What is Indigenous Knowledge?

Voices from the Academy

Ladislaus M. Semali, Joe L. Kincheloe, Joe L. Kincheloe

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9781135578497
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Ladislaus M. Semali and Joe L. Kincheloe's edited book, What is Indigenous Knowledge?: Voices from the Academy not only exposes the fault lines of modernist grand narratives, but also illuminates, in a vivid and direct way, what it means to come to subjectivity in the margins. The international panel of contributors from both industrialized and developing countries, led by Semali and Kincheloe, injects a dramatic dynamic into the analysis of knowledge production and the rules of scholarship, opening new avenues for discussion in education, philosophy, cultural studies, as well as in other important fields.

CHAPTER ONE

Introduction: What is Indigenous Knowledge and Why Should We Study It?

Ladislaus M. Semali and Joe L. Kincheloe

The term, indigenous, and thus the concept of indigenous knowledge has often been associated in the Western context with the primitive, the wild, the natural. Such representations have evoked condescension from Western observers and elicited little appreciation for the insight and understanding indigeneity might provide. But for others, especially the millions of indigenous peoples of Africa, Latin America, Asia, and Oceania, indigenous knowledge (or what others have called the native ways of knowing) is an everyday rationalization that rewards individuals who live in a given locality. In part, to these individuals, indigenous knowledge reflects the dynamic way in which the residents of an area have come to understand themselves in relationship to their natural environment and how they organize that folk knowledge of flora and fauna, cultural beliefs, and history to enhance their lives.

This book examines the social, cultural, and political issues that surround indigeneity and focuses on the benefits to be derived from the inclusion of indigenous knowledge in the academy. Such a task, however, will not be accomplished easily. Indigenous knowledge is an ambiguous topic that immediately places analysts on a dangerous terrain. Not only are scholars unsure what we’re talking about, but many analysts are uncertain who should be talking about it. As the editors of this book, we are acutely aware of these complex dynamics and the threats they present. Nevertheless, we perceive the benefits of the study of indigenous knowledge sufficiently powerful to merit the risk. We find indigenous knowledge to be intellectually evocative—useful for a variety of purposes in a plethora of contexts. It is this multi-dimensional usefulness that we and the authors of the various chapters of this book will address, as we attempt to provide insights into the questions proposed by the title.

The provocative questions put forward here challenge us from the start to define indigenous knowledge. The dilemma we face in defining indigenous knowledge and what it means in the context of millions of indigenous peoples of the world is central to the postmodern and postcolonial debates on the origins of knowledge and the manner in which it is produced, archived, retrieved and distributed throughout the academy. For about three years, these questions have preoccupied the members of the Interinstitutional Consortium for Indigenous Knowledge (ICIK) based at the Pennsylvania State University. Founded in 1995, this inter-collegiate, interdisciplinary Working Group has debated the merits and other common interest issues in indigenous knowledge and its relevance to the areas of teaching, research, and extension. The Working Group has received sponsorship through the colleges of Education and Agricultural Sciences at Penn State to sponsor monthly seminars and a series of events through which to explore the possibility of establishing a Center for Indigenous Knowledge in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.

ICIK is one among over 50 growing networks of indigenous knowledge resource centers that serve as local clearinghouses. Most of these centers are national in scope and serve an important networking function for individuals from many different disciplines and professions who may be scattered across the institutional landscape. National resource centers also serve to protect intellectual property rights to knowledge that could be used for the benefit of the country. A number of the indigenous knowledge centers, particularly The International Center for Indigenous Knowledge for Agriculture and Rural Development (CIKARD), located at Iowa State University, and two centers located in the Netherlands, are more global in their scope. Through the leadership of these centers, a worldwide field of study is emerging with its own publication, The Indigenous Knowledge and Development Monitor.

For ICIK members, a Commonwealth Center for Indigenous Knowledge serves to link Pennsylvania’s many institutions of higher education with the knowledge base that is unique to the communities of the Commonwealth by providing a variety of services such as:

• engaging in the validation of indigenouss knowledge.

• producing new research methods for studying indigenous knowledge.

• giving students and faculty both the methodologies for recording indigenous knowledge and the tools for using it effectively (e.g., curriculum materials, courses, lecture series, research projects involving faculty, graduate, and undergraduates students).

