Indigenous Knowledges in Global Contexts: Multiple Readings of Our Worlds

299 Pages·2000·14.917 MB·English

by  George J. Sefa Dei, Dorothy Goldin Rosenberg, Budd L. Hall

INDIGENOUS KNOWLEDGES IN GLOBAL CONTEXTS'
MULTIPLE READINGS OF OUR WORLD
Edited by George J. Sefa Dei, Budd L. Hall, and Dorothy Goldin Rosenberg
Indigenous knowledges are understood as the commonsense ideas and
cultural knowledges of local peoples concerning the everyday realities of
living. They encompass the cultural traditions, values, belief systems, and
world views that, in any indigenous society, are imparted to the younger
generation by community elders. They also refer to world views that are
products of a direct experience of nature and its relationship with the social
world.
Bringing new and complex readings to the term 'indigenous,' this
collection of essays from contributors from Canada and around the world
discusses indigenous knowledges and their implication for academic
decolonization. The book is divided into four sections: Situating Indigenous
Knowledges: Definitions and Boundaries; Indigenous Knowledges:
Resistance and Advocacy; Indigenous Knowledges and the Academy; and
Indigenous Knowledges and Transforming Practices. Collectively the essays
situate indigenous knowledges in relation to conventional knowledges,
validate the existence of multiple sources of knowledge, and examine the
varying strategies, projects, and theories that are currently being developed in
support of indigenous knowledges.
The book draws attention to some of the nuances, contradictions, and
contestations in affirming the place of indigenous knowledges in the
academy, while maintaining that different bodies of knowledge continually
influence each other.
George J. Sefa Dei is Professor, Department of Sociology in Education,
Ontario Institute for Studies in Education/University of Toronto (OISE/UT).
Budd L. Hall is Professor, Department of Sociology in Education, OISE/UT.
Dorothy Goldin Rosenberg is Professor, Department of Sociology in Educa-
tion, OISE/UT.
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Indigenous Knowledges in
Global Contexts
Multiple Readings of Our World
Edited by George J. Sefa Dei, Budd L. Hall,
and Dorothy Goldin Rosenberg
An OISE/UT book
published in association with
University of Toronto Press
Toronto Buffalo London
www.utppublishing.com
University of Toronto Press Incorporated 2000
Toronto Buffalo London
Printed in Canada
ISBN 0-8020-4200-7 (cloth)
ISBN 0-8020-8059-6 (paper)
Printed on acid-free paper
Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data
Main entry under title:
Indigenous knowledges in global contexts: multiple readings of our world
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 0-8020-4200-7 (bound.)
ISBN 0-8020-8059-6 (pbk.)
1. Ethnoscience. I. Dei, George Jerry Sefa, 1954- . II. Hall,
Budd L. III. Rosenberg, Dorothy Goldin.
GN476.I524 2000 306.4'2 COO-930345-6
University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publish-
ing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council.
University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support for its publishing
activities of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry
Development Program (BPIDP).
