Read on Twitter
I don't think it's fair to say that Indigenous knowledges are presented in a critique proof bubble without consulting Indigenous academics in your article, who will show you a lot of the critique doesn't come from academia itself, but from within communities and Elders. https://twitter.com/jonkay/status/1358776514175766534
Indigenous academics are constantly deconstructing Indigenous ways of knowing and being. Is this work that should be done by non-Indigenous academics? At this point in history, of vulnerable reclamation, and poor attempts at reconciliation? In my opinion, no.
At least not by people who haven't taken the time to engage with Indigenous Peoples, ways of knowing and being, theory, in the same way having a phD gives you that privilege, to be critical of your field and scholarship within it. And it's important to not essentialize.
The conversations we are having in community (Rez/urban) isn't always privy to the eyes of academia BC this whole article ignores the very damage academia has done to Indigenous knowledge systems. In fact, there are many critical convos I'd love to make space for at the academy.
But it's not an appropriate venue. And always under the gaze of the colonizers it's not a safe space for us to unpack the complexities of colonialism interwoven into our ways of knowing and being and what is valid knowledge production in an Indigenous context.
And we do have the freedom to fail. Indigenization is new at universities. What we are trying is novel, there is space for failure. And trying again. What works. How to decolonize the academy. It's all an experiment. And when we fail, often we're fired, or reprimanded.
Amie Wolfe tried to get students to unpack white supremacy. And she failed. And the consequences - silenced. Students carry on, with no consequences. That's the repurcussions. Instead of even entertaining Indigenous gikendasowin, white academics and journalists invalidate.
A big piece of Indigenization and decolonization work is having those complex, difficult conversations about where non-Indigenous and Indigenous epistemologies fit in the academy. More often than not, it's not the content that matters, but the way things are done.
I just wish @jonkay spent some time with us beyond a conference to understand the complexities before gaslighting Amie Wolf in a national newspaper and further undermining the legitimacy of Indigenous gikendasowin, and it's place at academia.
And maybe he's right.
And maybe he's right.
Maybe our ways of knowing and being don't belong there. But we're all just trying to figure that out. Through critical scholarship. And interrogating, and deconstructing the academy that produces and certifies knowledge while sitting on Indigenous land.
Also just, look... I'm not even an academic, def not an expert. This is just my opinion on work that's been done for many more years than I've been alive, by Elders/Indigenous academics; in the context of my experience in SW Ont as a mixed white Anishinaabekwe working at a uni.
