Modern Medicine
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UCLA Med School Requires Students To Attend Lecture Where Speaker Demands Prayer for ‘Mama Earth,’ Leads Chants of ‘Free Palestine.’
In a mandatory course on "structural racism" for first-year medical students at the University of California Los Angeles, a guest speaker who has praised Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on Israel led students in chants of "Free, Free Palestine" and demanded that they bow down to "mama earth," according to students in the class and audio obtained by the Washington Free Beacon.
Lisa "Tiny" Gray-Garcia, who has referred to the Oct. 7 terrorist attacks as "justice," began the March 27 class by leading students in what she described as a "non-secular prayer" to "the ancestors," instructing everyone to get on their knees and touch the floor—"mama earth," as she described it—with their fists.
At least half of the assembled students complied, two students said. Gray-Garcia, a local activist who had been invited to speak about "Housing (In)Justice," proceeded to thank native tribes for preserving "what the settlers call L.A.," according to audio obtained by the Free Beacon, and to remind students of the city’s "herstory."
The prayer also included a benediction for "black," "brown," and "houseless people" who die because of the "crapatalist lie" of "private property."
"Mama earth," Gray-Garcia told the kneeling students, "was never meant to be bought, sold, pimped, or played."
So began a long and looney lecture that shocked some students at the elite medical school and has led to calls for an investigation. Wearing a keffiyeh that covered her entire face, Gray-Garcia, a self-described "poverty scholar," led the class in chants of "Free, Free Palestine" as faculty and staff looked on in silence, according to people in the course and contemporaneous text messages reviewed by the Free Beacon.
Gray-Garcia later referred to modern medicine as "white science" and inveighed against the "occupation" of "Turtle Island"—that is, the United States—before asking students to stand for a second prayer. This time, nearly everyone rose.
When one student remained seated, according to students in the class, a UCLA administrator, whom the Free Beacon could not identify, inquired about the student’s identity, implying that discipline could be on the table.
UCLA and Gray-Garcia did not respond to requests for comment.
“Indigenous knowledge” is in the spotlight thanks to President Biden, who issued an executive order within days of taking office, aimed at ushering in a new era of tribal self-determination. It was a preview of things to come. His administration went on to host an annual White House summit on tribal nations, and convened an interagency working group that spent a year developing government-wide guidance on indigenous knowledge.
Released in late 2022, the 46-page guidance document defines indigenous knowledge as “a body of observations, oral and written knowledge, innovations, practices, and beliefs developed by Tribes and Indigenous Peoples through experience with the environment.” According to the guidance, indigenous knowledge “is applied to phenomena across biological, physical, social, cultural, and spiritual systems.”
Now the Biden Administration wants federal agencies to include these sorts of beliefs into their decision making. As a result, agencies like the EPA, FDA, and CDC are incorporating indigenous knowledge into their scientific integrity practices.
In some cases, tribal knowledge can certainly provide empirical data to decisionmakers. For example, if an agency is concerned about pollution in a certain area, tribal leaders might be able to provide insights about abnormally high rates of illness experienced within their community. That said, categorizing knowledge that includes folklore and traditions under the banner of enhancing “scientific integrity” poses a number of serious problems, to put it mildly.
Very often, indigenous knowledge deals in subjective understandings related to culture, stories, and values—not facts or empirically-derived cause-and-effect relationships. In such cases, the knowledge can still be useful, but it is not “science” per se, which is usually thought of as the study of observable phenomena in the physical and natural world.
Treating science and indigenous knowledge as equivalent risks blending oral traditions and spirituality with verifiable data and evidence. Scientists are aware of the danger, which explains why the authors of a recent article in Science Magazine wisely noted “we do not argue that Indigenous Knowledge should usurp the role of, or be called, science.” Instead, they argue, indigenous knowledge can complement scientific information.
Indeed, this knowledge should be collected alongside other input from stakeholders with an interest in the outcomes of federal policy. It shouldn’t be confused with science itself, however. Yet by baking indigenous insights into scientific integrity policies without clearly explaining how the knowledge is to be collected, verified, and used, federal agencies will make it easier to smuggle untested claims into the evidentiary records for rulemakings.
