  We study dark matter scattering off ${}^4$He and other light nuclei using
chiral effective field theory. We consider scalar DM interactions and include
both one- and two-nucleon scattering processes. The DM interactions and nuclear
wave functions are obtained from chiral effective field theory and we work up
to fourth order in the chiral expansion for the latter to investigate the
chiral convergence. The results for the scattering rates can be used to
determine the sensitivity of planned experiments to detect relatively light
dark matter particles using ${}^4$He. We find that next-to-leading-order scalar
currents are smaller than expected from power counting for scattering off
${}^4$He confirming earlier work. However, the results for two-nucleon
corrections exhibit a linear regulator dependence indicating potential problems
in the applied power counting. We observe a linear correlation between the, in
principle not observable, D-wave probability of various light nuclei and the
scalar two-nucleon matrix elements, again pointing towards potentially missing
contributions.
