We're saps for the "noble savage."

The movie "Avatar" is just the newest in a long list of pop culture artifacts in which a 97-pound weakling from industrial society becomes a new, better man by joining a tribe that lives in an holistic union with nature.

But once we take off the rose-colored (or 3-D) glasses, it's back to business as usual: watching our noble savages ride off into the sunset, not caring a whole lot about how they view the world.

Empirical and traditional methods for observing nature can complement each other, however. Take this case from the James Bay region of northern Quebec, as reported recently on Science Daily:

In the mid-1980s, the same highway used to facilitate construction of the controversial James Bay hydroelectric project was opened up to allow sport hunters into the once-inaccessible region to pursue game, including abundant moose.

The area's native Cree had long relied upon moose for food and other materials, as part of their traditional, subsistence way of life. Based on traditional monitoring methods, which combine moose sightings with tracking and encountering moose scat, they believed by the late 1980s that James Bay's population of the massive ungulates was crashing.

The region's professional wildlife managers didn't take their worries seriously. But it turned out that the Cree were right.

The road that had been opened to sport hunters also brought in logging operations, which literally cut away cover that moose used to hide from prying eyes.  

So even as overall moose numbers dropped, the remaining animals were easier to spot -- both by wildlife managers doing aerial surveys, and hunters looking for quarry. The hunters were able to kill the same number of moose, while wildlife managers extrapolated from survey and hunting data that the population was stable.

By the early 1990s, however, it apparently became impossible to ignore the fact that moose were getting very thin on the ground. (The moose population had been cut in half in less than a decade by overhunting.) The professionals began to listen a lot more seriously to the observations made by the indigenous Cree via their traditional methods.  "Today the Canadian wildlife authorities have learned their lesson," Science Daily chirps, "and work closely with the Cree, listening to what they have to say, and respecting their intimate knowledge of the environment."

Patricia Cochran, the director of the Alaska Native Science Commission, is working to make these sorts of collaborations more common.

An Inupiaq and a health professional herself, Cochran (who I met at the Copenhagen climate talks last December) told me that collaboration between scientists and Alaska Natives is a challenging process on all sides.  

For scientists trained in empirical research methods, it means "not just looking at a specific question, but at the interaction [of a species] with everything around it," she said. "Other creatures, food sources, weather conditions. We tend to look at things holistically."

In turn, some Native Alaskans have struggled with mistrust of Western methods of gathering information -- which in comparison to indigenous knowledge, excel at revealing the invisible. Cochran said that in a collaboration involving a study of harbor seals in the Prince William Sound, "it really took a while for our community to agree with scientists that we would tag an animal," Cochran told me. "People had to be convinced that tagging wouldn't harm them."

In this age of climate disruption, we must become more resilient to change. It would probably make a lot of sense to learn the lesson of Quebec's disappearing moose, and embrace different but equally valid ways of observing and understanding what's going on around us.  We just have to stay clear-eyed about indigenous knowledge, as well as careful with how we apply the scientific method.