Indigenous Epistemes

This chapter examines the academy as a hegemonic site of knowledge production that has largely ignored and dismissed indigenous ways of being in and relating to the world – or what I call epistemes. Drawing on Spivak's notion of sanctioned ignorance, I argue that the academy is characterized by an epistemic ignorance which prevents it from properly “profess[ing] its profession” (Derrida). Instead of liberal multicultural efforts of “knowing the other,” academics have a responsibility to do their homework and begin to learn from indigenous and other epistemes.