Often, discussions of Indigenous methodologies and epistemologies position indigenous scientific methods as supplementarity to mainstream Western science as opposed to legitimate sciences on their own. Because of this misconception, the way non-Indigenous researchers engage with Indigenous communities often ignores the scientific developments and contributions of Indigenous peoples and cultures.

 

To challenge this, the Indigenous Epistemologies and Methodologies Reading Group aims to assert the validity of Indigenous scientific methods. To achieve this, the reading group will be run by two Indigenous scholars at Cambridge and will incorporate the scholarship of global Indigenous peoples, while also including workshops for teaching attendees how to engage with various Indigenous communities in practice.

 

Through this reading group, our ambition is that we de-center ‘decolonial theory’* as the primary means of engagement with Indigenous methodologies and epistemologies, recognizing that Indigenous epistemology predates colonialism and deserves to be interrogated as a stand-alone group of scientific methods.

 

*We follow Tuck and Yang’s scholarship asserting that ‘decolonization is not a metaphor’ and that co-opting such language while simultaneously not advancing the sovereignty of Indigenous communities depends harm to our communities.