Y’all. I just had a 10 min argument with a student over Indigenous ontology and aliens and I need to rant. Today, I taught a section on peopling of the new world. We talked about ethnocentrism and western theories of peopling of the new world.

As an indigenous person, I thought I would show my students videos of Native people talking about their origin stories. We listened to a Hopi, Iroquois, and Lakota story. After the Hopi story, my student asked why the Hopi people could believe the earth was round.

He thought it was due to aliens. We argued back and forth for a while. He constantly kept saying aliens for any explanation I had. I explained that you can’t discredit a persons worldview, to no avail he persisted on the alien explanation.

Why is it so hard for student to credit native people and native knowledge?