20 Indigenous Knowledges: Further Reading / Resources

📜  United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People, adopted by the UN General Assembly in 2007.

💻 UNESCO: Local and Indigenous Knowledge Systems. “UNESCO’s Local and Indigenous Knowledge Systems programme (LINKS) promotes local and indigenous knowledge and its inclusion in global climate science and policy processes. LINKS has been influential in ensuring that local and indigenous knowledge holders and their knowledge are included in contemporary science-policy-society fora on issues such as biodiversity assessment and management (CBD, IPBES), climate change assessment and adaptation (IPCC, UNFCCC), natural disaster preparedness (ISDR) and sustainable development (Rio+20, Future Earth).”

🌐 Worldwide Indigenous Science Network, founded in 1989. “Traditional knowledge passed on orally and intergenerationally is the last reservoir of sustainable knowledge for our planet. Historical colonialism and genocide, and ongoing globalization, have severed the knowledge of who we are, where we come from, and what we’re here for. It’s led to devastating social, economic and environmental impacts as Indigenous communities are often located in/near intact ecosystems. Often, the target of the most extreme violence are community Elders and Indigenous Cultural Practitioners (ICPs) who serve as leaders and teachers, passing on traditional cultural knowledge and environmental histories as well as social and land management strategies that sustain healthy human populations alongside healthy natural ecosystems, ensuring the survival of their cultures and, ultimately, the planet.”

📙 Pascoe, Bruce. 2014. Dark Emu: Aboriginal Australia and the Birth of Agriculture. “If we could reform our view of how Aboriginal people were managing the national economy prior to colonisation, it might lead us to reform the ways we currently use resources and care for the land. Imagine turning our focus to the exploitation of meat-producing animals indigenous to this country. Imagine freeing ourselves from the overuse of superphosphates, herbicides and drenches. Envisage freeing ourselves from the need of fences, and instead experimenting with grazing indigenous animals and growing indigenous crops.” Published in 2014, this book sparked tremendous debate.

📙 Kimmerer, Robin Wall. 2020. Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants. Penguin Ecology. London: Penguin Books. Kimmerer’s highly influential book of essays brings together her Western scientific knowledge as a botanist with her traditional knowledge as a member of the Potawatomi Nation. “I could hand you a braid of sweetgrass, as thick and shining as the plait that hung down my grandmother’s back. But it is not mine to give, nor yours to take. Wiingaashk belongs to herself. So I offer, in its place, a braid of stories meant to heal our relationship with the world. This braid is woven from three strands: indigenous ways of knowing, scientific knowledge, and the story of an Anishinabekwe scientist trying to bring them together in service to what matters most. It is an intertwining of science, spirit, and story—old stories and new ones that can be medicine for our broken relationship with earth, a pharmacopoeia of healing stories that allow us to imagine a different relationship, in which people and land are good medicine for each other.”

📙 Gilio-Whitaker, Dina. 2019. As Long as Grass Grows: The Indigenous Fight for Environmental Justice, from Colonization to Standing Rock. Boston, Massachusetts: Beacon Press. “Books are born for many reasons. This one emerged as a result of many years of research and activism, which for me has always focused on environmentalism, Native sovereignty, and their intersection. If what the preeminent Indian law scholar Felix Cohen said was true, that Indians are the United States’ miner’s canary that signals the poison gas of the political atmosphere, to extend the metaphor, then in the larger world dominated by the fossil fuel industry all humans have become the miner’s canary. On a planet with a rapidly changing climate and undergoing what many scientists believe is the Earth’s sixth mass extinction, the future of humanity is looking about as bright as it did for American Indians in 1953 when Cohen wrote those words railing against federal Indian policy (known as termination, which was every bit as menacing as it sounded). From an American Indian perspective, we’re all on the reservation now.”

