Week 12 Indigenous Epistemologies

 For this weeks research and zoom discussion we read MARGARET KOVACH “Indigenous Methodologies Characteristics, Conversations, and Contexts” she explains the importance of understanding epistemology and how the world around us relates to it. Specifically, Kovach dives into indigenous knowledge, research, and methodologies as well as Nehiyaw epistemology. She compares these approaches to western methods of learning and research and gives examples of the different ways of learning around the world for people that come from different backgrounds and live different ways of life. She offers guidance to people conducting research in indigenous ways. She also expresses the importance of accepting different methods of research into the western educational system. 

Indigenous epistemologies are different from Western epistemologies in many ways. For example, typically western epistemologies include reading from a book, writing, memorizing, learning from your teacher inside of a classroom, researching different topics to learn about in books or online and most importantly the things that we learn about are science based whether we are conducting our own experiments or learning about science experiments conducted in the past. 

Indigenous education is typically considered learning from experiencing the world. It takes place throughout the day and continues to progress throughout your entire life. In the text, Kovach gives the example of the buffalo hunt as a parallel for research methodology. They learn about the world through experiencing the hunt. In western education, we would probably learn about a buffalo hunt by reading about someone else who has done it, maybe looking at pictures, rather than actually going out and experiencing it and getting a much deeper understanding of where our foods come from. 

The things that we learn reflect who we are as a community and what it is that we find important to us. Our language, the way that we speak and the things that we talk about reflects who we are as people, what we understand in the world and allows us to show others our own prospective and see the world through our own eyes. Our research is reflective of our world view. What we project is extremely important. I believe that western culture has a very limited understanding for the world because of the rat race that we have created and conformed to. It is important that we accept other cultures methodologies because they can be extremely insightful and even teach us to change our ways and see the world through someone else’s eyes. This is also why people who speak multiple languages see the world differently. They accept other cultures ways of communicating and thinking and find it important to speak to and learn from people that come from different cultures. Communication is so important throughout the world and it seems ignorant to only speak one language fluently. (No offense to anybody reading this that only speaks one language, I’m only fluent in one language myself).

Our education system is discriminatory of non western epistemologies because if we are given an assignment to read and research or conduct an experiment on a topic we usually need to include specific scholarly sources of some kind and I can’t think of a single class where “sacred sources” would fly with my teachers/ professors. 




Cite:

Kovach, Margaret Elizabeth. Indigenous Methodologies: Characteristics, Conversations, and Contexts. University of Toronto Press, 2000. 


Comments

  1. Anni PenceDecember 4, 2022 at 1:23 AM

    Hi again, I thought your perspectives in this post were great. I liked how you mentioned our language and how important communication is. I like how you described her overall writing very concise and clear. I think you gave great examples about the differences of western and indigenous epistemologies as well.

    ReplyDelete

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