Educational Psychology—Limitations and Possibilities

CHAPTER 78
Knowledge or Multiple Knowings:
Challenges and Possibilities of Indigenous
Knowledges
GEORGE J. SEFA DEI AND STANLEY DOYLE-WOOD
We begin first by grounding our critique within the decolonizing space of the anticolonial framework.
As pointed out elsewhere (Sefa Dei, 2000), the anticolonial discursive framework is an
epistemology of the colonized, anchored in the indigenous sense of collective and the importance
of developing a common colonial consciousness. Colonial in this sense is conceptualized not
simply as foreign or alien but imposed and dominating (Sefa Dei and Asgharzadeh, 2001). The
anticolonial framework allows us to engage educational problems through connections of knowledge,
discourse, culture, and communicative practices of schooling. We understand education as
realized within a historically developed and socially maintained space that is structured through
interrelationships among the multiple sites of teaching/learning and the everyday practices of
community and cultural life. To take into account these interrelationships means not only to
understand how they shape the substance of schooling, but also how learning and pedagogy
operate in our society on much broader levels to include critical decolonizing consciousness,
agency, and spirituality. Our intellectual focus on indigenity, local indigenousness, and the power
of knowledge to alter the encounter of the colonizer and the colonized (in ways that point to the
instability and fluidity of the colonial relation), is to show the dynamic of the resistance inherent
in colonial relations, as well as the ability of the colonized to manipulate the colonizer and his or
her colonial practices. The ways in which local knowings confront colonizing practices that are
continually reproduced and deeply embedded in everyday relations, represent powerful sources of
knowledge that allow the daily resistance and the pursuit of effective political practice to subvert
all forms of dominance to take place. We take the Euro-American school system and the experiences
of different bodies within these schools as a means through which such relations can be
examined. It is maintained that within schools there are material-structural, ideological-spiritual,
and socio-cultural-political dynamic schooling practices that produce significant differential material
consequences for both dominant and minoritized bodies. Smith (1999) has explored the
relationship between knowledge, research, and imperialism, pointing to the ways such relations
have come to structure our ways of knowing through the development of academic disciplines
and through the education of colonial elites and indigenous/ “native” intellectuals. Critical education
must therefore expose colonizing knowledges and social practices that have destroyed (and