Indigenous knowledges, universities, and alluvial zones of paradigm change

ABSTRACT

In the past two decades, Indigenous faculty and graduate students at research-intensive universities have been asserting a kind of cultural and intellectual sovereignty over their own academic production and participation. While colonization through assimilationist education suppressed – and continues to suppress – Indigenous community knowledge and Indigenous scholars have been drawing on Indigenist revival movements creating new academic works and challenging the conventions of what constitutes research. This article presents conversations in contested spaces regarding Indigenous identity and expression. It draws, in part, on the author’s own experience traveling between Indigenous communities and universities while supervising Indigenous PhD students. Universities are in conflicted positions as they ostensibly invite Indigenous expression, but resist the undoing of conventional hierarchies that maintain hegemonic equilibrium. Are Universities that open spaces for Indigenous knowledges and the place-based blending – and bending – of metaphysical and physical realities leading a paradigm change in ecological consciousness? Can Indigenous scholars and Indigenous communities be represented in academic locations in ways that redirect the goals and purposes of research and knowledge production? This writing is a reflection on emerging, and ongoing, questions of Indigenous advance in academic spaces.

KEYWORDS:

• Indigenous knowledge production
• higher education
• ontological equity
• place-based epistemologies
• ecological consciousness

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 The Coast Salish Transformer is spelled and pronounced a number of different ways depending on the language, dialect, and orthography referenced. This spelling is connected to Halkomeylem. Note that Ellen Rice White, from Vancouver Island, uses a different spelling, XEEL’S. The Transformer (or sometimes Transformers) is not a unified classification, but rather a reference to a shared primordial understanding of creation stories and landscape among Salish peoples.