Indigenous
Peoples Specialty Group Selected Sponsored sessions, |
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Gigi Berardi, Western Washington University, Northwest Indian College "Curricula of divergence and exclusion in tribal settings: Whither TEK?" Several years ago, the California Indian Forest and Fire Management Council, a consortium of 14 tribes, and the Bureau of Indian Affairs, Sacramento Area Office, Forestry Branch saw the need for education in natural resources and identified it as an important goal. Acting on this need, the Bureau funded the development of a curriculum for ecosystem science and management for Indians in natural resources management. One of the goals of the curriculum was to elevate Indian traditional ecological knowledge (TEK), a goal, which served as the foundation of an innovative, interdisciplinary two-year environmental studies program funded by the National Science Foundation, known as the Tribal Environmental and Natural Resources Management (TENRM) program. The program was designed to address the dilemma that many tribes face regarding their dependence on non-native expertise, which purports to provide solutions based on "exact" scientific knowledge that often hides political assumptions and agendas. This paper reports on the genesis of the program, and discusses the evolution of the foundational principles, from one of integration of western and tribal knowledge (an oxymoron) to a more realistic one -- co-articulation of knowledge systems; and, the examination of mainstream and Native science at the points of divergence, particularly in natural resources economics (quantitative and inflation-adjusted estimates of values and prices of Indian resources such as timber, fish, hard-rock minerals, land, water, and others; federal and tribal budgeting processes; demographic effects on resource demands; corporate-tribal joint ventures in resources use, etc. ). This emerging complexity regarding co-articulation of knowledge systems (TEK and others) provides the base upon which science education in Indian country should be built, just as science education will be built elsewhere by those at the leading edge of change.
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