What is Indigenous knowledge? How best to apply it in our modern day lives? It is local knowledge, unique to a given culture or society, the basis for local-level decision making in agriculture, health care, food preparation, education, natural resource management, and many other activities within communities. Indigenous knowledge is the information base for that society, which facilitates communication and decision-making. It is dynamic and continually influenced by internal creativity and experimentation as well as by contact with external systems... And finally, it forms part of our global knowledge, which means it has value and relevance today - it can be preserved, transferred, or adopted and adapted in many situations, particuarly to those modern dilemmas that require a fresh look, like natural resource management. But to implement indigenous knowledge is to use it as a whole. The image below explains this further. . . IMAGE: various elements of (First Nations) indigenous knowledge is shown here pictorially. For example, TEK (traditional ecological knowledge regarding sustainability of local resources) exists within a web of indigenous knowledge. At the center of this web are elements of the culture associated with spirituality, which are often overlooked by non-indigenous researchers. The small points represent discrete facts which are the predominate components of indigenous knowledge that can be understood by outsiders, validated and are subsequently removed from this web to be applied in Western natural resource management issues. However it is possible to then see that removing these `data points would weaken the structural integrity of the web. Likewise, the `data points are interconnected to the web and cannot be fully understood when they are removed from their context. This web therefore shows the need for considering indigenous knowledge as a whole in addressing modern problems. #spiritualjourney #ancientknowledge #bisoninternational #paultohlakai
Posted on: Mon, 01 Dec 2014 12:57:04 +0000
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