Indigenous sciences as scientific systems in dialogue with integrative and comparative biology

Integrative and Comparative Biology (ICB) seeks to explain biological diversity through the integration of form, function, development, physiology, behavior, and ecology across organisms and environments. Yet the field's history of synthesis has largely excluded Indigenous sciences, not because they lack empirical rigor, predictive capacity, or explanatory power, but because colonial scientific institutions have narrowly defined what counts as legitimate knowledge. Indigenous sciences are longstanding, place-based systems of inquiry grounded in careful observation, experimentation, interspecies relationships, and sustained intergenerational monitoring. They are not complementary supplements to Western science, nor alternative ways of knowing awaiting validation. They are autonomous scientific traditions that have generated sophisticated understandings of ecological processes over millennia. This paper argues that the exclusion of Indigenous sciences from ICB reflects broader histories of colonial knowledge production and the co-development of biological science with ethnological frameworks that marginalized Indigenous intellectual traditions. Drawing on Indigenous and decolonial science studies scholarship alongside canonical histories of comparative biology, this paper examines Indigenous salmon and fire stewardship as living scientific systems that continue to generate ecological knowledge while confronting state-imposed management regimes. Rather than asking how Indigenous sciences might be incorporated into existing biological frameworks, this paper asks what ICB can learn from scientific traditions that have long practiced integration across species, ecosystems, and generations, and what a genuinely reciprocal dialogue between sovereign scientific systems would require.