Welcoming Indigenous Knowledge

DC Regulators Are Welcoming Indigenous Knowledge—and the Right is Freaking Out

Anti-DEI forces have opened a new front in their battle against the “woke agenda.”

JULIANA BROAD

Last September, when the Biden administration canceled several oil and gas leases in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, it cited in its decision the expertise of the Native “original stewards” of the land. The move was the fruit of government-wide guidance issued in late 2022 encouraging the incorporation of what Biden policymakers broadly referred to as “Indigenous Knowledge”—a wide array of observations, oral and written records, innovations, beliefs, and practices of various Native communities—into ­science-based federal decision-­making. The rollout cited ways Indigenous knowledge had already informed federally funded research, including studies on controlled burns, crop yields, and historic fish populations.

The mention soon proved to be another piece of fodder for culture warriors on the right who decry the process as liberal orthodoxy run amok. As the Washington Free Beacon warned, the lease cancellations were just “the latest example of how ‘Indigenous Knowledge,’ a pseudoscience which posits native people possess unique insights into the laws of the universe, has pervaded the federal government.”

The Beacon is one of a chorus of conservative outlets—including the Daily Caller, the Daily Wire, Just the News, and the Federalist—that have seized on the policy as an example of woke overreach. At a moment when right-wing commentators blame everything from the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank to Boeing’s accident record on workplace diversity programs, the administration’s endorsement of Indigenous knowledge has offered them another avenue to skewer liberal commitments to inclusion. As anthropologist Elizabeth Weiss—who recently left San José State University after controversies over her handling of Native skeletal remains—wrote in an April op-ed attacking the policy, “an unholy alliance of ‘white guilt,’ virtue signaling, and political correctness” had caused Biden to mandate that “the religious beliefs of Native American tribes…be treated as objective and scientific.”

Many of the policy’s critics worry that regulations shaped by Indigenous knowledge will limit fossil fuel production and even depress the economy; in May, twenty GOP state attorneys general filed a lawsuit over the 2022 rule, arguing it will end up “stymying development.” But academic researchers say Indigenous knowledge can complement their investigations into complex natural systems—such as ecological dynamics—that cannot be reduced to simple physical laws. “From a Western science perspective, we have a particular way of testing things,” explains Keith Musselman, a University of Colorado, Boulder, hydrologist who helps lead the federally funded Arctic Rivers Project, which collaborates with Native communities to model climate vulnerabilities. “It’s a beautiful system when it works really well. But it puts blinders up to other ways that the system might be working.”

Much of the outrage can be traced back to two former Trump administration officials who have used freedom of information filings and lawsuits to draw attention to the battle. One, ­Michael Chamberlain, directs Protect the Public’s Trust, a conservative watchdog group that has attacked Biden’s energy policies. The other, Hans Bader, is backed by family wealth that has allowed him to fund a wide range of libertarian and conservative projects while sustaining his private legal battle against public initiatives that support diversity and inclusion.

Bader helms a foundation that, between 2010 and 2022, distributed around $35 million, mostly to conservative organizations. The money comes from his brother, Lars, a low-profile investment banker who studied computer science at MIT in the 1990s before becoming involved in early internet companies. Federal tax filings show that Lars—who declined to be interviewed—set up a charitable trust in 2004, originally pouring money into groups like the International Rescue Committee and UNICEF, as well as right-leaning think tanks. In 2010, that trust sunsetted and transferred almost $14 million to the recently established Bader Family Foundation. Four years later, Hans took over the foundation as its sole trustee. Since then, tax records show that the foundation’s annual giving has nearly doubled, even as its humanitarian mission petered out.

Hans Bader, who describes himself as a civil rights attorney, also declined to be interviewed. But his worldview is apparent in his writings and his lawsuits: Institutional capture has resulted in unconstitutional restrictions on free speech and the suspension of due process through anti–sexual harassment and diversity policies, which discriminate against men and white people. Bader has used the foundation to file and litigate public records requests seeking information on how the Biden administration develops and implements such policies, then shares his gleanings with right-wing media outlets.

While his assault on the Indigenous knowledge policy is a recent project, Bader has a long track record defending the legal rights of men, in particular those accused of sexual assault. As a law student, he wrote letters to the Harvard Crimson attacking a feminist scholar for her “venomous hatred” and calling proposed sexual assault penalties “discriminatory” to men—though he conceded that, as “a virgin, I would not be directly affected.” 

He went on to work at the Center for Individual Rights before landing at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a DC libertarian think tank, where he would spend most of his career. He left to join Trump’s Education Department in October 2017, just a month after Secretary Betsy DeVos announced that she would rescind Obama administration guidance on punishing and preventing campus sexual assault—a decision the Nation reported was reached in consultation with a men’s rights group backed by funding from the Bader Family Foundation. During Bader’s short stint at the department, he was seen as a driving force behind executing the rollback.

Since 2021, Bader’s foundation has sued the Biden administration 16 times, seeking information on Title IX reforms, critical race theory, gender-­affirming care, alleged anti-white discrimination, and, more recently, Indigenous knowledge. In May 2023, Bader filed a FOIA lawsuit against the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) and the National Science Foundation seeking “communications about how agencies plan to use indigenous knowledge in making scientific determinations.” He released the ensuing trove of records on Liberty Unyielding, a group blog that shares a mailing address with the Georgia-based Chosen Vessels of God Ministries.

On the blog, Bader has complained that Biden’s Indigenous knowledge effort “smacks of cultural relativism rather than scientific objectivity.” Yet, that’s in strange contradiction to his own record, as documented in tax filings, of funding organizations with goals antithetical to mainstream scientific norms. Take Project Prevention, which has received more than ­$1 million from Bader’s foundation and whose mission, including offering cash to people with substance use disorders who agree to be sterilized, has been described as “eugenics with a 21st-century face.” There’s the Alliance Defending Freedom, which has cited retracted studies in its litigation to ban abortion medicines and has received more than half a million dollars. Smaller amounts have gone to the Genetic Literacy Project, which journalists have described as an agribusiness industry “propaganda website,” and the Discovery Institute, which promotes the anti-evolution notion of intelligent design.

Conservative writers who regularly cite Bader’s work have also professionally benefited from his largesse: George Leef, a columnist at the National Review, is the director of external relations at the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal, which has received $163,000 from the foundation; another writer got his journalistic start at the College Fix, a project of the Student Free Press Association, which received $136,000 and which Bader has represented in federal litigation. A senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, which has received almost $700,000 from Bader, took to Forbes in February to write about “The Quiet Threat To Science Posed By ‘Indigenous Knowledge.’”

Bader’s efforts have been amplified by Protect the Public’s Trust, a group founded in 2021 by fellow Trump Education Department alum Chamberlain, who has argued that Biden elevated “indigenous knowledge to a plateau above empirical science.” Materials from its public records requests—almost all of which have been litigated by Gary ­Lawkowski, who helped represent Trump in the Supreme Court case overruling Colorado’s decision to bar him from its ballot—have been fodder for a string of Beacon stories. Chamberlain did not respond to questions regarding who funds PPT’s work.

A second Trump administration would likely take up Bader’s baton. Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation initiative viewed as Trump’s governing blueprint, suggests that the Indigenous knowledge policy would be a target, singling out OSTP as a place where Biden leveraged “the federal government’s resources to further the woke agenda” and where departmental guidance must be “reversed and scrubbed.” If Trump gets the chance, Bader will be the one who showed him where to scour.