• promoting diversity by valuing the ways-of-knowing that are characteristic of various cultures.

• promoting interdisciplinary, participatory research and cooperative problem-solving between communities and academic institutions.

• enhancing locally-appropriate development efforts in the Commonwealth.

• enhancing the internationalization of the curriculum of academic institutions by giving faculty and students ready access to a global network of indigenous knowledge resource centers.

• identifying and compiling resources.

• increasing teacher awareness of indigenous knowledge through a worldwide integrated database and the National Association for Science, Technology and Society.

• providing teacher training programs in Pennsylvania with methods which demonstrate how to use both local and scientific knowledge to make decisions about natural resource use and the environment.

• providing a linkage to Science, Technology and Society educational programs.

• encouraging interaction between indigenous epistemologies and western epistemologies for the purpose of finding new methods to produce knowledge.

These goals and ideas were put to a public forum discussion at the first ICIK conference held in April 1996 at the Penn State campus with the theme: Indigenous Knowledge and its role in the academy. In the following year, a second conference was held in April 1997 to follow up on the first. The debates in these two conferences focused on the epistemological and practical questions emerging from the notion of indigenous knowledge and how it is valued and used in the community. One outcome of such gatherings was that educators, scientists, and students came to the realization that indigenous knowledge does not exist in a vacuum and that it belongs to a community, and access to this knowledge is gained through contact with that community.

The idea of having conferences on indigenous knowledge was troubling to some people both from the theoretical and practical sense. On the one hand, it was troubling because of the prevailing idea that knowledge cannot be owned by one community and that suggesting boundaries to knowledge was a futile enterprise. These doubts led to questions like: Can knowledge be local? Can a community own a knowledge system? How is knowledge produced in an indigenous community? Is there a role of indigenous knowledge in the academy? In what ways can indigenous knowledge be integrated in the academy without devaluing one system over the other? What are the political, social, cultural, and academic ramifications? Can we interface African folk wisdom popularly found in African and African American communities, or indigenous healing practices, health enhancement therapies, nutrition and food practices, genetic diversification, livestock production, and agricultural practices with new technological developments in the academy’s laboratories? Does culture have anything to do with how knowledge is produced and distributed in the academy? How can we preserve or promote indigenous knowledge without threatening it to extinction?

On the other hand, raising these challenging questions was an important opportunity to expose the arguments on both sides. Inspired by Agenda 21 of the Earth Summit held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (Kakonge, 1995), some ICIK members were not easily swayed or dis-heartened by the deluge of unanswered questions. It was important to realize that some of the members were descendants of indigenous communities while others had worked with indigenous people in many parts the world. From their experience, they knew that indigenous peoples make choices about the environment they live in—an environment which has been for centuries the source of food, water, medicine, and other natural resources that sustain them and their families; they know what is valuable knowledge and what is not; they know from their own life experiences through trial and error how to treat disease, tend livestock, manage aquatic resources, provide health therapies, and how to preserve and pass on such local knowledge from one generation to the next.

The ICIK conferences provided opportunity for discipline related groups to engage in frank, in-depth, and serious dialogue. An examination of the function of knowledge was deemed necessary and a close scrutiny of how it is produced in the academy at the expense of indigenous systems and how the academy trains its own scientists was now open to critique. Educators, sociologists, economists, agriculturalists, rural development specialists, and others were willing to study the issues. Their resolve was to increase and improve the study and understanding of indigenous knowledge systems around the world, both in-and outside of the academy. Thus, the presentations in this volume are attempts to implement this resolve. Each chapter provides insights into one of the many complex domains of indigenous knowledge.

As we begin our foray into indigenous cultures and their knowledges, it is important for us to map our positionalities and the reasons we have chosen to undertake this work. We are scholars from different parts of the world and products of profoundly diverse cultures; yet, we are bound together by an interesting set of political, pedagogical, moral, and even cultural similarities. These similarities point to the problems engendered by essentialistic reliance upon macro-social proclamations. Culture as it plays out in the intersection of the macro- and micro-social aspects of lived reality too often confounds easy categorization—a point that keeps emerging throughout this book. We joke that we are both hillbillies, albeit of an African Kilimanjaro and a southern U.S. Appalachian variety. A brief biographical statement that positions us both in relation to the issues addressed is in order.

