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signify a “long-standing, nonEurocentric, mainstream culture” (p. 555) not necessarily
related to the first people’s culture who inhabit an area. Concomitantly, there are
groups of people who are neither First Nations nor mainstream. For example,
the Maroons of Jamaica and Surinam are relatively indigenous in their way of
life, indicating that indigenous knowledge is not essential. Therefore, indigeneity
connotes ways of knowing that are nonEurocentric, often place-based and often
subjugated to Eurocentric cultural and political worldviews, what Sandra Harding
(1998) describes as “Europology … metaphors, models, narratives, and discur-
sive resources” that “are those of European history, not of Asian, African, or
some other history” (p. 91).
Ladislaus Semali and Joe Kincheloe (1999) further define indigenous knowl-
edge as:
The dynamic way in which the residents of an area have come to understand themselves in
relationship to their natural environment and how they organize that folk knowledge of
flora and fauna, cultural beliefs, and history to enhance their lives. (p. 3)
In other words, indigenous knowledge is deeply rooted in place, with “place” being
both an external, physical construct as well as internally constituted. “Because
Indigenous peoples’ identities are imbued with a sense of place, place becomes
a part of their inner space” (Aikenhead and Ogawa 2007, p. 560). This internal
constitution of “place” is important for considering the confluence of place-based
education, justice, and indigenous knowledge systems in science education. It is
this internalization of place that enabled people like African slaves and Indian
indentured servants to survive in the Americas, while recreating many aspects of
their culture, including language, religion, and food. It is through this lens that
people view their connections with the lands they inhabit.
What I understand about the natural world starts with my mother’s Jamaican
neo-indigenous worldview. Coming from a rural and agricultural background, my
mother’s stories inform my thinking about and being in the natural world.
Learning and then eventually teaching science, I found that some of the things
that I was taught conflicted with how I understood the world to be. Now I ques-
tion these things. For example, I learned to appreciate insects when my mother
caught them and put them in our hands to observe them. She encouraged us to
release them through an open window. She once allowed a treehopper that came
in with the cabbage to live in a plastic cup on the dining table until it decided to
leave. This way of being conflicted with the ideas learned in my science methods
courses where we caught insects, ethered them, pinned, classified, and displayed
them for a grade. In contrast, I learned as much about appreciating and identifying
insects while keeping them alive as I did when they were pinned and dead in
my formal education. Students experience these sorts of tensions when their
traditional knowledge is both challenged and examined as suspect in science
classrooms.
“I say it again: Science has not been neutral nor colorblind. hurt could not cure. comrade,
Bliss ain’t playing.” Josefina Baez, performance artist