When Amanda Black started university in New Zealand in 1995, she got her first taste of discrimination. Black is an Indigenous person to New Zealand who comes from a rural community, and several wealthier, white students told her that she must have received special privileges to attend university, that her ability was inferior and that she was stupid and had little to offer scientifically. She says she has faced similar attitudes throughout her career, sometimes from fellow academics — despite receiving multiple awards for her research as a soil ecologist, including a Rutherford Discovery Fellowship in 2021. In 2020, she became the director of Bioprotection Aotearoa in Canterbury, one of New Zealand’s National Centres of Research Excellence.
The centre’s mission is for its scientists to conduct environmental research guided by Indigenous values, which Black says are grounded in te pono (truth, honesty and integrity), te tika (doing what is right, in the right way) and te aroha (respect and reciprocity). Researchers are expected to engage with Indigenous communities to co-create research opportunities and share knowledge.
As director, Black facilitates opportunities for the centre’s scientists to engage with Indigenous communities and encourages researchers to attend gatherings called noho marae, at which attendees stay in traditional Māori meeting houses, hear about local Indigenous communities’ aspirations and offer ideas for co-designing research programmes. Black supports Indigenous sovereignty over human and non-human genomic data that originates from Indigenous communities or lands and, under her leadership, the centre provides its researchers with guidance on data sovereignty and intellectual property when working with Indigenous Knowledge.
Black encourages a diverse mix of students and researchers who have a range of perspectives about bioprotection, and she works to ensure that early-career, female and Indigenous researchers receive deserved promotions. She tells Nature that she sees her role as developing the next generation of researchers to be not only scientifically competent, but also ethical and culturally responsive.
What’s the coolest discovery that’s come out of your work?
A lot of conservation is geared around saving one species, but we have to start looking at saving whole ecosystems. When you bring back keystone species, those that drive the system, the theory is that that should increase the resilience of ecosystems. We’re trying to understand which key parts of the ecosystems need saving to, in turn, help restore the entire ecosystem. Then it becomes a habitable place for the taonga, or treasure, species — those that we hold dear — that we’re trying to conserve, as well as our other birds, plants and animals.
A New Zealand example of this is that seabirds are keystone species for forest resilience because they provide nutrients for healthy soil through their droppings, leftover scraps of food and burrowing. If we bring these birds back, we’ll help forest ecosystems to withstand climate change and maybe even biosecurity threats, such as weeds and pathogens.
Why is diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) work important to you?
For many years, research was done in a Western, colonialist way. Research outcomes were paramount. It was ‘get it done’ by any means necessary — without consultation with people in the communities where scientists were working. Museums took artefacts and the labs that sequenced the genomes of many of New Zealand’s endemic species were based overseas. Ethics, data sovereignty and the rights and interests of Indigenous Peoples weren’t a priority or even considered.
But we deal with global problems these days and I don’t think one knowledge system or approach is going to be able to solve them all. We need multiple perspectives on very complicated problems. That’s where DEI comes in. We make space for those with different perspectives. Because of their experiences and the challenges they have faced, they’ve often got quite innovative solutions to problems. We need new approaches because our one way of thinking hasn’t got us very far with these global problems. It’s certainly not going to hurt if we reach out to encourage different people to share their thinking with us.
I have to deliver research, but my role is also to create an institute where people from all sorts of backgrounds can thrive — a place for thinking, a place for collaboration, a place for innovation.
What’s the biggest Indigenous stereotype that you’d like to dispel?
It’s that Māori get special privileges. In fact, we do double duty in our institutions, in that we do all the cultural stuff, we have to be role models, we have to comment on everything, we get asked to do interviews like this one and we counter misinformation about our communities. We are expected to be knowledge and community brokers, whereas a lot of our colleagues simply get to focus on their research. I get paid because of the outputs on my CV, not because I am Māori.
How have you dealt with issues of racism in your personal and professional life?
At university, we Māori students had to deal with the attitude that we were stupid, lazy and had nothing to offer scientifically, and I’ve had to deal with that kind of attitude all my life. Nowadays, I just let my work speak for itself. As I’ve got older, I’ve cared less and I’ve found my voice. I focus my attention on what’s important. If someone wants to give me their opinion, that’s fine, but don’t expect me to engage if it’s not a well-constructed argument. I am an academic — I construct arguments based on evidence. I’m not going to engage with a diatribe, especially a racist diatribe.
The critics are getting used to me. Being opinionated and standing up for myself, I am getting a bit of a reputation for being kind of scary. That’s because people who choose to work with me see me as a very capable person, who doesn’t take BS and has an uncanny ability to cut to the chase. These characteristics are what make me successful, and they are desirable traits — in a man. But when these traits are seen in an Indigenous woman, they are scary to those who don’t like the status quo being challenged, because then their own privileges and entitlements show up.
What’s the biggest misconception about a career in science?
There’s an assumption that scientists are not creative people, which is wrong. We just express it in a different way. And there’s a massive misconception that scientists are unemotional, unfeeling human beings. Often, scientists are highly sensitive people who take a lot of things to heart and who will overanalyse every aspect of their lives.
I was working with a non-Indigenous colleague, who was given one of our endangered snails so that he could sequence its genome. But he just couldn’t bring himself to kill it. I suggested that giving it a karakia, a prayer, would be a nice thing to do. For Māori, the snail is a treasure and a gift, and if we are going to sacrifice it for research, then it would go with a karakia to wish it well in its transition. So he did, and that says a lot.
What do you do to get away from science?
I like to travel, experience new cultures and try new foods. I typically go to countries where English is not the main language, because I like to fully immerse myself in a culture and experience everything it has to offer. One of my favourite immersions was in Fiji. I was working with a PhD student to scope out field sites — away from the tourist resorts — getting to know real Fijian life, the people’s struggles and aspirations. I love challenging myself in different environments and listening to different kinds of people. I find it all fascinating.
