REVIEW 3 major objections 4 minor 21 references
Indigenous knowledges and kinship as a model for our future in outer space
T0 review · 3 major / 4 minor · reviewed 2026-08-11 · deepseek-v4-flash
Pith's one-line read A Mi'kmaw astronomer argues that humanity's future in space should be governed by Indigenous kinship, treating outer space as land with its own rights rather than as a resource to mine or a wilderness to fence off.
desk verdict This is a useful perspective piece that names a real gap in space-governance debates, but its proposed 'treaty with outer space' is still an intention, not a policy: the paper itself admits the 'good guest' behavior is undefined. read the letter →
The pith
A machine-rendered reading of the paper's core claim, the machinery that carries it, and where it could break.
The reading
What carries the argument
The load-bearing mechanism is kinship as a treaty relationship: a cultural–legal frame in which the sky, Moon, planets, and stars are treated as animate relations with rights, so that interactions with them are governed by protocols specifying rights and responsibilities for all sides. The paper assembles this frame from Indigenous methods—what's above reflects below, knowledge is relational, multiple variables interact concurrently, knowledge is holistic, and nature is holy, sacred, and familial—and applies it to outer space. The mechanism does the argument's work by converting “what may we take?” into “what do we owe in return?”
What would settle it
A finding that no recorded Mi'kmaw or Yolngu protocol actually extends treaty obligations to the Moon or planets, or that the cited sources describe stories rather than operative governance rules, would remove the concrete basis for claiming treaty-with-space is an available Indigenous methodology.
Extended reading notes
Core claim
The central claim is that humanity should “live in treaty with outer space as its own land and place with its own rights of existence.” The paper grounds this in Indigenous methodological principles: what is above reflects what is below, knowledge is relational and holistic, and nature is animate, familial, and party to treaties. On this view, celestial bodies are not dead resources to be claimed under the Artemis Accords, nor a fragile environment to be administered by nation states; they are relations with rights, and humans are guests whose actions must be reciprocal. The author argues this is a genuinely third position, distinct from both space exploitation and space environmentalism.
Load-bearing premise
The argument assumes that culturally specific Indigenous kinship-and-treaty concepts, such as the Mi'kmaw view of the sky as a treaty partner, can be transferred to outer space as a workable universal governance model despite the paper's own warning that Indigenous knowledges are not homogeneous.
Editorial extensions
If this is right
- The Artemis Accords' resource-extraction and site-protection clauses would be reframed as colonial unless they incorporate treaty relationships with celestial bodies and include Indigenous nations as co-governing parties.
- Satellite constellations and orbital debris stop being merely environmental impacts and become breaches of hospitality toward a sky that has rights, making what operators give back a licensing question.
- Exploration itself does not end; instead it is recast as visiting, so missions would need protocols for reciprocity before removing lunar water, asteroidal minerals, or orbital slots.
- Indigenous peoples move from the category of stakeholders or victims of light pollution to co-authors of the rules governing the night sky and space activities.
- The practical first step becomes a cross-cultural effort to define what humans can give to outer space when they take from it, rather than debating who profits.
Reading between the lines
- The paper leaves implicit that recognizing celestial bodies as legal persons with standing, in the manner of rights-of-nature movements, would give courts a concrete way to enforce the duties it describes.
- Because the paper concedes there is no pan-Indigenous knowledge system, implementation cannot be a single global protocol; it would require nation-by-nation treaties among Indigenous nations, states, and space actors, which the paper does not specify.
- The same kinship logic would apply to near-Earth orbit: mega-constellations alter a commons shared by all peoples, so a testable policy extension is to require orbital operators to fund sky-recovery or astronomy-support measures as a giving-back obligation.
- A further editorial extension is that existing space-environment proposals could be audited to check whether they treat Indigenous nations as rights-holders or only as consultation objects.
Editorial analysis
A structured set of objections, weighed in public.
