Please join us for the next HERG seminar:
Friday, February 3, 2017, 12:00-2:00, Multipurpose Room (room 2012), Ponderosa Commons Oak House
Cash Ahenakew, Assistant Professor, Department of Educational Studies, UBC
Grafting Indigenous Ways of Knowing Onto Non-Indigenous Ways of Being: The (Underestimated) Challenges of a Decolonial Imagination
Abstract:
This article examines issues that arise when Indigenous epistemologies are interpreted through non-Indigenous ontologies in research settings. I use the concept of grafting to refer to the act of transplanting ways of knowing and being from a context where they emerge naturally to a context where they are artificially implanted. I start exploring this context through a poem that outlines the difficulties Indigenous people tend to face when inhabiting academic spaces whose architecture is built on the violent historical foundations of modernity. Next, I briefly outline critiques of recognition and inclusion in political and educational spheres to highlight how liberal discourses have tended to offer only conditional forms of integration that support dominant ways of thinking by presenting them as benevolent and inclusive. I then turn to a discussion of the implications of this analysis for Indigenous research methodologies. I conclude with tentative suggestions for further work in this area.
Referencing this recently published article:
Ahenakew, C. (2016). Grafting Indigenous ways of knowing onto non-Indigenous ways of being. International Review of Qualitative Research, 9(3), 323-340. http://irqr.ucpress.edu/content/9/3/323
Aurelia Kinslow, PhD Candidate, Department of Curriculum and Pedagogy, UBC
Aboriginal Student and Community Development Officer, First Nations House of Learning, UBC
Treading the Path of the Heart
Abstract:
Weaving in and out of dialogue with her animal helpers in spirit, each aspects of self, the author reflects on the ways movement and displacement continuously shape her relationship to her identity as an Indigenous woman, as a student and as a researcher. This piece engages storytelling, choreography and received knowledge to touch on notions of nomadism and becoming from an Indigenous perspective.
Published in the following article:
Kinslow, A. (2013). Treading the path of the heart. Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, 2(2), 83-91. http://decolonization.org/index.php/des/article/view/19610