The language of the colonists is locked in through the current structure of academia – we must challenge the colonizers through anticolonial praxis and methods to preserve indigenous knowledge

CAGED KNOWLEDGE: DOCUMENTATION AS A COLONIAL STRATEGY The documentation of Indigenous Knowledge has become an exceptionally popular method for including IK in academic research and environmental policy and for assisting in the recovery and protection of IK. (22) Documenting or digitizing Indigenous Knowledge is a seemingly benign way of appearing to recover Traditional Indigenous Knowledge while at the same time increasing access to the knowledge and vastly increasing the potential for its exploitation. Yet coercing our knowledge to conform to the rules of the colonial power structure serves only to further denigrate and attack the nature of Indigenous Knowledge. When knowledge is made into a text, it is translated from Indigenous languages into English, locking its interpretation in a cognitive box delineated by the structure of a language that evolved to communicate the worldview of the colonizers. (23) it is also stripped of its dynamism and its fluidity and confined to a singular context. It is void of the spatial relationships created between Elder and youth. It becomes generalized and depersonalized. It is separated from the land, from the worlds of the spirits, from its source and its meaning, and from the methodologies for transmission that provide the rigor that ensures its proper communication. It becomes coerced and manipulated into a form that cannot possibly transform or decolonize. (24) Rather than documenting knowledge we should be protecting the land and the Indigenous processes for the transmission of Indigenous Knowledge to younger generations. In other words, we must strengthen the oral tradition, teach children how to learn from the land and how to understand the knowledge of the land. From the perspective of Indigenous Peoples, how you learn is as important or perhaps more important than what you learn, and Indigenous educational programs must use culturally inherent ways of teaching and learning IK. They must be land-based, and they must provide opportunities for youth to interact with Elders and Traditional Knowledge holders on Indigenous terms. (25) Language programs must work toward teaching English-speaking children the cultural and conceptual language, not just the indigenous equivalents of English. (26) Indigenous Knowledge will not be relevant or of any use to the process of liberation if it exists only in documented Elders' interviews. Indigenous Knowledge must be lived, and so we must think very carefully about how we are preparing our children to live their cultural knowledge in the coming generations. ENGAGING INDIGENISM Engaging in anticolonial strategies for the protection, recovery, and maintenance of IK systems means that academics, Indigenous Knowledge holders, and the political leaders of Indigenous nations and settler governments must be prepared to dismantle the colonial project in all of its current manifestations. Academics who are to be true allies to Indigenous Peoples in the protection of our knowledge must be willing to step outside of their privileged position and challenge research that conforms to the guidelines outlined by the colonial power structure and root their work in the politics of decolonization and anticolonialism. This Indigenous approach is critical to the survival of Indigenous Knowledge and ultimately Indigenous Peoples. Anticolonial strategies for the recovery of Traditional Indigenous Knowledge systems require a deconstruction of the colonial thinking and its relationship to IK. They require a critical analysis of colonialism and how it has led to the current state of IK. They require the recovery of Indigenous intellectual traditions, Indigenous control over Indigenous national territories, the protection of Indigenous lands from environmental destruction, and educational opportunities that are anticolonial in their political orientation and firmly rooted in traditions of their nations. These strategies will create the spaces necessary for the recovery of Indigenous Knowledge systems using the processes, values, and traditions inherent in those knowledge systems, while fostering the political mobilization to stop the colonial attack on Indigenous Knowledge and Indigenous Peoples in future generations.