Indigenous peoples

The spiritual lives of indigenous people have long been of interest to outsiders, especially colonial occupiers. Indigenous spirituality, once evaluated as non-conforming to colonial powers’ pre-existing ideas of religion, was used as justification for the subjugation of indigenous peoples and the seizure of their lands. Interactions between the English and the Wampanoag, an indigenous nation whose members inhabit the eastern coast of what is now considered New England, can be categorized in…

Identity For Indigenous people, ancestry is deemed as the spirits of the Indigenous people (Perso & Hayward, 2015). Indigenous people show extreme respect to their ancestry, as they believe it explains where they come from. The foundation of Indigenous identity is their links to the ‘country’ (Perso & Hayward, 2015). It is about where they grow up, who they are and which group they belong to. Indigenous people value the traditional lands of their cultural groups and the kinship between…

Indigenous people have their own ways of seeing, being, doing, and knowing in this world. According to Richard Spearman, “Kendaaswin is the Anishinaabe way of developing and disseminating knowledge” (Spearman, 2016). Anishnabe people have theorized that the two aspects of reality are physicality and spirituality. In Anishnabe knowledge there are seven aspects: spirit memory, original instructions, acquired knowledge, traditional knowledge, revealed knowledge, mother earth knowledge, and…

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…

Indigenous education across Australia has been gradually improving as we become more aware; however it is still drastically behind the standards of non-indigenous students. Therefore it is our responsibility as teachers to become aware of continual issues that have arisen and address them to enable progress. We must examine the ways in which we can Engage and encourage learning within our English classrooms. Before we begin I must tell you my personal experiences and explain why this is an…

There are many definitions of Indigenous archaeology. George P. Nicholas’s definition of Indigenous archaeology is “Indigenous archaeology is an expression of archaeological theory and practice in which the discipline intersects with Indigenous values, knowledge, practices, ethics, and sensibilities, and through collaborative and community-originated or –directed projects, and related critical perspectives. Indigenous archaeology seeks to (1) make archaeology more representative of,…

For generations Indigenous peoples have passed their knowledge on through oral traditions . This includes storytelling to teach about cultural beliefs, values, customs, rituals, history and ways of life. The text “Aboriginal Oral Traditions” centers on this knowledge. In the introduction, Hulan and Eigenbrod succinctly explain oral history in the following way: “Oral traditions form the foundation of Aboriginal societies, connecting speaker and listener in communal experience and uniting past…

Topic 1: The Legacy of Colonialism on Indigenous Parenting: An Expansion of the Canada Child Benefit for the First Peoples of Canada This policy study will focus on the social welfare issue of parenting and childcare for indigenous peoples through the legacy of colonialism in Canada. The legacy of colonialism defines the division of the indigenous family, which has occurred through governmental policies formed throughout the history of Canada. The problem of poverty and economic alienation…

Oral health in Indigenous children and young people in rural and remote communities Oral health is a microcosm of the wider Indigenous disadvantage evident in measures of employment, income, education and health. Indigenous children consistently have more caries (in both frequency and severity) and untreated oral health problems (Ha et al., 2014). In some studies, the incidence of caries is more than double in the Indigenous child sample than for non-Indigenous children (Roberts-Thomson et al.,…

Language is defined by Merriam-Webster Dictionary as a “system of words or signs that people use to express thoughts and feelings to each other” (Merriam-Webster). But language is more than that, language is a vessel that carries culture, spirituality, knowledge and wisdom, it connects humanity to the past therefore bringing an overall community essence to all those who speak it. As a result of this deep connection to language that humanity shares, when language is taken through assimilation it…