Lakota Cosmology Meets Particle Physics: An Interdisciplinary Collaboration

Lakota Cosmology Meets Particle Physics is an interdisciplinary partnership between STEMarts Lab, physicists from the ATLAS Experiment at CERN, QuarkNet, and the Taos Integrated School of the Arts (TISA) in Taos, New Mexico. Lead collaborators include an intriguing mixture of artists, developers, educators, scientists, and specialists in indigenous culture and Native American studies. The team first joined forces in April 2017 at Taos in a three-day workshop targeting 10-12-year-olds from the local area. The goal was to explore native science, western science, and the arts, as parallel ‘ways of knowing’ and understanding our place in the universe. Key elements of the workshop included interactive exchanges on indigenous story-telling and cultural knowledge, western particle physics and cosmology, tipi building, cloud chamber building, and the development of projection art using Tagtool[1] from storylines created by the students. We describe the motivation for this novel partnership, its effectiveness as an educational program, lessons learned, and plans for future activities.

[1] Tagtool is a live performance instrument for drawing and animation: www.omai.at