Humans watch the sky all of the time and look for the reassuring planets and stars that we identify with. In the north, those stars might include Polaris the North Star, or Betelgeuse in the constellation of Orion. We learn about these stars and the constellations in the sky as children in school even if we live in urban areas where it is too bright to even see many of them.
But, we learn about these objects based on the names and stories we see in textbooks. These constellations and names were codified by a group of professional astronomers about a century ago and these names are based on Greco-Roman stories and European naming. That is, the names we learn are typically anglicized names since we are in primarily English-speaking countries like Canada and the US. On the other hand, the nation of Canada was built on the lands of Indigenous peoples who spoke a plethora of languages and had their own names for stars and constellations.
We do not see these languages or names in STEM and astronomy thanks to centuries of colonization, racism, and underrepresentation of Indigenous peoples and knowledges in these fields of study. Sometimes we in professional astronomy adopt Indigenous names for newly discovered objects, be them moons of Saturn, or interstellar asteroids passing through our Solar System, or naming of exoplanets. This is a nice change, but these objects have something in common, we do not see these celestial objects with the unaided eye in the same way we can observe the North Star or Saturn itself. Astronomers claim that this is a step forward in being inclusive of Indigenous and non-Eurocentric cultures, and to some extent it is. However, it is not equitable.
I do not see a future where it would be understood to call Polaris by any Indigenous name or seeing Saturn and its moons in textbooks written in non-English names. The naming of these objects has been defined by the International Astronomical Union, itself a construct of the Eurocentric system. As such the naming of objects has been defined in a system that benefited from a history of colonization, imperialism. Furthermore, naming is also led by those people who get credited with discoveries. In current astronomy, that means the naming of objects is subject to the whims of mostly White scientists and inclusion then depends on their benevolence.
What would a “decolonized” sky look like? How would we name objects, would we use maps in every language to reflect all of the different cultures under those stars? Could we create a star map that blends these languages in a shared mapping? I don’t know what a decolonized mapping of the night sky could be, but we should not fool ourselves into thinking that using Indigenous words to name new discoveries is inclusion. It is not really, it is performative and nice, but it does nothing to be more inclusive of Indigenous people in the daily life of science. It is worse because scientists can use this naming for their own benefit. That is, it is a tool to receive attention for work and credit for diversity work, but what is actually changed?