This article features the museums of Oaxaca, the place where the community museum movement in Mexico got started. Oaxaca has the largest Indigenous population in Mexico, with about 36.6% of the population over five years old, or about 1.027 million people, speaking an Indigenous language. Tourists spend large amounts on group or personalized tours…

Many non-Western and non-English-speaking scholars express the need for supporting a methodological approach that foregrounds the voices of nationals and locals (or indigenous peoples). Supporting this stance, Western scholars will reach out in democratic and liberatory ways that effect research collaboration, helping to foster social justice and…

We now stand at an interesting intersection in the perennial debate about the merits of homework, write Marzano and Pickering. Arguments against homework are becoming louder and more popular; at the same time, research is providing growing evidence that homework can be useful when employed effectively. After reviewing three recent books that have…

One of the most important questions I ask as both a cultural anthropologist and a university teacher is: How do people come to know what they think they know? In this article, I adopt a narrative approach to processes of learning and discovery in two very different locales, an indigenous society in the South Pacific, and a senior seminar on…

This volume of transformed research utilizes an activist approach to examine the notion that nothing is apolitical. Research projects themselves are critically examined for power orientations, even as they are used to address curricular problems and educational or societal issues. Philosophical perspectives that have facilitated an understanding…

Intellectual property enables individuals to gain financially from sharing unique and useful knowledge. Compensating indigenous people for sharing their knowledge and resources might both validate and be an equitable reward for indigenous knowledge of biological resources, and might promote the conservation of those resources. This book contains…

The Alaska Federation of Natives, in cooperation with the University of Alaska, received funding to implement the Alaska Rural Systemic Initiative (AKRSI). Over a 5-year period (1995-2000), AKRSI initiatives are systematically documenting the indigenous knowledge systems of Alaska Native people and developing educational policies and practices…

Hannah is a Pacific island grade 1 teacher in a local village school. She has been guided in her teaching practice by the values she learned growing up in an extended family. These values involved observing and listening to elders, and then practicing what she observed and participating in many conversations among family members. Written by the…

The constructs used to evaluate research quality--valid, objective, reliable, generalizable, randomized, accurate, authentic--are not value-free. They all require human judgment, which is affected inevitably by cultural norms and values. In the case of research involving American Indians and Alaska Natives, assessments of research quality must be…

Organizations are self-organizing living systems and therefore capable of doing for themselves much of what managers have always tried to do for them. The role of the leader in organizations should be one of helping the organization develop a clear sense of its own identity, since that is the reference point around which self-organizing takes…

This paper develops a speaker-centered view of language as an alternative to the monolithic decontextualized abstractions favored by modern linguistics, and suggests the application of the speaker-centered view to indigenous language renewal. The paper contends that the modern notion of languages as homogeneous stable "things" that are…

The Alaska Rural Systemic Initiative (AKRSI) was established in 1994 under the auspices of the Alaska Native/Rural Education Consortium, representing over 50 organizations impacting education in rural Alaska. AKRSI's institutional homebase and support structure are provided by the Alaska Federation of Natives in cooperation with the University of…

Discusses the traditional Native American understanding that all things in nature are connected, and explores how this is similar to, and perhaps helped to shape, the Western scientific understanding of the science of ecology. Some relationships in nature described in Native stories are just now being "discovered" to be true by Western…

The Baiga of central India are known for their extensive knowledge of the forest and healing. Healing knowledge is transmitted orally from male expert practitioners to novices. Features of this instruction, which is experiential and geared to the apprentice's levels of interest and ability, raise questions about the feasibility of including…

Eurocentric intelligence is restricted to rational, linear, competitive, and hierarchical thinking. Indigenous intelligence encompasses the body, mind, heart, and experience in total responsiveness and total relationship to the whole environment, which includes the seven generations past and future. Implementation of major changes to indigenous…