Locating Ourselves

My African Origins

I (Ladi) was born on the slopes of the Kilimanjaro in Tanzania. The more than one million people who reside on Mount Kilimanjaro share a similar history and culture. They occupy closely spaced homesteads extending between the elevations of 2,000 and 4,000 feet above sea level, on the southern slopes of Mount Kilimanjaro. In pre-independence Tanzania (then known as Tanganyika), the population in the Kilimanjaro region was divided into about 30 distinct chiefdoms (or territories). First the Germans, and later the British, consolidated these systems into a few administrative units by setting up the paramount chief (Mangi Mkuu) as a native ruler of the Wachagga of Kilimanjaro. German missionaries established the first schools on Mount Kilimanjaro in the late nineteenth century and introduced the Chagga people to the cash economy and to the techniques of coffee cultivation, a farming technique that was borrowed from other colonial territories at the time. By the early 20th century, education was an important way for the Chagga people to enter the expanding political economy and an important way for chiefs to redefine their political power.

I grew up in a large peasant family: father, mother, and ten siblings.

I also belonged as we all did, to a broader extended family of uncles, aunts, cousins, and to the village community as a whole. We spoke Kichagga as we worked in the fields. We spoke Kichagga in and outside the home. I can remember vividly those evenings of storytelling around the fireside. On many occasions in full moon we sang, danced, and competed with voices from across the valley that sung from the top of their voices way into the dead of night. Each night had a different song and a different dance. The colorful stories told every night in song and narration, with mostly animals as the main characters were all told in Kichagga. In many fables, riddles and proverbs were weaved into many of these stories as lessons to be learned. I remember the hare, being small, weak, but full of innovative wit and cunning, was our hero. We identified with him as he struggled against the brutes of prey, both large and small, like the lion, leopard, jackal, and hyena. His victories were our victories and as was often reinforced by my grandmother at her fireside, we learnt that the apparently weak can outwit the strong. We followed the animals in their struggle against hostile nature—drought, rain, sun, wind—a confrontation often forcing them to search for forms of cooperation. But we were also interested in their struggles amongst themselves, and particularly between the beasts and the victims of prey. These twin struggles, against nature and other animals, reflected real life struggles in the human world.

Not that we neglected stories with human beings as the main characters. Often my grandmother recounted episodes from her own youth, how they were mistreated by the Europeans during World War I, how hard they worked in the fields, and how they had to tattoo their bodies so as to avoid being taken as slaves. Cooperation as the ultimate good in a community was a constant theme. It could unite human beings with animals against beasts of prey. We therefore learnt many lessons through stories, ceremonies, symbolism, and also learned to value words for their meaning and nuances. From my elders, I learnt the music of our language on top of the content. The language, through images and symbols, gave us a view of the world, but it had a beauty of its own. The home and the fields, were then my “pre-primary” school. But what is important for this discussion is that our immediate and wider community, and the language of work in the fields, were one. Each part of the natural world is hitched to the universe—connected to all other parts of nature. Therefore, language was not a mere string of words. It had a suggestive power well beyond the immediate and apparent meaning. It carried the lesson. Our appreciation of the suggestive magical power of language was reinforced by the games we played with words through riddles, proverbs, transpositions of syllables, or songs. These lessons readily illustrated in simple personal life stories, recollections, and memories, formed part of the indigenous education, history, and one of multiple ways of knowing passed on from the generations of my grandmother and father to us. The lessons provided a powerful new sense of identity.

I recall vividly the many days I accompanied my mother and father to go to work in the maize (corn) fields. I listened to them telling stories about their youth and about their challenges in life. My mother never passed the opportunity to alert me about the different plants which were treatments for snake-bites, spider bites, and many other remedies for headache, stomachache, and so on. My father often warned me to remember not to cut certain trees or shrubs for feeding the animals. He would explain how poisonous and deadly such grass would be to our livestock. All this information was learned effortlessly and stored in memory as a way of survival in a wild and cruel terrain.

Then, I went to school, a colonial school, and this harmony was broken. The language of my education was no longer the language of my culture. I first went to Iwa Primary School. Our language of education was now Kiswahili. My struggle began at a very early age constantly trying to find parallels in my culture with what was being taught in the classroom. In school we followed the British colonial syllabus. The books we read in class had been written by Mrs. Bryce, mostly adapted and translated into Kiswahili from British curricula. We read stories and sung songs about having tea in an English garden, taking a ride on the train, sailing in the open seas, and walking the streets of town. These were, unfortunately, stories far removed from our life experiences. As expected, we memorized them even though they were meaningless.

