Star Stories and Indigenous Resistance Against Light Pollution
“Indigenous people have nurtured critical relationships with the stars, from keen observation and sustainable engineering to place-based ceremony, navigation, and celestial architecture for tens of thousands of years. The Indigenous relationship and knowledge of the sky is exceptional in that it encompasses mind, body, heart, and spirit.”
—Annette S. Lee1
ur planet circles a sun that is at the edge of our galaxy, and on a night with ideal conditions, a radial arm of the Milky Way can be seen, swirling clouds of gas dotted with stars running from one end of the sky to the other. Observing this phenomenon has always been a shared experience across cultures, but light pollution is rendering it invisible in many places across the world. Spilling outward not only on urban areas but even toward remote communities, this whitewashing of the night sky is a “slow violence” accelerated by capitalism, colonial powers, and billionaire space-race vanity projects. “Whitening the Sky: Light Pollution as a Form of Cultural Genocide” makes the argument that light pollution is a form of active destruction of Indigenous knowledge based on observations of the sky, such as navigation, food economics, and a mnemonic In 2021, Hilding Neilson, an astronomer at the University of Toronto (U of T) and member of the Qalipu Nation, and Elena E. Ćirković, a legal scholar, co-authored a paper calling for the Canadian Space Agency to address the rights of Indigenous peoples and their knowledge structures in creating policy about space exploration and colonization. Where does the Crown obligation of shared stewardship begin and end? How high do treaties reach? And what are artists, scientists, cartographers, land defenders, and elders doing to keep this knowledge alive?
