn more about our colleagues' scholarship. Additional details will be posted here a week before the event.
Open to the University community!
For those of you who are unable to attend in person, please use the following Zoom link: https://arizona.zoom.us/j/88290958670
"Indo-Pacific Teleconnections: How Indigenous Peoples Have Used the Pleiades and Marine Birds to Predict El Niño and La Niña—an Exemplar of First Science"
by Gregory T. Cushman (University of Arizona, Department of History)
Abstract: Traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) and the science of Native peoples are frequently portrayed as existing outside of history. This study uses a global, comparative, transdisciplinary framework to historicize the 3,000-year development of methods to predict the weather and climate used by Andean, Polynesian, and other Indo-Pacific peoples, which fixated on the Pleiades, Milky Way, winds, marine birds, and other environmental signs. Some practices are highly efficacious for predicting local and regional manifestations of what scientists now call the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) and played a role in its modern discovery. The marked similarity of historical techniques for long-range climate prediction and keeping track of the calendar used by Rapanui, Māori, Native Hawaiian, Malagasy, Muchik and other Native Andean experts has only slight connection to the adoption of European-derived ideas during colonization. This similarity is far more compellingly explained as the result of autonomous scientific discoveries, rooted in the ancient past and entangled with religious beliefs, that are fundamentally grounded in systematic observation of the same vast, shared, interconnected Indo-Pacific environment. This study also deploys an innovative technique using a desktop planetarium for historicizing the appearance of the night sky applicable to any world locale, plus a new theoretical concept—First Science, the science of First Peoples—for making sense of these historical dynamics. The night sky deserves recognition as a crucial constituent of environmental and cultural history.
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Contacts
Jon Bauscchatz