Reflection On Indigenous Knowledge Management

An increasing amount of indigenous communities and organizations are adopting information technology tools to organize and store their knowledge. The term Indigenous Knowledge Management is used to describe the tools developed at the Distributed Systems Technology Centre (DSTC) in Australia. According to Jane Hunter (2005), the goal of these Indigenous Management tools is to “enable Indigenous communities to capture, control, and share their knowledge within local knowledge bases according to their unique, specific local needs” (p. 109). These tools are an important factor in preserving Indigenous knowledge because without the direct involvement of Indigenous people, outsiders often have difficulty in selecting culturally appropriate methods …show more content…
This knowledge is so specific and special to that group of people that it determines how they make basic decisions regarding “food, security, human, and animal health, education, and natural resource management” (as cited in Hunter, 2005, p. 109).
The first part of my reflection addresses Part A and explains the increasingly important relationship between Indigenous Knowledge and information technology, and provides examples of Indigenous Knowledge Management systems projects. These projects include the National Museum of the American Indian’s (NMAI) inventory and repatriation project, Indigenous Knowledge Bases, and the IKM (Indigenous Knowledge Management) system, developed by DSTC and NMAI.
In 1989, the National Museum of the American Indian Act (NMAI Act) was passed, transferring stewardship of 800,000 objects from the George Gustav Heye collection of the Museum of the American Indian in New York City to the Smithsonian Institution. The NMAI Act also required all Smithsonian institutions to inventory and repatriate Native American, Native Hawaiian, and Alaska Native human remains and certain other cultural objects. A subsequent NMAI Amendment Act expanded the types of cultural objects that required inventory and repatriation (“National Museum of the American Indian”, …show more content…
It is important because it is a very useful tool for researchers and people researching family genealogies. As with Kīpuka, Papakilo makes documents and archives available that used to only be accessible through libraries, archives, the State Historical Preservation Division, and the Bureau of Conveyances. Digitizing the documents is becoming more important as the originals degrade and become useless (Quitevis, 2015). Preserving historical documents through digitization also makes them easily accessible through a web