I recently had the privilege of listening to a speaker who introduced the concept of indigenous science to me. For those who aren't aware, my own formal education is in life science, with an emphasis on ecosystem-scale questions and applications like conservation. Ecological approaches tend to be less reductionistic and more holistic in how they understand the subject, but indigenous science takes this to a whole different level, apparently!
Dr. Pfeiffer has written a good (though a bit lengthy) article about indigenous science and why it is important. Indigenous science is, in many respects, intermarried with indigenous religion rather than compartmentalized like how things are often viewed in Western culture. Here's a little snippet from the article to kick things off:
"Indigenous peoples continuously occupying specific ecosystems for centuries or millennia maintain intimate familiarity with how those ecologies function. From the Yanomami in the Amazon to the Inupiat in the Arctic, Native communities successfully shepherded resources through a combination of deeply held belief systems and sophisticated adaptive management technologies, augmented by the pervasive accumulation, intergenerational transfer, and application of scientific knowledge. This is why Native peoples developed scientific terminology to categorize and characterize species and interspecies relationships—such as birds associated with specific fruiting trees, or the migration patterns of walrus and caribou—long before Western science invented academic fields like agronomy, animal behavior, ecology, climate science, restoration ecology, soil science, and zoology.
...
During my career as a university lecturer, whenever scientists in my field alluded to place-based or experiential knowledge, they described it as “anecdotal” or derived from an “informant,” downgrading local expertise as nonscientific or ancillary to “real” science. In every natural resource management agency meeting I attend as a consultant, decisions are ostensibly based on the “best available science.” Translation? Anything written by someone with degrees accompanying their name, even if it was published decades ago or is the sole article on the topic, will take precedence over the unpublished expertise of a Native or local practitioner."
This is just fascinating for me to think about, both as a Druid and as a scientist. I've studied enough philosophy of science to be aware of its limitations and shortcomings, but there is a massive repository of knowledge indigenous peoples have about how the world works we just... ignore. I'm looking forward to digging into this topic a bit more, and am curious if others have already done so or have some observations to contribute. 
