árbediehtu and other indigenous knowledge

As part of a current writing project I am exploring some of the indigenous knowledge that we may look to introduce into the geography curriculum. I need to say at the beginning that I am not an expert in this field, and this post is a collation of other people's ideas and drawn from research and reading. I have started to see the phrase indigenous knowledge appearing on some specification updates which I have been exploring in recent months.

I think teachers are going to need a little support in identifying what that actually means for them.

In some countries there is a (relatively recent) tradition of acknowledging the land on which events take place - the ancestral lands of groups who were displaced and dispossessed by settlers and colonisers. This happens in Australia for example, as well as New Zealand and Canada.

Shaw, Herman and Dobbs (2006) define Indigenous peoples as 

“groups with ancestral and often spiritual ties to particular land, and whose ancestors held that land prior to colonization by outside powers, and whose nations remain submerged within the states created by those powers”

This article explores the indigenous knowledge of the Saami / Sapmi.

It is not easy to put árbediehtu — Indigenous peoples’ knowledge — into words. It is a distinctive  knowledge system, an understanding that is deep and complex. The Norwegian Biodiversity Act calls  it “experience-based knowledge.” Some call it “silent knowledge” because it is not written down and can be perceived as pure intuition. It could also be called “silenced knowledge” because it has been marginalized by centuries of missionary work and “Norwegianization” which has led to this  knowledge being seen as inferior. Loss of knowledge is a painful loss for a people.

It's time to move away from Eurocentric knowledge.

Hawai'i'an knowledge is explored in this piece. After all, we use certain words such as pahoehoe and a-a to describe lava types found in Iceland.

This article explores how it is being used to create games to teach people about the importance of this indigenous knowledge.

In a review of Barry Lopez's 'Horizon' by Robert MacFarlane, he recounts how the Inuit hunters refer to him as naajavaarsuk, the ivory gull, a species distinguished by its habit of “standing on the perimeter of the action, darting in to snatch something when there’s an opening”. One might add – though Lopez does not – that he is also an isumataq, a storyteller who “creates the atmosphere in which wisdom reveals itself”. The achievement of Lopez’s work has always been ontological before it is political; a “redreaming”, to use his verb, of the possibilities of human life.

More to come on this... but it's an area which geographers need to be cognisant of....

Image: Alan Parkinson, shared under CC license.