The landmark Indian treaty fishing rights case Sohappy vs. Smith (later consolidated into United States vs. Oregon) recently marked its 50th anniversary. Despite the fact that the Native Americans prevailed in the case, the entire management edifice of Pacific Northwest lamprey, steelhead, and salmon is grounded not at all in the worldview of the Indian tribes. Rather, it resides in the formal structures of modern environmental law and contemporary science.

Yet in critical ways, Native American thinking and knowledge about these fish eclipse scientific knowledge. I commend to the reader Sammy Matsaw and colleagues’ 2020 article “Cultural Linguistics and Treaty Language” in the recent Lewis and Clark Environmental Law Review symposium volume devoted to this case. What I find striking here is not the immense scientific literature on anadromous fish, but rather what Native American perspectives teach us about the limits, the core assumptions, and the alternatives to science.

Science is useful and powerful -— within its domain. But that domain has limits. Cultural linguistics makes apparent (to me anyway) that one key limit of science arises from how it creates boundaries around little chunks of the world. This atomization is ubiquitous in science — consider how scientists purport to identify discrete entities they call genes, nucleotides, chemical elements, mathematical symbols, ecosystems, and species. Much of science entails defining those units of nature (via “words,” also known as “abstract symbols” or “data”), and inferring rules for their manipulation (“grammar,” also known as “graphs,” “equations” or “models”).

So too, environmental law entails giving special meaning to words describing discrete ideas, for example the concepts of a hard look, unreasonable risk, preemption, or the elements of a tort. Less abstractly, the Fish and Wildlife Service, denying the petition to list the lamprey, said the key reason was its inability to define a Distinct Population Segment. Legal arguments often dispute whether a particular concept applies to a particular set of facts — thus they are often a dispute over the boundary of a legal concept. Implicit in all this is the idea that boundaries exist.

It is impossible to overstate the importance of deep, implicit assumptions in the structures of the English, legal, and scientific languages. As Matsaw and colleagues state, “Forcing a foreign language onto Indigenous lands is similar to building fences, roads, dams, plowing crops, and extracting minerals.” Native American language focuses on process rather than physical things (that is, verbs over nouns). Their culture sees the natural world not as something with so many distinct parts and distinct ideas, but rather where things are inextricably linked. This is qualitatively distinct from science, where we cut off little chunks of nature, identify them, manipulate them, and study them.

There is, however, contemporary science somewhat more consistent with the Native American perspective. Computational systems dubbed cellular automata constitute one scientific model that captures the essence of discrete units interacting with one another. The key result here is that there is no way to predict the future behavior (in technical lingo, the state) of a universal computer, except by letting it play out over time (for example breaking such a complex system into parts and building a model of it does no good). This result is well known in complex systems, yet also refutes the idea that atomization that underlies much science will necessarily lead to knowledge. Beyond that, the Native American worldview is that humans are not just observers of complex natural systems, but integrated into them.

As I understand it, Native Americans integrate hard knowledge, spirituality, and how we treat other people and animals into an irreducible whole. Further, this perspective celebrates and appreciates the unique life story of each individual person and animal. Consistent with the teachings of cellular automata rule 110 and Native Americans, truly each of us is on a different path, yet united within a whole.

Native Americans are not just another stakeholder. Contemporary environmental law and modern science have existed a scant 3 to 20 generations, delimiting the fossil-fuel era and the Renaissance. By contrast, Native American knowledge of nature is embedded in languages, symbolic structures, rituals, and stories that have allowed their cultures to persist over 500 generations.

When the worldview and core structure of societies that have persisted for millennia — and function well for their culture — are in apparent conflict with key implicit assumptions of modern life, law, and science, we should question the modern.