Decolonizing Western-Indigenous Dialogues

Interwoven Epistemologies for Multiple Modernities

Karsten Kiewitt, Ronald Lutz, Gregory Cajete, Maria do Carmo dos Santos Gonçalves, Ditlhake Kefilwe Johanna

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2025
• eBook ISBN: 9781350425217
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Colonialism & Post-Colonialism
• Index: Social Sciences

This groundbreaking book offers a unique collection of Indigenous and non-Indigenous approaches to decolonizing international development.

The world is facing enormous challenges, from ever-growing global inequality to climate change to the continuing fallout from the Covid pandemic. It is becoming increasingly clear that the origin of these challenges lies in the economic models and imperial lifestyles perpetuated by the Global North. In order to find new answers to the world's biggest challenges, then, it is necessary for the Global North to acknowledge Indigenous knowledge systems as unique and legitimate epistemologies and to engage in dialogues with them.

This collection brings together contributions from Indigenous and non-Indigenous authors to promote that dialogue. It provides a unique, rare forum for discourse between the expressive potentials of differing world views, and ultimately, for developing cooperation in the terms of Eisenstein's notion of interbeing, which counteracts the "History of Separation" between nature and culture and between Global South and Global North. What emerges is a path forward towards a new, interwoven modernity characterized by an embrace of separate, but mutually constitutive, ways of knowing.

For its wide topical and geographic breadth, and for its bringing together of Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars around the world, this book is a must-read for researchers and students interested in indigenous studies and decolonial approaches to international development.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Notes on Contributors
• Preface
• Introductions
• 1 On the Decolonization of Dialogues
• 2 What Is Native Science?
• Part One Dialogues
• 3 To Know from Within
• 4 To Be Open for Constructive Strangeness: Experiences with Intercultural Knowledge Exchange in Development Cooperation and Science
• 5 Embodied Knowledge: Decolonizing Philosophy by Turning to the Nature that We Are
• 6 Perhaps We Didn’t Need a Bridge: In Dialogue with Indigenous Mathematics
• 7 Western and Indigenous Knowledge Systems: Attainment of the Sustainable Development Goals and the Umunthu Developmental Approach
• 8 Kitheka ki matu: A Forest Has Ears
• Part Two Challenges
• 9 Conceded Land Rights, Indigenous Territoriality, and Cooperation: Contradictions and Challenges
• 10 Spirited Five Fingers Model: A Way of Reconnecting to the Spirit of Reciprocity in Social and Community Work
• 11 Mobilities in the Global South and New Circuits of Affects
• 12 Indigenous Social Security Systems for Endogenous Social Development in Southern Africa
• 13 Indigenous in Europe: The Challenge in Bringing Back Livonian
• 14 The Hijab and Faith: Fashion and Modesty
• Part Three Perspectives
• 15 Thirty Years of Democracy in South Africa: Reflecting on Social Work and Climate Change Challenges through a Ubuntu Lense
• 16 Decoloniality as Total Disentanglement with Modern Capitalist and Neoliberal Complex: Social Work Perspective
• 17 Indigenous Youth and the Recomposition of Community Life: Some Experiences in Oaxaca, Mexico
• 18 “Not about us, but with us!” Perspectives of Insurgent Research with Children of the Global South
• 19 From Alternative Epistemologies to Alternative Aesthetics: A Plea for a Decolonial Environmental Aesthetics
• 20 Buen Vivir and Sustainability: Relation between Indigenous Knowledge and Western Concepts
• Conclusion
• 21 Conclusion: Decolonializing Knowledge
• Index
• Copyright