This rhetorical beat is annoying because it's relatively uncommon for it to actually come from indigenous voices - frequently it's coming from disaffected radical members of the cultural or ethnic mainstream, seeking either absolution or spiritual fulfillment in an exoticized carve-out from science.
Does science often have a white, patriarchal, or "Western" bias? Absolutely. Does it belong to "the West"? Absolutely not. It's universal!
Couldn’t have said it better myself. Encounter it very often in museums
The amount of this shit I saw when I worked at a museum was eye opening. I think of it as an older thing? But even so. I spent a lot of effort trying to humanize every group the museum* covered, and probably got the most push back in the Native American gallery.
*I was a docent at Fruitlands Museum. It has four buildings on a big property- the Fruitlands farmhouse, where Alcott’s transcendentalist commune was, a shaker office building from the closed local village, a painting gallery, and a Native American collection- mostly modern (native made) repros now.