Space’s Role in Building Bridges Between Cutting-Edge and Ancestral Knowledge

The launch of the Peregrine-1 mission in early January gave the space community the occasion of a reminder that the Moon is not only subject to exploration and commercial endeavors, but also a divine entity subject to mythical beliefs in the U.S. and around the world. This leads to questions on the extent to which the Moon should be commercialized.

In December 2023 Buu Nygren, President of the Navajo Nation, requested a halt to the Peregrine mission, poised to deposit human remains on the lunar surface, in the name of the sacred dimension the Moon holds for its people and its cosmogony. The Navajo and other native American people are not the only ones that have a cosmogony where the Moon takes a central position. In Australia for example, the path of the Moon, like other planets of the solar system, is widely known across several Aboriginal tribes and is generally seen as a road or pathway for the primary ancestor spirits.

Being pragmatic, it would be illusionary to try and accommodate every cosmogony or mythical conception of the space environment with the exploration and commercialization of space. Stakes for humanity’s future might simply be too high. However, a middle ground can most certainly be found between an unbridled commercialization of space and a total absence of it. And the lament of the Navajo, while relatively limited in repercussions so far, might just be one of the triggering events needed in order to draw that thin demarcation line with what we should forbid ourselves from doing in space, in order not to repeat the mistakes humanity has done to its environment in the past. This, because indigenous people tell us the story of a different, maybe wiser way of being to the world.

Going further than philosophical and ethical questions, another question we can ask ourselves is what can the space sector do to support indigenous societies at global level. Two main dimensions are to be retained: the protection of indigenous communities’ territorial integrity, and the support that can be provided in helping them preserve their immediate environment.

Territorial integrity is paramount when it comes to the preservation of indigenous communities, as a respect of ancestral land, community practices, and natural resources management. Geospatial data based on satellite imagery inputs can here bring concrete contributions to the monitoring of illegal trespassing of indigenous communities’ territories and reserves. The Karen Environment Social Action Network (KESAN) in Myanmar is notably using satellite imagery to empower the Karen community to reclaim land that has been expropriated or contest court decisions in order to safeguard ancestral territories and defend land and forest rights.

Similarly in the U.S., GIS mapping is used in support of “landback” projects that promote the return of lands to native American Indian tribes who are committing to managing them for conservation, some using traditional knowledge in wildlife conservation or the use of prescribed fires to protect their ancestral ground. Such a use of GIS has recently been highlighted by the Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development.

The relevance of indigenous land also lies in its intricacy with challenges of resources management and environmental protection. The improved capacity of indigenous and local communities to better manage natural resources is not new to economists following the works of Elinor Ostrom. Protected territories of indigenous people contain 80 percent of the world’s remaining biodiversity and intersect with about 40 percent of the land protected areas and ecological reserves globally.

In addition, and according to the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), up to 35 percent of the remaining terrestrial areas with very low human intervention are owned, managed, used, or occupied by Indigenous peoples. Protecting such land, was deemed an effective strategy for reducing carbon emissions and biodiversity loss by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) given the ability of indigenous communities to sustainably exploited land and natural resources.

Linking both the preservation of land integrity and resource management, the challenge for the protection of land against encroachment and illegal logging is key in our primeval forests, of which the forest of Papua New Guinea or the Amazon forest are a few remaining examples.

A few months ago, as part of my mayoral activities in Paris, I shared a conversation with Papuan chief Mundiya Kepanga from the Huli tribe who shared his deepest concerns regarding the existential threat illegal logging represented over the Primeval Forest of New Guinea. And there is no doubt that satellite imagery and data can now support such communities in defending themselves.

The Awajún people of Peru, for example, have started using geospatial tools in defending themselves against such illegal activities following a training they received and a supported through the Earth Observations for Indigenous-led Land Management (EO4IM) program shared between the NGO Conservation International and NASA. The latter has notably been providing GIS training to the Navajo or Samish Indian Nations in order to provide capabilities in ecological forecasting, mining and water resources and disaster management.

The Ashaninka community in Peru is also notably supported by Rainforest Labs, a bespoke software solution developed by Cool Earth and Cadasta, an Esri-powered tool, to bridge information gaps coupling indigenous knowledge with technologies that empower communities with survey design and mapping to better combat land invasion, drug trafficking and illegal logging over their territory.

In the Arctic, the Inuits, who suffer from a rapidly changing global climate that poses an existential risk to their lives, are now using a combination of new technologies and generations-old wisdom to keep their communities safe when hunting and moving around thin ice areas.

Coupling the power of satellite data with indigenous knowledge could also be a way of improving policy-making. In Canada, mixing insights from satellite imagery with “qaujimajatuqangit,” Inuit epistemology, has helped in studying the links between climate change, impacts on vegetation and caribou herd movements, thus addressing community concerns about food security.

Combining Earth observation data with indigenous knowledge is one of the modern ways we can also now explore to conserve indigenous cultural heritage, making it a repository of the high added value their knowledge of our world and environment represents. Nonprofits like the GEO Indigenous Alliance or the Native American tribes focused National Tribal Geographic Information Support Center (NTGISC) have been particularly active in promoting such a conservation effort, yet it is only one of the multiple commitments we must make in order to preserve what shall be seen as a heritage of mankind. VS

Image credit: NASA/Bill Ingalls