The First Astronomers

I was so excited to get my hands on this beautiful and enlightening book. I was lucky enough to get help from Duane Haumacher when I was looking for some Indigenous star lore for The January Stars, and he promptly supplied the perfect information. Duane is a practising astro-physicist, but The First Astronomers was written in collaboration with First Nations elders and knowledge holders, and all proceeds from the book are going toward Indigenous science education programs.

The First Astronomers is divided into chapters dealing with the nearest star (ie the sun), the twinkling stars, the variable stars, the navigation stars etc, and combines Indigenous stories with Western scientific observation and theory to show just how well First Peoples understood and used the movements of the stars to predict the seasons, weather and navigation. It's absolutely fascinating, and shows just how sophisticated Indigenous scientific knowledge was and is. Of course when you are living in deep synchronicity with the natural world, intimate observation and memory is essential.

There is also a deep spiritual dimension to this knowledge, and Duane tells a wonderful anecdote about one night observing a couple of meteors flash across the sky. The Indigenous guides he was with made a brief observation that in their tradition, meteors signify death in the community, then continued with their discussion. The next morning when Duane arrived for a scheduled information session, he was told it had been cancelled because two elders had died the previous night... He says the hairs stood up on the back of his neck.

I couldn't hope to ever master the degree of traditional knowledge shown by Duane's informers in this book, but I especially enjoyed the way that narrative and story-telling so elegantly and engagingly encode this information. Only the most simple level of these sacred stories is shared here, but it's still enough to hint at the incredible depth of traditional learning that was dismissed and ridiculed for so long.