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In this chapter, Canadian authors Anita Prest and Scott Goble use sociological lenses to illustrate how, as non-Indigenous researchers, they learned to immerse themselves in local Indigenous knowledge(s) in western Canada. Such learning enabled them to reframe their investigations to reflect the ontological and epistemological orientations of the communities with whom they work. They submit that such immersion and questioning is necessary for decolonizing practices in music education and research so as to fairly represent the worldviews of local First Nations. Drawing on the problematics with new materialism as well as their personal struggles for self-reflexivity, they demonstrate the challenges involved in decolonizing personal epistemological perspectives. Their chapter provides an example of the work to be done in reframing a sociologically informed music education.

After recalling the international context of the contemporary claims to cultural property, Glowczewski discusses the concept of inalienability which, in central and north western Australia, surrounds the ritual circulation of sacred objects and the cults of which they are a part, including rituals of colonial resistance. Afterwards she examines the elaboration of a culture centre which involved in the 1990’s the representatives of a dozen Aboriginal languages and organisations based in the coastal town of Broome; this initiative reflected an attempt to control the representation given of their cultures and to claim the reappropriation of their objects (in Museums) and knowledge in a process of cultural repatriation and political affirmation. First published in 2002.

Chapter 1 discusses the key concepts explored in this book: collaborative archaeology, Indigenous knowledge, and the clear connections between exploring the past and contemporary, living peoples. The chapter examines Nipmuc sites in the Hassanamesit Woods of Massachusetts. The lines of inquiry discussed include documentary research, ethnohistory, oral history and oral tradition, cultural landscapes, and cross-cultural epistemologies. The important connections between academic research and modern political processes for tribes (such as the federal acknowledgement process) are also discussed, as well as the outdated practice in archaeology of creating an artificial divide between “pre-history” and “history.” The decolonizing of archaeology is central to the approach used throughout this book and through the relationships that have developed between the authors over the past few decades.

This chapter concludes the section on silver, and the book as a whole, by applying the translation/mistranslation method developed in earlier chapters to the theories of metallic generation and conversion that informed colonial amalgamation technologies. It begins by reviewing theories of likeness and attraction in classical natural philosophy and early modern European sources, wherein the combination of opposite forces like hot and cold, or male and female, enables matter to come into being or change shape. The chapter next analyzes how colonial miners and metallurgists reinterpreted the lessons of antiquity and made sameness into a source of metallic generation. European writers’ inability to translate these ideas suggests that the ideas that underpinned amalgamation technologies came from Indigenous mining communities.

This chapter sets the stage for a potentially unique perspective on political philosophy. It requires a nonmainstream approach and readers are highly encouraged to dismiss commonly held assumptions as best as can be done. The Navajo cyclical process encourages a seemingly repetitive pattern of thought, plan, practice, and regeneration. This process has seemingly been in practice since time immemorial or at least since Navajo knowledge holders began carrying out ceremonies. Several figures illustrate the patterns of thought that, in time, begin reflecting an arrangement in the reader’s mind. This chapter introduces the Navajo mountains model as a specific philosophical thought.

Universities in Latin America (and, to a certain extent, in the entire non-Western world) were created in the colonial and republican periods as replicas of modern European universities, which had stabilized criteria for the classification, organization, and hierarchy of knowledge and for the legitimation of truth following closely the Napoleonic and Humboldtian reforms in the 1800s. Traditional Latin American traditions of knowledge, both scientific and artistic, were discriminated against and totally excluded from the university curricula in the name of an exclusively eurocentric epistemic paradigm. As a consequence of this epistemicide, all the music schools today, both basic and superior, teach primarily the erudite European musical genres, whereas the popular, Indigenous and African-derived musical traditions, which are extremely rich in the entire continent, do not form part of the curriculum available for music students. In order to offer a positive alternative to this monothematic and historically limited musical environment, we have devised the methodology of the Meeting of Knowledges, through which masters of traditional music, most of them people with little or no formal literacy, are hired to teach regular courses in music, dance, theater, and correlated arts, in courses given equal relevance and prestige to those of the Western erudite musical tradition. Started in the University of Brasília in 2010, the Meeting of Knowledges has already expanded substantially. This chapter sums up the theoretical and methodological foundations of the Meeting of Knowledges and explore connections with other epistemic and political interventions in ethnomusicology and music education.

This book examines the aesthetics and rhetorics of Oceania within the context of huihui, understood as the result of pooling. It explores how the boundaries between the political and the poetic, the rhetorical and the aesthetic, are often blurred within Indigenous knowledge productions. It also shows how Pacific writers and artists skillfully consider and powerfully craft their words in Indigenous and imperialist languages. The book seeks to encourage reading, writing, and seeing through a Pacific or Oceanic lens—processes that counter the framing of rhetorical and aesthetic practices as always and only in response to a colonizing West or East, which inhibits rhetorical and aesthetic sovereignty. By recognizing the rhetorical and aesthetic sovereignty of the Indigenous peoples of the Pacific, the book contributes to the overturning of these hegemonic structures and the promotion of decolonization.

