Dr. Daniel Heath Justice, a professor in the Department of First Nations and Indigenous Studies and Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Literature and Expressive Culture sat down earlier this year to discuss Indigenous knowledges in open education with Will Engle, Strategist for Open Education Initiatives at the Centre for Teaching, Learning and Technology. View the video for the highlights of the interview and read below for the full transcript.
WE: In 2015, you began a Twitter campaign, #HonouringIndigenousWriters, to share the names of Indigenous writers to push back against the “frequent assumptions that Indigenous literary history is any less complex, robust or diverse than that of other peoples.” Your efforts inspired a Wikipedia-edit-a-thon, which took place for a second time this March, in which people came together to add information about Indigenous writers to Wikipedia. Wikipedia is a widely used information source for many people across the world, but it also contains a lot of gaps, exclusions and biases. Based on your experiences, are there ways that Indigenous voices, stories and perspectives can be brought into more open resources and online spaces to promote belonging and relevance and support the idea of bringing in diverse voices? How might this be done thoughtfully?
DJ: Much broader technology access makes it possible for underrepresented voices to be heard, whether it’s Wikipedia, Twitter, other forms of social media or other electronic resources. I think it creates the conditions for people to be heard, those who may not have access to the mechanisms of power. The flip side of that, of course, is that racists and bigots also have access to that, and they are motivated and numerically significant. So, while we’re talking about the important ways in which technology can empower underrepresented peoples, it also empowers the already powerful.
We’re always struggling with the balance between accessibility and legitimacy. Just because somebody can post something, doesn’t mean that it’s accurate, it doesn’t mean that it’s generative, and it doesn’t mean that it is free from causing harm. So, one of those constant struggles is making sure that the material that is widely available is accurate. That voices who aren’t typically represented have access. [And that these voices are] protected from trolling and from being trashed by people motivated to shut them down. So I’m ambivalent; any technology can be used for good or ill. Every technology has a culture around it. Part of what we’re trying to do is to make sure that the culture that’s around Indigenous voices online is one where Indigenous people can thrive and not where Indigenous people are yet again put in a position of defending our basic humanity.
Any tool can be a weapon, and I think the direction to which that weapon is pointed is part of the culture that we’re trying to create or we’re trying to hold back. I get frustrated with the well-intended, but I think very naïve ideas of a lot of digital media specialists who believe that technology will solve all of our problems because there is so much evidence to prove that’s not the case. Technology alone is so easily weaponized; technology has to be deeply interwoven with cultures of accountability.
In Wikipedia, facts are required to be verifiable through a citation to a “reliable source.” Wikipedia’s view of reliable sources is not that different from the perspective of secondary sources used in traditional scholarship: peer-reviewed journals, academic books, and mainstream newspapers are all viewed as reliable secondary sources of information. Though, these sources have often been exclusionary of Indigenous perspectives and voices and may not be reliable sources of information and scholarship on Indigenous topics. How does academic scholarship structurally enforce or disrupt gaps and exclusions of representation?
The archive is always problematic when it comes to Indigenous peoples. So much of what was collected in the archive was racist from its inception. A lot of the work that we have to do is interrogate the archive. Oftentimes what’s not in the archive is at least as important as what’s present. But that’s not to say that the archive doesn’t matter. I think anytime we’re looking to understand which sources are legitimate, which ones are problematic, which ones are outright dangerous. I think a singular approach is never going to be effective. We have to constantly question what is the material that we’re looking at, who is the source? What motivated the source? And where does it get its authority?
The reality is that text-based sources carry a lot of cultural capital in our broader society, and for good or ill, lies have been published just as well as truth has. Academia has a long history of colonial extraction of Indigenous communities and misrepresentation.
There is also a lot that’s good in the archive for a lot of our communities. Here in Canada, a lot of the materials that were collected in the archive before residential school and during the early years are not available in communities anymore. Some of that includes language use. There are several language revitalization scholars, community scholars as well as academic scholars, who are going to those archives to find materials. But understanding that those materials are very much embedded in a matrix of colonialism and racism. So it’s a process of combing through the archive and seeing: what is useful to communities? What is meaningful to communities? Where do community memories still speak back to that material that can give us a sense of its relevance or its accuracy? And then there are also community memories that didn’t get lost and so making sure that there’s space for that.
One thing that we don’t talk about much is the material in the archive that was collected from community members who were already outsiders in their communities—some of the things that are there as traditional knowledge were considered quite dangerous at the time. The reason anthropologists and ethnographers went to those individuals was that they were the ones who were willing to speak. Whereas more traditionally respectful people would not speak on those issues.
There are also complications with some of the traditional knowledge that’s in the archive. Some of it is witchery, it’s not medicine, and in some communities don’t have people who have the medical knowledge to be able to combat that.
There are all kinds of ways in which the archive is problematic. It can be a really important tool, but as I was talking about with technology, we have to create a culture of critical thinking and care around that to make sure that what we’re drawing out of the archive is actually safe, accurate, affirms our humanity and speaks to our needs today. Taking things out without any critical assessment can create real harm, so again, I think a lot of it is that the training that people get to approach the archive with care and with as much knowledge as possible.
The founder of Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales, has stated that a goal of Wikipedia is to give every single person on the planet free access to the sum of all human knowledge. How do we reconcile the idea that Wikipedia is an open resource that is founded upon scholarly and academic outputs but that those outputs are not necessarily reflective nor inclusive of all human knowledge? For example, there are huge gaps and biases involved in what gets treated as a reliable academic source.
