The Star Knowledge They Called 'Folklore'

In 1890, the US Bureau of Indian Affairs banned all 'pagan' star ceremonies. The same year, European astronomers were still debating whether meteors came from space. Native star trackers had mapped the Pleiades' motion, predicted lunar eclipses to the minute, and aligned medicine wheels to solstices with architectural precision. The Smithsonian called their records 'folklore' and stored them in the ethnography wing, not the astronomy wing. The distinction was not about accuracy. It was about who was allowed to be accurate.