📙 Dillon, Grace L. (ed.). 2012. Walking the Clouds: An Anthology of Indigenous Science Fiction. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. “It might go without saying that all forms of Indigenous futurisms are narratives of biskaabiiyang, an Anishinaabemowin connoting the process of ‘returning to ourselves,’ which involves discovering how personally one is affected by colonization, discarding the emotional and psychological baggage carried from its impact, and recovering ancestral traditions in order to adapt in our post-Native Apocalypse world. This process is often called ‘decolonization,’ and as Linda Tuhiwai Smith (Maorio) explains, it requires changing rather than imitating Eurowestern concepts. […] Walking the Clouds confronts the structures of racism and colonialism and sf’s own complicity in them” (Dillon 2012).

📜 Whyte, Kyle P. 2018. ‘Indigenous Science (Fiction) for the Anthropocene: Ancestral Dystopias and Fantasies of Climate Change Crises’. Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space 1 (1–2): 224–42. https://doi.org/10.1177/2514848618777621. “Portrayals of the Anthropocene period are often dystopian or post-apocalyptic narratives of climate crises that will leave humans in horrific science-fiction scenarios. Such narratives can erase certain populations, such as Indigenous peoples, who approach climate change having already been through transformations of their societies induced by colonial violence. This essay discusses how some Indigenous perspectives on climate change can situate the present time as already dystopian. Instead of dread of an impending crisis, Indigenous approaches to climate change are motivated through dialogic narratives with descendants and ancestors.”

📜 Johnson, Danielle Emma, Meg Parsons, and Karen Fisher. 2021. ‘Indigenous Climate Change Adaptation: New Directions for Emerging Scholarship’. Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space. https://doi.org/10.1177/25148486211022450. “Although Indigenous peoples’ perspectives and concerns have not always been accommodated in climate change adaptation research and practice, a burgeoning literature is helping to reframe and decolonise climate adaptation in line with Indigenous peoples’ lived experiences. In this review, we bring together climate adaptation, decolonising and intersectional scholarship to chart the progress that has been made in better analysing and responding to climate change in Indigenous contexts.”

📜 Kidman, Joanna. 2020. ‘Whither Decolonisation? Indigenous Scholars and the Problem of Inclusion in the Neoliberal University’. Journal of Sociology 56 (2): 247–62. https://doi.org/10.1177/1440783319835958. “Indigenous academics who mobilise a form of public/tribal scholarship alongside native publics and counter-publics often have an uneasy relationship with the neoliberal academy which celebrates their inclusion as diversity ‘partners’ at the same time as consigning them to the institutional margins. This article traces a cohort of Māori senior academics in New Zealand whose intellectual labour is structured around public/tribal scholarship and examines how this unsettles and challenges the problem of neoliberal inclusivity in settler-colonial institutions.”

📙  Graeber, David, and David Wengrow. 2021. The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity. London: Allen Lane. This book seeks to illuminate the great variety of societies that have existed throughout human history (against simplistic narratives of the inevitably lost egalitarianism of hunter-gatherer ‘small bands’). The early chapters draw extensively on the Wendat philosopher and statesman Kandiaronk: “we find here all the familiar criticisms of European society that the earliest missionaries had to contend with – the squabbling, the lack of mutual aid, the blind submission to authority – but with a new element added in: the organisation of private property.” See also John Steckley’s Untold Tales: Four Seventeenth-Century Hurons (1981) and The Eighteenth-Century Wyandot: A Clan-Based Study (2014).

📜 Yunkaporta, Tyson, and Donna Moodie. 2021. ‘Thought Ritual: An Indigenous Data Analysis Method for Research’. In Thought Ritual: An Indigenous Data Analysis Method for Research, 87–96. Brill. https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004461642_006. “When Indigenous methodologies focus primarily on data collection in their design, the result can be a perpetuation of colonisation through the data analysis phase […] In order to resolve this issue, Yunkaporta designed the Indigenous data analysis approach outlined in this chapter. This aligns a relationally responsive approach with hybridised Indigenous versions of complexity theory and thought experiment in order to make the approach recognisable to the academy.”