Academic Leadership Four Arrows

Empirical Research
Telling Stories and Living Art:Making Room for Social Justice and Diversity in Graduate Education
Reviewed By Four Arrows
Volume 5 - Issue 2
Jul 31, 2007 - 11:17:42 AM

As an American Indian author, too often have I seen the oppression of wisdom and the ignoring of our “other ways of knowing” that Indigenous students experience in their quest to gain the “credibility” that a degree in higher education can offer in this world. Many cultures who are not full married to Euro-centric ways of learning and producing new knowledge suffer similarly. African American author, Patricia Williams expresses this reality:

I can no longer justify my existence in the academe…The moment I find some symbol of my presence in the rarefied halls of elite institutions, it gets stolen, co-opted, filled with negative meaning (1991, p. 27)

In their book, Research as Resistance: Critical, Indigenous, and Anti-Oppressive Approaches, editors Leslie Brown and Susan Strega (2005) offer chapters about Indigenous research and how its contributions to the world are oppressed in the academy from a Canadian perspective. The situation is worse in the United States.
Battiste in her comprehensive literature review on Indigenous Knowledge and Pedagogy in First Nations Education (Canada) explains why this is a problem:

Indigenous scholars discovered that indigenous knowledge is far more than the binary opposite of western knowledge. As a concept, indigenous knowledge benchmarks the limitations of Eurocentric theory — its methodology, evidence, and conclusions — reconceptualizes the resilience and self-reliance of indigenous peoples, and underscores the importance of their own philosophies, heritages, and educational processes. Indigenous knowledge fills the ethical and knowledge gaps in Eurocentric education, research, and scholarship (2002:5).

In 1999, Maori scholar Linda Tuhiwai Smith published Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. She writes about the importance of Indigenous people creating and applying their own research methodologies that have allowed them to survive for tens of thousands of years. These unique cultural approaches to observing and understanding the world and its relationships, although differing significantly between peoples and nations, often stand in contrast to Eurocentric ways learning about the world. As a result, “Indigenous scholars are in a position to enlarge the scope of research paradigms in ways that will benefit all research traditions (Barnhardt & Kawagley, 2005, p. 13). In other words, many of the ideas that come forward from our Indigenous authors can be useful for all students.

The American Association for the Advancement of Science has begun to recognize the potential contributions that indigenous people can make to our understanding of the world around us (Lambert 2003).

Indigenous societies, as a matter of survival, have long sought to understand the regularities in the world around them, recognizing that nature is underlain with many unseen patterns of order. For indigenous people there is a recognition that many unseen forces are at play in the elements of the universe and that very little is naturally linear, or occurs in a two-dimensional grid or a three dimensional cube. (Barnhardt & Kawagley, 2005, p. 12)

In his 1981 book, The Primal Mind, Jamake Highwater describes the results of education that operates according to the list above:

The West has grown positively sick of looking at itself, and it is trying to catch a glimpse of some vague “otherness,” some potential alternative, some different reality previously hidden beyond the self-congratulatory mirrors of a stifled and windowless civilization. (p. 24).

In this article, I offer a rationale for all students and teachers in higher education, not just non-western or Indigenous ones, to consider alternative approaches to dissertation or thesis research as a way to make room for diverse perspectives that are more likely to lead us toward social and ecological justice.

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