In the early 2000s, I spent much of my time over the course of several years fighting the incursion of religion into science classes in the United States. At the time, the main target of religious fundamentalists was evolution. Well-funded groups at places like the Discovery Institute were trying to insert the religious concept of Intelligent Design (ID) into high school science classes on an equal footing with biological evolution—in spite of a lack of evidence in favour of the notion that the current complexity in biological species required divine intelligence to arise, and a massive amount of counter-evidence that the few specific biological systems, such as bacterial flagella, that these groups focused on, evolved from various earlier organisms.

We were very successful, culminating in a famous court case in Dover, Pennsylvania, where a local school board had tried to replace a high school science text with an intelligent design textbook. After testimony from numerous scientists, the judge wrote a remarkable 139-page judgement describing ID as religion, rather than science, and therefore not appropriate for discussion in high school science classes.

Let’s fast forward 25 years and move a few thousand miles northwest. I now live in British Columbia (B.C.). A colleague recently forwarded me the current B.C. high school science curriculum for grades nine and twelve. It includes an embarrassing amalgam of religious gobbledygook and anti-science rhetoric. It is an insult to school children in B.C. and does a disservice to the students of the province at a time when understanding the nature and process of science is becoming increasingly important to their competitive prospects in a world dominated by technology.

You may wonder how religious fundamentalism could so effectively creep into the curriculum in a progressive place like British Columbia. The answer is simple. The religious nonsense being inserted into the curriculum has nothing to do with Christian fundamentalism; rather, it is Indigenous religious nonsense. And in the current climate, Indigenous “knowledge” is held to a different standard from scientific knowledge—or, rather, to no standard at all.