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What are the role and responsibility of the professor of European ancestry, who has also battled for legitimizing Indigenous epistemologies and educational considerations in academe, in working with students who take up the challenges involved in this scholarship? This article focuses on an analysis of some of the articulated responses to a panel presented at a graduate conference in a faculty and university committed to equity and social justice. It creates space to address such questions as What does it mean to take Indigenous thought seriously in an educational institution? How can the relational and traditional/historic aspects of these knowledges, with their commitment to spiritual, intellectual, emotional, and physical dimensions, move beyond acceptance to being seen as normal? How to ensure that intellectual space is open to this turn to the re-creation of such knowledges in the context of the post/colonial university? The article interrogates the roles, limits, and possibilities of education in addressing persistent epistemological inequities as certain knowledges are valued in the university whereas others are relegated to secondary status when they are acknowledged at all. Guswentha and Homi Bhabha's notion of third space provide analytic moments to investigate the tensions and contestations as knowledges collide, interact, and reform in confined discursive spaces.
Far from irrelevant in the modern world, traditional indigenous social, political and cosmological ontologies are profoundly important to the development of transformative alternative frameworks for global order and new ways of being. (Makere Stewart-Harawira, 2005)
The other point I am trying to make is not only that the history of colonialism is the history of the West but also that the history of colonialism is a counter-history to the normative, traditional history of the West. (Homi Bhabha, 1990, p. 218)
Epistemological racism comes from or emerges out of what we have labeled the civilizational level-the deepest, most primary level of a culture of people. (James Scheurich & Michelle Young, 1997)
Background to the Story
This is a Canadian story, but it could be a story from any colonized country where indigenous people struggle for the rightful recognition of land and knowledge rights. It is a rocky story of seeking and finding, even momentarily, spaces that allow for intellectual interactions in peace, friendship, and respect for differences. In this...