Illuminating Stories from the Night Sky
The Young Naturalists Club will have participants engage in a paper bag lantern making activity that aims to decolonize their understanding of one of the oldest natural sciences: astronomy. Western scientific perspectives on constellations will be paired with Indigenous night sky stories on the lanterns to crack open the one-sided education and experience many have in this field.
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Le Young Naturalists Club invite les participants à participer à une activité de fabrication de lanternes de sacs en papier visant à décoloniser leur compréhension de l’une des plus anciennes sciences naturelles : l’astronomie. Les perspectives scientifiques occidentales sur les constellations seront jumelées avec des histoires autochtones sur afin de percer l’éducation unilatérale.
The YNC would like to share an aspect of one of the oldest natural sciences, astronomy. The First Nations people have studied the sky for tens of thousands of years; Western culture only since the time of the Greeks. Western science and Indigenous knowledge both try to make sense of the world around us but are conceptually different. In the case of astronomy, the same set of stars in the night sky are couched in different languages. In Western astronomy, the sky is filled with abstract constellations whereas First Nations star stories are lessons that educate us about the relationship between the sky and the land. The goal of this project is to decolonize our understanding of the night sky and crack open the one-sided education and experience many have about this field.
Participants are invited to make paper bag lanterns that explore the different ways First Nations and Western science interpret the constellations of Ursa Major/The Big Dipper and Corona Borealis (the Bear’s Fen). In the Mi’kmaq culture, this star pattern is sometimes described through a story called ‘Muin and the Seven Bird Hunters.’ This story is a traditional Mi’kmaq sky story that has been handed down orally from generation to generation explaining the movement of the constellations Ursa Major/Big Dipper and Corona Borealis and linking the annual cycle of the seasons with the movement of stars about the North Celestial pole (Tatapn/ North Star).
