Indigenous Knowledge in the Decolonial Era

Abstract

world, yet it also privileges itself as the fiduciary of all knowledge with authority to authenticate or invalidate other knowledge (when it gets around to it). Colonial-power-knowledge conceptualizes intellectual colonization in Foucaultian terms, in this case with a Western knowledge fiduciary acting as guardian over its Indigenous knowledge ward (Foucault 1977; Feldman 1997). I suggest that the resulting contradiction embroiders some Western knowledge expertise with unreasonableness through its ignorance of other knowledge. Posing as the fiduciary of all knowledge exposes the limits of Western knowledge. Early twentieth-century poet Carl Sandburg poses the knowledge landscape as circles in the sand that help explain Western knowledge's conundrum. The white man drew a circle in the sand, Sandburg begins immediately, told the red man 'This is what the Indian knows.' Continuing, Sandburg describes the white man drawing a big circle around the smaller one: This is what the white man knows. Then, as though responding to international development and Western knowledge experts, Sandburg shows the Indian sweeping an immense circle around both rings in the sand. This is where the white and the red man know nothing (Sandburg 1971, 30). Often it never seems to dawn on experts that there are limits to their knowledge. In the early twentieth century the philosophical syzygy of modernity included the spheres of Marxian ideology and liberal theory. Sandburg poses his view of colonial-power-knowledge amidst Western self-doubts after the horrors of attempted world colonization became known and