scholarly journals New Research Perspectives on Native American Students in Higher Education

JCSCORE ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 60-80
Author(s):  
Stephanie J. Waterman

This chapter begins with a brief history of higher education’s role in assimilation, oppression, and removal of Indigenous people. A short literature review outlines the progression of higher education literature from deficit focused ideologies to current research that decolonizes and centers of Indigenous Knowledge Systems. “Sharing circles” as an Indigenous methodology is described. Centering Indigenous experiences in higher education and Indigenous knowledge systems focus on ways that Western forms of education can be used as tools to strengthen Native nations.

Author(s):  
Cornel Du Toit

This paper endeavours to converge on present-day experiences of self. This is done against the backdrop of the interdependence between person (organism) and environment (physical and cultural). The rich history of development of personhood in the West is discussed with reference to the metaphor of mask for personhood. Cultural epochs are described as phonocentric (in front of the mask), logocentric (behind the mask) and virtuocentric (between non-present masks). The history of modernism led to the experience of the end of personhood in the West. The restoration of personhood (subjectivity) seems possible through the restoration of some form of communitarianism. This brings Africa in focus. In an enigmatic way Africa knows science and utilises technology, but simultaneously relativises it in favour of traditional customs which the Western mind may judge to be mythological and primitive. African personhood is discussed with reference to African science in the format of Indigenous knowledge systems, to African community life as ubuntu, and to the place of seriti in African metaphysics.


Afrika Focus ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Henry Kam Kah

This study focuses on the construction of the history of the Laimbwe people of Cameroon through indigenous methods of enquiry and/or epistemologies. These include analyses of surviving historical objects, sites and artefacts from the pre-colonial period to the reunfication of British Southern Cameroons with the Cameroun Republic in 1961. Some traditional items of the Laimbwe people of Cameroon and existing artefacts as well as sites reveal a very rich history with information that Western and conventional research have not vividly captured. In this paper, we reflect on the salience of these sources in understanding the rich socio-cultural and political history of the Laimbwe. There is a need to document this as an indigenous African library in this age of globali- sation so that indigenous knowledge systems are disseminated to a wider academic audience. A construction of Laimbwe history through these indigenous forms of the library present them as new perspectives of local epistemologies beyond the capture of the western library introduced into Africa during the colonial period and even before. It continues to shape the way African national and local histories are written based on Western interpretations and or epistemologies. Key words: sites, objects, history, Laimbwe, Cameroon 


Author(s):  
Zingisa Nkosinkulu

This chapter seeks to map how indigenous people and their indigenous knowledge systems are the most researched and written about in the world, yet they are the least understood. The curriculum of the empire and its scientific explanation justified how indigenous knowledge systems should be approached and viewed as well as who has the authority to justify; hence, indigenous knowledge systems were justified as inferior and not worthy of the standard of European knowledge system. In this chapter, Frantz Fanon's thought will be deployed to illustrate how this division of knowledge justifies the perpetuating dehumanisation of indigenous people under the mask of modernisation and globalisation. By deploying decoloniality, Afrocentricity, and Fanonian thought, this chapter seeks to challenge this curriculum that is based on the history of the conquest of Africa that positioned Africa only as a cradle of slaves and the black bodied as created by God only for the benefit of the Europeans.


Afrika Focus ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 53-73
Author(s):  
Henry Kam Kah

This study focuses on the construction of the history of the Laimbwe people of Cameroon through indigenous methods of enquiry and/or epistemologies. These include analyses of surviving historical objects, sites and artefacts from the pre-colonial period to the reunification of British Southern Cameroons with the Cameroun Republic in 1961. Some traditional items of the Laimbwe people of Cameroon and existing artefacts as well as sites reveal a very rich history with information that Western and conventional research have not vividly captured. In this paper, we reflect on the salience of these sources in understanding the rich socio-cultural and political history of the Laimbwe. There is a need to document this as an indigenous African library in this age of globalisation so that indigenous knowledge systems are disseminated to a wider academic audience. A construction of Laimbwe history through these indigenous forms of the library present them as new perspectives of local epistemologies beyond the capture of the western library introduced into Africa during the colonial period and even before. It continues to shape the way African national and local histories are written based on Western interpretations and or epistemologies.


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