Referee Report
Summary. This proceedings essay argues that the current debate about humanity's future in outer space—between commercial exploitation (exemplified by the Artemis Accords) and space environmentalism (exemplified by the SATCON/Dark & Quiet Skies efforts)—is a false binary, and that both poles carry colonial assumptions. Drawing on Mi'kmaw, Yolŋu, and other Indigenous methodologies, the author proposes a 'third way': humanity should act in treaty with outer space, treating it as a land/place with its own rights and as kin, so that space activities are carried out as a 'good guest' rather than as extraction or as colonial preservation. The paper argues that Indigenous peoples and nations must be parties to, not merely stakeholders in, space policy, and it lists several common Indigenous methodological commitments (relational knowledge, holism, concurrent multiple variables, nature as sacred and familial) that motivate this stance.
Significance. The essay's significance is programmatic. It introduces into the astrophysics and space-governance literature a perspective that is routinely reduced to stakeholder consultation or victimhood narrative (a point the author makes about the SATCON/Dark & Quiet Skies reports), and it names the coloniality of both extraction and preservation—a pairing that mainstream space-policy debate tends to keep separate. Strengths: the author states positionality, cites relevant Indigenous-scholarship literature (Kimmerer, Hamacher, Country et al., Marshall et al.), explicitly acknowledges that there is no pan-Indigenous knowledge system, and is candid that the concrete content of 'good guest' behavior is not yet specified. There are no quantitative claims, so standard checks for circularity or parameter-fitting do not apply; the relevant evidentiary standard is whether the argument's normative steps are defended. The main risk is that the central proposal currently has clear negative content (not exploitation, not colonial conservation) but underdeveloped positive content, and the transfer of culturally specific treaties to a universal framework is asserted rather than established.
major comments (3)
- [§4] The paper's central policy proposal is left content-free precisely where it must bear weight: §4 states 'What would being a good guest in outer space look like? It is not obvious' and 'How we give back to outer space is something that humanity and nations can work on developing,' and §5 repeats that the first step is to 'develop protocols for what humans can give to outer space.' Since the stated objective (§1) is to 'advocate for policy changes,' the third way currently reduces to negative constraints (no pure extraction, no colonial conservation, no unlimited satellite constellations), which almost any otherwise-unregulated activity could satisfy. The author should either (a) specify a minimum institutional shape of a treaty—who the parties would be, what reciprocal obligations look like concretely, and how conflicts between Indigenous protocols and nation-state space law would be resolved—or (b) explicitly reframe the contribution as a research agenda in which the governance content is deferred, so that the central claim is stated as a hypothesis to be developed rather than as a concluded recommendation.
- [§3–§4] The inference from culturally specific frameworks to a universal governance model is asserted rather than derived. Section 3 moves from Mi'kmaw six-worlds cosmology—where the sky is 'its own world' governed by treaties (Whitehead & Kaulbach 1988)—and Yolŋu protocols for Sky Country (Country et al. 2023) to the conclusion in §4 that 'outer space is a land onto itself that requires relationship building,' and then to the global recommendation to 'live in treaty with outer space' (§5). The author notes correctly in §4 that 'there is no such thing as a pan-Indigenous knowledge system,' but the proposal nevertheless generalizes a list of commonalities into a single framework for 'humanity.' The paper needs to state explicitly whether the intended model is a plurality of distinct treaties between each nation or people and sky, a global framework negotiated with Indigenous nations as parties, or an analogy intended only as an ethical orientation; currently the argument oscillates among these possibilities without addressing the tension with the heterogeneity caveat.
