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This article documents and examines the experience, challenges, and lessons of the Department of Indigenous Studies at Trent University as it worked over a 30-year period to bring Indigenous Knowledge into the intellectual life of the university. Bringing Indigenous peoples into the academy is a fairly straightforward project. It is, however, only the start of a new intellectual project in Canada: the creation of Indigenous universities and the creation of Indigenous spaces in Canadian universities. Both projects involve more than the physical presence of Indigenous peoples. They involve an active teaching and research engagement with the knowledge that Indigenous peoples have created over millennia.
Before all words are spoken, we send greetings to the universe and to all living things. We give thanks for the rising of the sun and the light and life that it brings. We give thanks for another day of life.
I start in this traditional fashion with words of thanksgiving: the words that come before all others. Historic Haudenosaunee protocol requires a formal acknowledgement of the other, a ceremony "at woods edge," as it is called. It signals to those whose village we are about to enter that we have arrived, asks for permission to enter, and gives time to refresh ourselves from the journey. It allows time to collect our thoughts, to pay our respects, to thank the universe and our protectors for their watchfulness, and allows our prospective hosts to ready themselves. The ceremony at woods edge is an important aspect of Haudenosaunee diplomacy. It begins with the Thanksgiving Address, which reminds us of the nature of the universe, its structure and functioning, the roles and responsibilities of all aspects of it, and creates an attitude of humility and gratitude.
I acknowledge the original inhabitants of this land and their descendente who have lived here for a few millennia and whose way of life has changed significantly over this time.
I also acknowledge the institution of the university in which we as professors and students work and study. Universities have their origins in a distant land close to 900 years ago. Like the original inhabitants of North America, they have survived the ages and have been transformed, often by forces that they have been unable to...