Contents
FOREWORD BY DR VANDANA SHIVA Vll
PREFACE Xi
Introduction 3
Part I. Situating Indigenous Knowledges: Definitions and Boundaries
1 Updating Aboriginal Traditions of Knowledge
MARLENE BRANT CASTELLANO 21
2 Heart Knowledge, Blood Memory, and the Voice of the Land:
Implications of Research among Hawaiian Elders
LEILANI HOLMES 37
3 Indigenous Knowledge: Lessons from the Elders - A Kenyan Case
Study
NJOKI NATHANI WANE 54
4 African Development: The Relevance and Implications of
'Indigenousness'
GEORGE J. SEFA DEI 70
Part II. Indigenous Knowledges: Resistance and Advocacy
5 Oral Narratives as a Site of Resistance: Indigenous Knowledge,
Colonialism, and Western Discourse
ELIZABETH McISAAC 89
6 The Retention of Knowledge of Folkways as a Basis for Resistance
PATIENCE ELABOR-IDEMUDIA 102
vi Contents
7 Indigenous Nations and the Human Genome Diversity Project
SANDRA S. AWANG 120
8 Toward Indigenous Wholeness: Feminist Praxis in Transformative
Learning on Health and the Environment
DOROTHY GOLDIN ROSENBERG 137
Part III. Indigenous Knowledges and the Academy
9 Native Studies and the Academy
JOSEPH COUTURE 157
10 Toward an Embodied Pegagogy: Exploring Health and the Body
through Chinese Medicine
ROXANA NG 168
11 Not So Strange Bedfellows: Indigenous Knowledge, Literature Studies,
and African Development
HANDEL KASHOPE WRIGHT 184
12 Breaking the Educational Silence: For Seven Generations, an Information
Legacy of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples
BUDD L. HALL 202
Part IV. Indigenous Knowledges and Transforming Practices
13 Ayurveda: Mother of Indigenous Health Knowledge
FARAH M. SHROFF 215
14 Partnership in Practice: Some Reflections on the Aboriginal Healing
and Wellness Strategy
SUZANNE DUDZIAK 234
15 Peace Research and African Development: An Indigenous African
Perspective
THOMAS MARK TURAY 248
16 Mpambo, the African Multiversity: A Philosophy to Rekindle the
African Spirit
PAUL WANGOOLA 265
CONTRIBUTORS 279
Foreword: Cultural Diversity and the
Politics of Knowledge
DR VANDANA SHIVA
Colonialism has from the very beginning been a contest over the mind and the
intellect. What will count as knowledge? And who will count as expert or
as innovator? Such questions have been central to the project of colonizing
diverse cultures and their knowledge systems. Indigenous knowledges have
been systematically usurped and then destroyed in their own cultures by the
colonizing West.
Diversity and pluralism are a characteristic of non-Western societies. We
have a rich biodiversity of plants for food and medicine. Agricultural diversity
and the diversity of medicinal plants have in turn given rise to a rich plurality of
knowledge systems in agriculture and medicine.
However, under the colonial influence the biological and intellectual
heritage of non-Western societies was devalued. The priorities of scientific
development and R&D efforts, guided by a Western bias, transformed the
plurality of knowledge systems into an hierarchy of knowledge systems. When
knowledge plurality mutated into knowledge hierarchy, the horizontal ordering
of diverse but equally valid systems was converted into a vertical ordering of
unequal systems, and the epistemological foundations of Western knowledge
were imposed on non-Western knowledge systems with the result that the latter
were invalidated.
Western systems of knowledge in agriculture and medicine were defined as
the only scientific systems. Indigenous systems of knowledge were defined as
inferior, and in fact as unscientific. Thus, instead of strengthening research on
safe and sustainable plant-based pesticides such as neem and pongamia, we
focused exclusively on the development and promotion of hazardous and
nonsustainable chemical pesticides such as DDT and Sevin. The use of DDT
causes millions of deaths each year and has increased the occurrence of pests
12,000 fold. The manufacture of Sevin at the Union Carbide plant in Bhopal led
viii Foreword
to a disaster that killed thousands and that has disabled more than 400,000
people.
It is now recognized that the use of chemicals to control pests has been an
ecological calamity, and as a result the use of plant-based pesticides is becom-
ing popular in the industrialized world. Corporations that long promoted the use
of chemicals are now looking for biological options. In their efforts to develop
new markets and to control the production of biopesticides, transnational
corporations (TNCs) such as W.R. Grace are claiming international patent
rights on neem-based pesticides.
Research in the field of drugs and medicines has taken an identical path.