This chapter introduces the foundational principles of Archaeologies of Listening. It takes the reader back to the genesis of anthropological method as well as the debates that have influenced attitudes toward indigenous knowledge and oral traditions over the last century. It critically examines the failure of “New Archaeology” to employ anthropological methods and proposes a complementary practice that does not eschew science but advocates a broader practice incorporating empirical evidence from those with deep experience with material cultures and landscapes. This chapter brings into focus how a richer interpretative posture occurs when we open our practice to the knowledge of others by employing the principles of apprenticeship and patience when working with communities. By putting into action the principle of epistemic humility, alternative views of the past open as do alternative ontologies that structure how the archaeological record is formed and heritage is performed.

This chapter locates heritage landscapes as central to ongoing debates and future contexts and offers insights and recommendations of how engagements with landscapes can include emancipatory discourse and/or be deployed in ways that mobilize agency. It suggests ways that heritage managers can move toward protecting the intellectual and property rights of Indigenous people in heritage initiatives that could include developing research protocols, in collaboration with Indigenous people that take on the political and historical contexts. Not only as a consideration of issues related to Indigenous heritage such as confidentiality, intellectual property rights, access, right of review, and ownership of data, but also as a way to bring in the controversial topics and concerns. The chapter suggests that to develop dialogue and expand the context for Indigenous knowledge in heritage and environmental management practices, scholars must restructure how we report our work and the laws and practices that guide investigations. This chapter argues that the field of critical heritage theory has much to offer as it moves away from a critique of shortcomings to instead provide recommendations and a new engagement with heritage landscapes that makes room for multiple understandings and brings in subjugated and stakeholder knowledge.

Agustín Farfán’s Tractado breve de anothomia y chirvgia (1579) stands out as one of the most widely read medical texts of sixteenth-century colonial Mexico, printed more times than any other local source on health and the body during the period. Despite its popularity then, it has not received as much attention from scholars as projects by other medical authors of the colonial era who either wrote before Farfán did, or were better positioned in European circles, or whose work is seen as having tapped into cutting-edge scientific debates. This chapter proposes a new entry point into the Tractado, highlighting its singular connection with the readers of New Spain, and taking as a point of departure the revisions between the first and second editions: a series of context-driven changes that reveal shifting attitudes toward patients’ needs and indigenous medical knowledge.

This chapter asks a number of questions about knowledge, property, and embodiment. Are there ways of protecting the disadvantaged from the oppressive strangulation of multinational corporations and the individuals they hire to expropriate indigenous knowledge? Why have we neglected to compensate indigenous groups? Is it because our notions of property are incommensurable with indigenous forms of knowledge? If so, why have other forms of knowledge and experience given way? Is it because we recognizing differences in how property is understood but have no clear way of compensating for inalienable wealth when it is taken? In such instances, what can reimbursement mean? And how do we reimburse? Does our confusion about how to do this arise from the fact that the process of globalization homogenizes our views of what matters? If so, how can indigenous peoples resist the temptation to comply with these overwhelmingly seductive trends? If not, how may we learn to see what can be morally gained by an appreciation of what is unique about other lifeways, the rituals that give them local meaning, and the places that are profoundly changed when engaged ritually?

Careful listening to oral traditions, a significant part of Tanzanian Haya heritage, for nearly a year led to an ancient shrine where Haya elders encouraged excavations. This was early participatory community archaeology, where indigenous knowledge and the initiative of elders paved the way to significant archaeological finds about iron technology and the enduring qualities of knowledge preserved by ritual performance. Patient apprenticeship to knowledge-keepers during ethnoarchaeological observations of iron technology also led to significant insights into inventive techniques in iron technology that otherwise would have gone unnoticed. Listening with epistemic humility, opening ourselves to other ways of constructing history and heritage, unveils heritage under treat. A forgotten massacre by German colonials, the knowledge of which has been erased by disease and globalization, was revealed and is now preserved only by listening closely to Haya elders five decades ago.

This chapter concludes the argument of the book and shows how environmental politics in Africa is central to the production of state effects, and vice versa. The theoretical framework, inspired by postcolonial approaches, produces a powerful way to categorise and assess African environmental politics in terms of the governance and contestation of land, populations, economies and international relations. Moreover, this chapter argues that green states in Africa are distinctive, compared to those elsewhere, in terms of the centrality of land and conservation, the importance of ‘the peasant question’, the importance of green modernisation and industrialisation strategies, and the assertion of continental solidarity. Based on the analysis of the political implications of these green state effects, the conclusion suggests that political resources should be marshalled in support of hybrid forms of territorialisation, environmental dissidents, radical strategies of green transformation, and relations of critical transnational solidarity. Taking green states in Africa seriously will challenge existing debates in global environmental governance, and encourage them to become more genuinely global than they have been hitherto.

The book concludes with a note of optimism not only on the future of the Navajo philosophy of leadership in a contemporary world, but also on how many Indigenous philosophies might work for specific Indigenous nations. Navajo philosophy is guided by a ground search through the use of the wolf. It is also guided by a search from above by the eagle. This chapter emphasizes a tie between interspecies relatives that means humans, wolves (people with hooves), and eagles (people with wings) can work together for a common good. It is a call for all interested parties to cooperate in the search for a contemporary place within Navajo philosophy.