Introduction: Indigenous Knowledge Recovery Is Indigenous Empowerment

Abstract

Indigenous knowledge recovery is an anticolonial project.1 It is a project that gains its momentum from the anguish of the loss of what was and the determined hope for what will be. It springs from the disaster resulting from the centuries of colonialism's efforts to methodically eradicate our ways of seeing, being, and interacting with the world. At the dawn of the twenty-first century the recovery of Indigenous knowledge is a conscious and systematic effort to revalue that which has been denigrated and revive that which has been destroyed. It is about regaining the ways of being that allowed our peoples to live a spiritually balanced, sustainable existence within our ancient homelands for thousands of years. In privileging writings about current work in Indigenous knowledge recovery, we are challenging the powerful institutions of colonization that have routinely dismissed alternative knowledges and ways of being as irrelevant to the modern world. Because Indigenous Peoples and other advocates of Indigenous knowledge have typically been denied access to the academic power structures that legitimize such knowledge, this special issue of American Indian Quarterly offers us a rare scholarly opportunity to validate it. In carving a new space for discussion about Indigenous knowledge, we are testifying to its importance. This special issue provides a forum for sharing the ways in which researchers and writers are engaging Indigenous knowledge in the academy and in communities, both on individual and collective levels. Rather than engaging this issue simply as an intellectual exploit, our goal is to discuss Indigenous knowledge in the broader context of Indigenous empowerment. All the contributors to this collection would agree that Indigenous knowledge is meaningless and actually harmful if its holders and practitioners are not [End Page 359] simultaneously empowered and supported in our efforts to not only survive but also thrive. In addition to our physical subjugation, the process of colonization required the complete subjugation of our minds and spirits so that our lands and resources could be robbed from underneath our bodies. Ngugi wa Thiong'o describes the largest weapon of imperialism as the "cultural bomb": "The effect of a cultural bomb is to annihilate a people's belief in their names, in their languages, in their environment, in their heritage of struggle, in their unity, in their capacities and ultimately in themselves."2 Indeed, through the combined efforts of government institutions and Christian workers, Indigenous Peoples in the United States and Canada faced severe persecution for practicing our spirituality, for speaking our languages, and for attempting to live the way our ancestors before us had lived. The federal boarding and residential schools continued this tradition, aiming their most concerted and brutal assaults on our most vulnerable and precious populations—the children.3 While the devastation wrought from these assaults was not totally complete, it has been thorough enough to severely disrupt our ways of living and to cause us to question the usefulness and importance of the ways of life given to us. The colonizers taught us that the conquest and "civilizing" of our people was inevitable; that we, too, must give way to "progress." It was hammered into our heads that our Indigenous cultural traditions were inferior to those of Euroamericans and Euro-Canadians, that there was nothing of value in our old ways, and that those ways were incompatible with modernity and civilization. In order for the colonizers to complete their colonizing mission, they were required to make not only themselves believe these ideas, but us as well. In one way they were correct; within the confines of colonialism our ways were irrelevant and incompatible. Indigenous traditions are of little value in a world based on the oppression of whole nations of people and the destructive exploitation of natural resources. Our values and lifeways are inconsistent with the materialism and militarism characteristic of today's world powers. In this world that colonialism has created, there is no place for Indigenous knowledge. When Indigenous...

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