By the time I was in fifth grade Swahili was no longer the medium of instruction. English had taken over and Kiswahili was only a subject taught once a week. Kichagga was not to be spoken at any time and if caught speaking it we were severely punished. Thus, one of the most humiliating experiences was to be caught speaking Kichagga while still on the school grounds. The culprit was given corporal punishment—three to five strokes of the cane on the buttocks. And how did the teachers catch the culprits? A wooden button with the word “English” curved into both its sides was initially given to one pupil who was supposed to hand it over to whoever was caught speaking Kichagga or Kiswahili. Whomever had the button at the end of the day would have to say who had given it to him and the ensuing process would bring out all the culprits of the day. Thus children were turned into witch hunters and in the process were being taught the lucrative value of being a traitor to one’s immediate community. It is important to note here that the English language was highly rewarded. It was the measure of intelligence and ability in the humanities, the sciences, and all the other branches of learning. English became the main determinant of a child’s progress and one of the criteria for promotion up the ladder of formal education. Oral literature in Swahili or Kichagga stopped. In secondary school I read Gulliver’s Travels, Dickens, Oliver Twist and Huckleberry Finn, and later my knowledge in literature grew more sophisticated as I got introduced to Chaucer, T. S. Eliot, with a touch of the Latin version of Virgil.

The new stories in English literature competed and replaced in classrooms many traditional stories about land, mother earth, water sources, good behavior, respect for elders, the environment, and so on. The introduction of fables into schools from outside intentionally interrupted indigenous knowledge. The new and “superior” knowledge preferred the morals, customs, and ways of knowing brought by missionaries as well as colonial rulers who colonized many of the indigenous peoples of Africa. Traditional stories were ignored and despised by emphasizing a European or missionary moral position. Through imported books, a particular European-centered literacy education was introduced to us in schools at a very early age. A eurocentric knowledge system, therefore, attempted to replace local practices, history, language, and cultural values while claiming that such replacement was vital because of the claim made that many indigenous communities did not have written languages. What is often overlooked in such claims is that the dissemination of books and other literacy materials was done and continues to be done not entirely for altruistic reasons but also for economic and political reasons intended to erase and subjugate indigenous knowledge systems.

For my grandfather and grandmother and their siblings, literacy, particularly oral literacy, was the main vehic...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Chapter One Introduction: What is Indigenous Knowledge and Why Should We Study It?
• Chapter Two Indigenous Knowledge and Schooling: A Continuum Between Conflict and Dialogue
• Chapter Three Indigenous Knowledge as a Component of the School Curriculum
• Chapter Four Community as Classroom: (Re)Valuing Indigenous Literacy
• Chapter Five Science Education in Nonwestern Cultures: Towards a Theory of Collateral Learning
• Chapter Six Indigenous Knowledge, Indigenous Learning, Indigenous Research
• Chapter Seven Indigenous Knowledge Systems—Ecological Literacy Through Initiation into People’s Science
• Chapter Eight Indigenous Knowledge and Ethnomathematics Approach in the Brazilian Landless People Education
• Chapter Nine Indigenous Music Education in Africa
• Chapter Ten The Inseparable Link Between Intellectual and Spiritual Formation in Indigenous Knowledge and Education: A Case Study in Tanzania
• Chapter Eleven Indigenous Languages in the School Curriculum: What Happened to Kiswahili in Kenya?
• Chapter Twelve Indigenous Knowledge Systems for an Alternative Culture in Science: The Role of Nutritionists in Africa
• Chapter Thirteen Agricultural Extension Education and the Transfer of Knowledge in an Egyptian Oasis
• Chapter Fourteen Indigenous People’s Knowledge and Education: A Tool for Development?
• Chapter Fifteen Local Knowledge Systems and Vocational Education in Developing Countries1
• Chapter Sixteen Indigenous Knowledge, Historical Amnesia and Intellectual Authority: Deconstructing Hegemony and the Social and Political Implications of the Curricular “Other”
• Chapter Seventeen Indigenous Knowledge: An Interpretation of Views from Indigenous Peoples1
• About the Editors and Contributors
• Index