NATIVE AMERICAN SCIENCE. A comprehensive understanding of Native American science presents a challenge because it is difficult to draw meaningful conclusions from the ideas, practices, and observations of hundreds of separate societies. Adding to the challenge is that Native American traditions were oral.

The Validity of Oral Traditions

The oral histories of American Indians are knowledge systems about the natural environment and how they sustain a social structure of mutual dependence that ensures the survival of future generations. These oral narratives lay out a background on which further descriptions weave a picture that originated in the minds of the ancients. The ability to visualize the narrative provides a sturdy framework on which to build an age-old lesson of ideologies and conceptual understanding. In this way Native Americans passed on a culture that sustained life for thousands of years. These narratives were not passed on...