Indigenous Cosmologies and The Institution That Forgot It was One

Western cosmology cannot account for approximately 95 percent of the universe. Its two best measurement methods disagree on the expansion rate. Its dominant model has been patched for decades with more invisible dark energy proposals. None of this has prompted serious examination of the foundational assumptions the model was built on. This paper argues the crisis is not only technical but is institutional. The same centuries in which Western physics embedded its foundational choices were the centuries in which Indigenous relational cosmological traditions were classified as myth rather than knowledge. That classification shaped which questions physics could ask, which frameworks received resources, and which anomalies were permitted to become crises. The paper maps how an institution ceases to experience itself as one. How ontological choices become assumptions, assumptions become infrastructure, and infrastructure eventually becomes indistinguishable from reality. It names the Indigenous cosmological traditions (eg Aboriginal Australian, Blackfoot, Yolŋu, Māori, Anishinaabe) excluded during this process and examines what they offer to the anomalies current cosmology cannot resolve. The final section demonstrates the mechanism in real time.