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She recounted a 2016 speaking engagement at which angry audience members tried to silence her by saying she was a guest on their land. “I was saying the university is not on Indigenous lands. It is a public institution. It’s all of our land,” she said. “Nobody should think they are a guest, or that their ethnic background is going to make any difference in terms of how we’re going to interact here.”

In a paper delivered to the 2016 meeting of the Canadian Political Science Association, Widdowson said the emphasis on respecting traditional Aboriginal knowledge in academia undermines “the intellectual foundation of the university.” Two years later, as she teaches at a university where “respecting and valuing Indigenous ways of knowing” is official policy, she remains pessimistic.

“Most quote, unquote, Indigenous knowledge is not knowledge. It’s spiritual belief. And in order to respect something or value something, we have to look at the evidence,” she says. “This is what a university is about, trying to figure out what it is that we should value — not having university administrators tell us, ‘Thou must value X.’ They’re doing it as a public-relations exercise to show how they really do care.”

There are certainly examples of traditional Indigenous knowledge contributing to science. One of the most frequently cited is the discovery of the active ingredient in Aspirin — acetylsalicylic acid — in the bark of willow trees, which Native Americans used to relieve pain. More recently, observations by Inuit have helped identify climate-induced environmental changes in the Arctic, and Heiltsuk elders inspired biologists to classify a distinct population of seafood-eating wolves in British Columbia.