68. Indigenous knowledge, science, and anti-colonial education: contradictions, politics, and possibilities
Sara Tolbert, Te Whare Wānanga o Waitaha University of Canterbury; Matthew Weinstein, University of Washington-Tacoma; Kari Moana Te Rongopatahi, Te Whare Wānanga o Waitaha University of Canterbury; Tiana Malina Te Rongopatahi Mo'iha, Indi-genius Mind(s); Alaka’i - Halau Hale Kuhikuhi; Tara O'Neill, University of Hawaii-Manoa;
This panel explores complications and opportunities of bringing together Indigenous knowledge and Indigenous science practices with the discourses and practices of dominant science education, often named technoscience or 'western science'. Globally, there have been increasing calls to attend to Indigenous knowledge within technoscientific education, or as part of the official curriculum. Some of these emerge from re-energized Indigenous social movements, as in mana ōrite curriculum reform initiatives in Aotearoa and the rise of Hawaiian cultural and 'ōlelo [language] immersion schools in Hawai'i. The practices, epistemologies, and ontologies of such knowledge systems often challenge nationalism, empire and the racial and gender hierarchies/hegemonies of which technoscience has played important roles as well as its narratives, myths, ontologies and epistemologies. In this panel, presenters will explore the curricular and pedagogical practices of bringing these multiple nature-cultures together, examine the contradictions and messiness of drawing on multiple worldviews in science classrooms, and reflect on the politics of such admixture and the effects, of what Albert and Muderna Marshall call two-eyed seeing, in reconfiguring each worldview. The papers address the conference call as land and land relations act as a central unifying theme in Indigenous knowledge systems, and thus one rationale for two-eyed seeing, is a reorientation towards more sustainable nature-relations in a time of global ecological crisis. This panel contributes to STS scholarship through reflecting on classrooms as the site of scientific cultural reproduction, but also transformation, as knowledge systems are brought together casting a light on power and the constructed nature of knowledge.