- [§1] The motivation for the third way rests on the claim that 'both sides of current discussion are colonial' (§1), but the demonstration is asymmetric: colonial extraction through the Artemis Accords and terra nullius is argued in some detail (§2), whereas the coloniality of space environmentalism is supported only by the terrestrial national-park analogy. The author does not engage the actual proposal of Lawrence et al. (2022) to show how its specific mechanisms, as distinct from its historical analogues, would be colonial. Since the distinctiveness of the third way depends on environmentalism being as colonial as exploitation, this is load-bearing; the author should either offer a concrete analysis of Lawrence et al. or an equivalent space-environmentalist framework, or moderate the claim to 'space environmentalism risks being colonial in practice.'
minor comments (4)
- [§2] The statement that 'most of the largest radio and optical telescopes that exist or are planned are on Indigenous lands' is an empirical claim and should be supported by a citation.
- [§2] 'It is not able that the clause in the Artemis Accords...' appears to be a typo for 'It is notable that...'.
- [Title/§4] The title advertises 'kinship as a model,' but the operative concept throughout the argument is treaty; kinship receives only brief treatment in the §4 bullet 'Nature is holy, sacred, and familial' and in §5, and the term is not defined or connected to the treaty mechanism. The paper should either develop kinship explicitly or retitle to reflect the treaty-centered argument.
- [References] The reference list has a few formatting inconsistencies: the entry for 'D. LIPE' is set in all caps with inconsistent capitalization, the Walker et al. 2020 report entry is missing the full 'NOIRLab' designation, and the in-text rendering of Hamacher et al.'s title ('Light Pollution is Cultural Genocide,' §2) does not match the title given in the reference list; these should be verified at production.
Circularity Check
No circular derivation: the policy proposal is an argued analogy grounded in cited external Indigenous scholarship, with no fitted parameters, predictions, or self-referential premises that reduce to its inputs.
full rationale
This paper makes no quantitative claims, fits no parameters, and derives no equations; its central recommendation that humanity should 'live in treaty with outer space as its own land and place with its own rights of existence' is argued from cited Indigenous methodologies and oral traditions (e.g., Kimmerer 2013; Whitehead & Kaulbach 1988; Country et al. 2023). None of these citations are the author's own prior results, so there is no self-citation chain carrying the argument. The paper explicitly acknowledges the non-universality of Indigenous knowledges ('there is no such thing as a pan-Indigenous knowledge system') and concedes that the concrete content of being a 'good guest' is underdetermined ('What would being a good guest in outer space look like? It is not obvious'). Those are limitations of argumentative support or policy specificity, not circular reductions: the conclusion is not assumed in the premises nor is any quantity fitted and then renamed a prediction. The transferability of culturally specific kinship and treaty concepts to outer space is asserted by analogy rather than derived, but an unproven analogy is a weakness in justification, not a definitional or self-referential circularity. The analysis therefore finds no circular step.
Assumptions & free parameters
assumptions (3)
- domain assumption Treaty relationships between Indigenous peoples and the land/sky can be extended to outer space as a governance model.
- domain assumption Both space exploitation and space environmentalism are colonial frameworks.
- domain assumption Celestial bodies can be considered animate relatives with rights.
Cite this review
Pith. "Pith review of Indigenous knowledges and kinship as a model for our future in outer space." pith.science (2026). https://pith.science/paper/L3DUUBJY
@misc{pith2026241206669,
author = {Pith},
title = {Pith review of: Indigenous knowledges and kinship as a model for our future in outer space},
year = {2026},
howpublished = {\url{https://pith.science/paper/L3DUUBJY}},
note = {Machine review of arXiv:2412.06669}
}
read the original abstract
Commercial endeavours have already compromised our relationship with space. The Artemis Accords are creating a framework that will commercialize the Moon and further impact that relation. To confront that impact, a number of organizations have begun to develop new principles of sustainability in space, many of which are borne out of the capitalist and colonial frameworks that have harmed water, nature, peoples and more on Earth. Indigenous methodologies and ways of knowing offer different paths for living in relationship with space and the Moon. While Indigenous knowledges are not homogeneous, there are lessons we can use from some of common methods. In this talk we will review some Indigenous methodologies, including the concept of kinship and discuss how kinship can inform our actions both on Earth and in space.
Reference graph
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Reviewed August 11, 2026 · model on record in the stance chip above.
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