Indigenous knowledge and academic imperialism

International Journal of Inclusive Education, 2000

This paper is an invitation to critically engage in the discussion of 'Indigenous knowledges' and the implication for academic decolonization. Among the issues raised are questions of the definition and operationalization of Indigenous knowledges and the challenges of pursuing such knowledge in the Western academy. The paper draws attention to some of the nuances, contradictions and contestations in affirming the place of Indigenous knowledges in the academy. It is pointed out that Indigenous knowledges do not 'sit in pristine fashion' outside of the effects of other knowledges. In particular, the paper brings new and complex readings to the term 'Indigenous' maintaining that different bodies of knowledge continually influence each other to show the dynamism of all knowledge systems. It is argued that when located in the Euro-American educational contexts, 'Indigenous knowledges' can be fundamentally an experientially-based, non-universal, holistic and relational knowledge of 'resistance'. In the discussion, the paper interrogates the notions of tradition, authenticity, orality and the assertion of indigenous identity as crucial to the educational and political project of affirming Indigenous knowledges.

2020

© 2016 by the Contemporary Science Association, New York. In this article we investigate strategies for authentically engaging Indigenous knowledges in the epistemologically Western "uni-versity" using data from cross-institutional, virtual international student exchanges between University of Alaska Fairbanks and Victoria University of Wellington. Analysis of student perspectives on Indigenous Knowledges (IK) from discussion forums illustrates their growing understandings of IK as authentic, complex systems generating distinct theoretical and analytic frames; including insights as to how these frames provide innovative, cross-disciplinary processes and solutions to current challenges. Targeted and student-generated questions initiated dynamic dialogue, including: the intersections and divergences of Western and Indigenous knowledge systems; the roles of Indigenous languages in enhancing understandings of IK; the potential for bridging or interfacing IK and Western knowled...

Engaged Scholar Journal: Community-Engaged Research, Teaching, and Learning

In response to the Truth and Reconciliation Calls to Action (TRC, 2015), a school board teamed with university educators and educational partners to generate a professional learning series to support educators’ engagement with Indigenous knowledges. A research team that assembled two years later interviewed the learning series participants to explore how educators were navigating Indigenous knowledge within a Eurocentric school system. This research acknowledges the challenges of doing this work within shifting institutional policies and initiatives, the wider politics of Indigenous and non-Indigenous relations, building intercultural understandings and community partnerships, and negotiating epistemological difference. The researchers — including Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples — echoed resonances with the participants that occurred throughout the data collection process and often spoke about the parallel paths of research and schooling — both historically used as tools of c...

A shift in the way that knowledge is understood and recognised has been occurring in the Western academy in recent years. Marked by significant works from within the academy, such as those by Connell (2008), Denzin and Lincoln (2005), and Kincheloe and Semali (1998), and from a growing acknowledgment of theorists, academics and activists from outside the canon, the understanding of knowledge systems and ways of knowing different to that from the West has gathered momentum. This paper will explore some of the key tenets of recent writing in the engagement of ‘indigenous’ and ‘al- ternative’ knowledge systems in terms of ‘border’ theory, whilst charting a direction for research methodologies that engage and remain respectful to epistemologies and ways of knowing alternative to those of the Western academy.

Australasian Philosophical Review, 2024

This paper focuses on Elizabeth Anderson's application of the epistemological idiom of mētis to the debate over the equal status of indigenous knowledge and scientific knowledge in the academic curriculum. Against the denial of this equal status by critics of indigenous knowledge or science, Anderson defends what one might term a conciliatory view, the view, roughly, that indigenous knowledge meets the criteria of scientific knowledge presupposed by the critics of the equal status of indigenous knowledge and scientific knowledge in the academic curriculum, and it is continuous with agroecological form of mainstream scientific inquiry. I argue that the conciliatory view does not rest substantively on mētis as an epistemological idiom since the view is based on the direct conceptual relation between the notion of indigenous knowledge and the notion of scientific knowledge or inquiry. More importantly, the view amounts to appealing to the critics of the equal status of indigenous knowledge on the terms of those critics and leaves unchallenged those very core assumptions that ground their denial of the equal status of indigenous knowledge in the first place. Building on Anderson's fruitful analysis of mētis, I attempt a sketch of an alternative view that vindicates the equal status of indigenous knowledge and scientific knowledge in the academic curriculum, but which avoids those drawbacks.

Curriculum and Teaching Dialogue, 2017

Our interest in asserting the validity of our Indigeneity within academia brought us together at the Annual International Maroon Conference, Jamaica in 2014. Here we recognized our common heritage rooted within the context of colonization and our want to move beyond the borders of geography in breaking down the hegemonic boundaries of Western education imposed upon us. Tirza, a US based Nanny of the Maroons scholar of Jamaican heritage, and Denzel, a First Nation Kamilaroi scholar from Australia, critically interrogated the inadequacy of academia to facilitate our scholarship and efforts to interrogate the dynamics of exclusion and alienation in claiming our rightful place within academia. Meditating on global matters, we explored themes of Indigeneity and resistance, questioning our physical location within respective continents where institutionalized racism maintained the hegemonic system of poverty, inequality and educational apartheid among our people--African Americans and Abo...

2016

There has been a persistent contest among contemporary scholars over what is considered legitimate knowledge. This contest has implications on ways of knowing, organizing society, and responding to environmental chal-lenges. The Western education system is a hybrid of different knowledge, adopted through European global expansion, to enrich our learning in for-mal educational settings. This article examines the production of Western knowledge and its validation, imposition, and effects on indigenous people and their knowledge. The author argues that there is a relationship between knowledge producers and their motives with the society in which they live. This relationship influences what is considered “legitimate knowledge ” in society, politics, and economy in non-Western contexts.

Journal of Education, 2004

Indigenous knowledge' is a relatively recent buzz phrase that, amongst other things, constitutes part of a challenge to 'western' education. Apologists of indigenous knowledge not only maintain that its study has a profound effect on education and educational curricula but emphasise its significance in antiracist, antisexist and postcolonialist discourse, in general, and in terms of the 'African Renaissance', in particular. In this paper, I argue the following: (1) 'indigenous knowledge' involves at best an incomplete, partial or, at worst, a questionable understanding or conception of knowledge; (2) as a tool in antidiscrimination and anti-repression discourse (e.g. driving discussions around literacy, numeracy, poverty alleviation and development strategies in Africa), 'indigenous knowledge' is largely inappropriate. I show, further, that in the development of 'knowledge', following some necessary conceptual readjustments in our understanding of this term, there is considerably greater common ground than admitted by theorists. It is this acknowledgement, not lip service to a popular concept of debatable relevance, that has profound educational and ethical consequences.

Socio (2), 2013