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Indigenous Epistemologies of North America

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 September 2021

Barry Allen Open the ORCID record for Barry Allen [Opens in a new window]
Barry Allen*
Affiliation:
McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
*
Email: bgallen@mcmaster.ca
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Abstract

Indigenous cultures of North America confronted a problem of knowledge different from that of canonical European philosophy. The European problem is to identify and overcome obstacles to the perfection of knowledge as science, while the Indigenous problem is to conserve a legacy of practice fused with a territory. Complicating the difference is that one of these traditions violently colonized the other, and with colonization the Indigenous problem changes. The old problem of inter-generational stability cannot be separated from the post-colonial problem of sovereignty in the land where the knowledge makes sense. I differentiate the question of the value of knowledge (Part 1), and its content (Part 2). The qualities these epistemologies favor define what I call ceremonial knowledge, that is, knowledge that sustains a ceremonial community. The question of content considers the interdisciplinary research of Indigenous and Traditional Ecological Knowledge, as well as the issue of epistemic decolonization.

Keywords

Indigeneityknowledgecolonizationceremonycomparative epistemology
Type
Article
Information
Episteme , Volume 20 , Issue 2 , June 2023 , pp. 324 - 336
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Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press

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