Abstract
This article explores Indigenous standpoint theory in Australia in the context of postcolonialism and some of its aspects influencing Canadian First Nations scholarship. I look at how cultural metanarratives are ideologically informed and act to lock out of scholarship other ways of knowing, being and doing. I argue that they influence knowledge and education so as to ratify Eurowestern dominant knowledge constructs. I develop insights into redressing this imbalance through advocating two-way learning processes for border crossing between Indigenous axiologies, ontologies and epistemologies, and dominant Western ones. In doing so, I note that decolonisation of knowledge sits alongside decolonisation itself but has been a very slow process in the academy. I also note that this does not mean that decolonisation of knowledge is always necessarily an oppositional process in scholarship, proposing that practice-led research (PLR) provides one model for credentialling Indigenous practitioner-knowledge within scholarship. The article reiterates the position of alienation in their own lands that such colonisation implements again and in an influential and ongoing way. The article further proposes that a PhD by artefact and exegesis based on PLR is potentially an inclusive model for First Nations People to enter into non-traditional research within the academy.
Highlights
Decolonisation of knowledge is a central objective if First Nations’ people are to bring their knowledge with them to schools and universities for credentialled learning
Today such Eurowestern traditional models are becoming challenged by multiple alternatives: the rise of Indigenism in Australia is another successive wave of epistemological theorising in social science, like feminism, post-modernism and postcolonialism
I propose that this practicum I am advocating of such methodologies as practice-led research (PLR) research (Arnold 2005, 2007) is not another form of “shape-changing” that comes about through integration and assimilation
Summary
Decolonisation of knowledge is a central objective if First Nations’ people are to bring their knowledge with them to schools and universities for credentialled learning. Indigenous scholar Denis Foley states that the dominant Western science model as applied since the colonisation of Australia has “resulted in the elimination and extermination of Indigenous social systems, knowledge, traditions and cultural sciences” (Foley 2003, 44). Today, such Eurowestern traditional models are becoming challenged by multiple alternatives: the rise of Indigenism in Australia is another successive wave of epistemological theorising in social science, like feminism, post-modernism and postcolonialism. Indigenous Australians assert that they have knowledge methodologies that contrast with Western ways of knowing (Bessarab & Ng'andu 2010; Hutchinson et al 2014) Their cultural transmissions, like those of Canadian Indigenous peoples, have been replaced and diminished by cultural as well as geographic colonisation. This becomes poignant when we see the history of residential schools in Canada as a form of oppression and control through the pretence of education, and of the Stolen Generations of Australian Aboriginal children
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