The academy is stuck in its ivory tower logic of systemically shutting out indigenous populations – perpetuating stereotypes about indigenous knowledge that forces out these groups from ‘intellectual’ discussions and research

In his discourse theory, Michel Foucault convincingly shows how knowl- edge and power are profoundly interconnected in Eurocentric societies. Seek- ing knowledge, the "will to truth," covers up the will to power, and discourses of the academy and larger society become agencies of power. Their production is "at once controlled, selected, organised, and redistributed according to a certain number of procedures" that render them a "system of exclusion (historical, mod- ifiable, institutionally constraining)" (Foucault 8, 10). This system of exclusion relies heavily on public institutions and their practices: pedagogy, print, the pub- lishing system, libraries, and laboratories (Foucault 11). Thus, discourse is both agent and subject of control, limitation, and exclusion; and academic and scientific disciplines are controlling instruments of discourses and of power. According to their "rules of exclusion" that operate with neo/colonial self/other dichotomies, they separate valid from invalid, progressive from traditional, scientific from un- scientific, logo-centric from irrational knowledge and methodology. They have thus produced and buffered the predominant Western Cartesian-Newtonian worldview and cemented and disseminated it in discourses of the academy, which, in this way, assigns primacy to knowledge based on reason, logic, science, and empirical proof and excludes knowledge based on observation, oral tradition, di- gressive thinking, and even the spiritual. Indigenous epistemologies are associ- ated with the latter categories, grounded in Indigenous traditions and worldviews. Therefore, as a Western-based logic suggests, Indigenous knowledges cannot be- long to the legitimate materialistic worldview of true science, reason, and logic. They, to speak with Foucault, "speak the truth in a void"- they are not in the realm of truth of mainstream discourse because they do not obey the rules of the Cartesian-Newtonian "discursive 'policy'" (17). There are many statements by Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars alike illustrating this hegemonic thought system ingrained in the academy. George Hob- son holds in his article "Traditional Knowledge Is Science" in 1992 that "Western scientists have a tendency to reject the traditional knowledge of native peoples as anecdotal, non-quantitative, without method, and unscientific [...]. From our scientific ivory towers we tend to ignore basic knowledge that is available to us." Western educational institutions have discounted Indigenous knowledges and nurtured the belief that non-Western cultures "contribute nothing to the develop- ment of knowledge, humanities, arts, science, and technology," which Mi'kmaw scholar Marie Battiste terms "cognitive imperialism" (Hobson).4 Colleen Mc- Gloin et al. state that it is necessary to reinstate "knowledges that are often omit- ted from the realm of the western episteme" (3). ["T]he academy," writes Kuok- kanen, " has ignored, overlooked, and dismissed [Indigenous] ontologies- in fact, the academy's structures and discourses are built on the assumption that there only is one episteme, one ontology, one intellectual tradition on which to rely and from which to draw" (3). Kovach reinforces the fact that prioritized Western- based research practices and policies reproduce colonial relationships in the acad- emy (28). And Mihesuha and Cavender Wilson reproach the North American academy explicitly for condoning structural racism: "Gate-keeping, ethnic fraud, biased writings, favoritism, ignorance, racism, and exclusion are only a few anti- Indianisms we face regularly" (13). 5 Many definitions of Indigenous knowledge abound in political, ecological, and cultural studies discourses. I have found Battiste's definition most useful: Indigenous knowledge is an extensive and valuable knowledge system. According to the categories used by Eurocentric knowledge, it is a transcultural (or intercultural) and interdisciplinary source of knowledge that embraces the contexts of about 20 percent of the world's population. Indigenous knowledge is systemic, covering both what can be observed and what can be thought. It comprises the rural and the urban, the settled and the nomadic, original inhabitants and migrants. [...] Indigenous knowledge comprises all knowledge pertaining to a particular people and its territory, the nature or use of which has been transmitted from generation to generation. [...] Indigenous knowledge is an adaptable, dynamic system based on skills, abilities, and problem-solving techniques that change over time depending on environmental conditions. Its premises are grounded in holism and relational world views, and it defies cate- gorization as it operates, to speak with Western categories, in an interdisciplinary and transcultural mode (Battiste). Tewa scholar Gregory Cajete speaks of "Na- tive Science," explaing that "it is a metaphor for a wide range of tribal processes of perceiving, thinking, acting, and 'coming to know' that have evolved through human experience with the natural world. Native science is born of a lived and storied participation with the natural landscape. [...It] is the collective heritage of human experience with the natural world" (2-3). Indigenizing the academy means foremost synthesizing the two knowledge systems in a rather holistic approach toward science and research, transforming the Western understanding of Indig- enous knowledge and carving an academic and scientific space where Indigenous values and knowledges are respected and supported (Mihesuha and Wilson 2; Al- fred 88), where Indigenous methodologies, decolonizing perspectives, and critical reflexivity are included, where multiple truths are accepted, where epistemic dif- ferences are bridged, where guidelines for ethical research are applied (Kovach 27-33; Kuokkanen 143; Tuhiwai Smith 7), and where subjectivity, spiritual compo- nents, and sacred knowledge have legitimate value beside objectivity and empiri- cal evidence (Kovach 67; Wilson 55).6 Indigenous scholars mostly apply an inclu- sionist approach to indigenizing the academy, i.e. they acknowledge respectful work of non-Indigenous scholars, including Marxist, feminist, postcolonial, a other critical theories that help to expose and overcome Eurocentric hegemonies in Western societies, discourses, and educational systems (Tuhiwai Smith 165-66, 185-91; Kuokkanen 142; Kovach 48, 86; Graham Smith in Kovach 88, 91-92).