Indigenous systems of medicine and the properties of medicinal plants were
totally neglected in Western scientific research and health policy, which fo-
cused exclusively on the Western allopathic system and on 'exporting' technol-
ogy from the Western pharmaceutical industry. Thus health and pharmaceutical
budgets in the Third World were heavily weighted in favour of developing and
disseminating the Western allopathic system. Indigenous medical systems have
long been officially neglected in India, yet that nation's various systems of 'folk
medicine' are based on over 7,000 species of medicinal plants and 15,000
herbal formulations. The Ayurvedic texts refer to 1,400 plants, Unani texts .to
342, and the Siddha system to 328. Western homeopathy uses 570 plants, of
which approximately 100 are native to India. The economic value of medicinal
plants to 100 million rural Indian households is immeasurable.
Meantime, the Western public is growing increasingly aware of the side
effects of hazardous drugs, and of the rise of strains resistant to antibiotics; and
as a result, the Western pharmaceuticals industry is turning more and more to
the plant-based systems of Indian and Chinese medicine. Drugs derived from
indigenous medicinal systems are now being patented at an exponential rate.
The current value of the world market for medicines derived from indigenous
and local knowledges is estimated to be $43 billion. The use of traditional
knowledge has increased the efficiency of screening plants for medical proper-
ties by more than 400 per cent.
It is now generally recognized that the chemical route to strengthening agricul-
ture and health care has failed, and must be abandoned. This provides us with an
opportunity to re-evaluate indigenous knowledge systems and to move away
from the false hierarchy of knowledge systems back toward a plurality. The
pluralistic approach to knowledge systems requires us to respect different such
systems - to embrace their own logic and their own epistemological foundations.
It also requires us to accept that one system (i.e., the Western system) need not
and must not serve as the scientific benchmark for all systems, and that diverse
systems need not be reduced to the language and logic of Western knowledge
Foreword ix
systems. The integrity of our biological intellectual heritage can be protected only
after we embrace the pluralistic perspective. A hierarchical perspective will
continue to project the Western paradigm as scientifically superior in spite of its
now proven failure to keep people healthy and to safeguard their food supplies.
As well, the assumption that a hierarchy exists, and should exist, is the underlying
basis for legitimizing piracy as invention.
The phenomena of 'biopiracy' and 'intellectual piracy,' whereby Western
commercial interests claim products and innovations derived from indigenous
traditions as their 'intellectual property' (through protections such as patents),
have emerged because indigenous knowledge systems have been devalued and
(it follows) have not been afforded protection. This lack of protection reflects
the reductionist approach that the West imposes on indigenous knowledge
systems. Also, Western-style IPR systems are biased toward Western knowl-
edge systems, which reduce biodiversity to its chemical or genetic structures;
thus, indigenous systems get no protection, yet the theft of these systems is
protected. As long as Western-style IPR regimes continue to gain influence,
such intellectual and biological piracy will continue to grow until a system for
protecting biodiversity and indigenous knowledge systems is established.
Protecting this planet's biological and intellectual heritage in the age of
biopiracy will require that we recognize and rejuvenate this heritage, and
develop legal systems for guarding it in the context of emerging IPR regimes.
Indigenous knowledge is thus at the heart of the global issues of our times.
The future of indigenous knowledges will not simply determine whether the
diverse cultures of the world evolve in freedom or are colonized; it will
also determine whether humanity and diverse species survive. The theft of
indigenous knowledges by the West will not offer protection to the world's
indigenous communities or to the diverse species with which they have coevolved.
Knowledge of other species - of biodiversity - has been central to the
survival of indigenous peoples. It is also at the heart of the global economic
enterprise. There are two paradigms of biodiversity conservation. The first
involves local communities, which sustain themselves by utilizing and con-
serving biodiversity. The second involves commercial interests, which make
their profits harvesting this planet's biodiversity and feeding that harvest into
industrial systems of production. For indigenous communities, conserving
biodiversity means conserving the integrity of ecosystems and species, safe-
guarding their rights to these resources, and maintaining their production
systems, which are based on long awareness of biodiversity. For them,
biodiversity has intrinsic value as well as high use value. For commercial
interests, biodiversity itself has no value; it is merely 'raw material' for produc-
ing commodities and maximizing profits.