I would push back on the idea that any repository can collect all human knowledge. I think that’s a really colonial model, and I think it presumes the idea that all knowledge should be available to all people. That’s a very imperialist notion that comes out of the Enlightenment. It comes out of extractive colonialism. It does not take into account protocols around knowledge and the ways in which certain kinds of knowledge are in Indigenous context. Certain kinds of knowledge belong to certain communities and to certain people who are charged not only with the care of that knowledge but also the careful utilization and employment of that knowledge.
I don’t think that all knowledge is meant for all people. I think a lot of it is, and I think accessibility to a lot of knowledge is really important. But there is an extractive mentality at the heart of the idea that all things should be available to all people. What that usually means is that the ideas and resources of marginalized people are available for extraction from the powerful. It typically doesn’t mean that marginalized people get access to the knowledge and power of the powerful. There are all kinds of unspoken codes in powerful strata of society that are intentionally kept from marginalized communities. Access to that would be great for the marginalized communities, but I think it’s a myth as it is that all knowledge is available, because it’s not, it has never been.
We have to have more of a conversation about why certain knowledge should be made widely available, and why certain knowledge maybe shouldn’t, and that would put us into conversation with Indigenous protocols around knowledge as well.
How does community relate to knowledge building or representation?
Knowledge, as I understand it, is never just about individuals. It is about communities; it’s about genealogies, it’s about histories. Community creates knowledge just as individuals create knowledge that then expands or sometimes contracts the knowledge capacity of the community. So, I think community has to be at the heart of our understanding of knowledge production and knowledge dissemination. When we’re talking about multiple communities in dialogue, then we have to think very much about relationships of power and how power also impacts knowledge production, knowledge maintenance, but also knowledge dissemination: who decides what knowledge should be shared? To what end? And why? And all of those kinds of questions are not just about community, but that tension between community and individual.
In open education, there’s a lot of discussion about inclusivity and that we are operating in a settler-colonial context. However, there is this interest in adding marginalized voices and Indigenous perspectives into open knowledge and open resources. How do we avoid being exploitive or appropriative?
I don’t know that you can fully avoid it, but I think you have to tread very carefully, and any time you step forward without some degree of consultation and reflection, you’re running real risks. I think of open education as being in a territory that you’re opening up, you may open up to underrepresented people, but you may also open it up to people who are just looking for another territory to claim. So I think real care and humility [is needed]. Those two qualities are the most essential ways to safeguard against exploitative practices, [as well as] being attentive when you’re called out when you’ve made a mistake. Everybody makes mistakes; it’s how you deal with the mistakes that make a difference.
I think you also have to question your preconceived notions about what knowledge is and should be. And if you’re getting a lot of pushback from Indigenous people about what you’re putting out there, or other underrepresented communities, think very carefully about why that is and listen. You may not agree, but sometimes you may disagree and still make the decision that is best for the community you’re trying to represent. Also, reflect on your motives and why you want certain things. Sometimes the things you’re most excited about are the most dangerous, and that’s a hard thing for people to reflect on. Especially for researchers, oftentimes, we invest so much into a project and then come to the realization that this could be a problematic project. Oftentimes people still go forward and try to rationalize why it’s okay. Still, if they were listening, then they’d say, “well, you know what? Yeah, I want to do this, and it kind of sucks, but I also don’t want to create harm.” It requires a relationship fundamentally; you cannot do this work in a minimally exploitative way if you don’t have relationships with the people you’re trying to represent.
Wikipedia has a diversity of projects aimed at promoting and building a more diverse and inclusive Wikipedia. I’ve seen it suggested that Wikipedia should shift the goal of being an open repository of all human knowledge to instead being a space where all humans can contribute to knowledge. How do you feel about that sort of statement, and is that a more appropriate goal for open education?
I think if we’re talking about different approaches to knowledge, one that allows everyone to participate in knowledge creation is a really important thing. Still, you can’t do it without assessing relationships and power. Demographics will determine a lot, and a very powerful majority culture is going to have a lot of impact on disempowered minoritized cultures. I think if you’re going to look at knowledge, you know the difference between the sum of all knowledge and all humans creating knowledge. The latter is a better way of approaching it. But you have to do it with the understanding of power relationships. If you try to evacuate politics and power from it, you’re just going to replicate the same systems of power. But, you will have done it under the auspices of diversity, which makes diversity seem the problem rather than the lack of critical assessment of power.
What blind spots does open education have in regards to engaging with Indigenous sovereignty?
I think open education is woefully underprepared to deal with Indigenous sovereignty and self-determination again because, in Indigenous communities and Indigenous knowledge traditions, the idea of kind of all things for all people is not universally shared. We have ample examples of our generosity being used to strip us of our lands, languages, family relationships, [cultural and political] autonomy and our bodily autonomy. All those things have been stripped in part because our early generosity was often used against us, and it’s not to say that our generosity was the problem; it was the lack of respect for that generosity. But Indigenous people have always worked very hard to be in good relations with non-Indigenous peoples and to very mixed results. So approaching open education without taking into account its colonial roots and also its colonial uses, I think it is quite dangerous.
If people are interested in decolonizing open education, they have a lot of work to do. It’s not just a matter of inclusion; it’s questioning the very foundations of what knowledge is. [Not only] in the Academy, but also in society. And thinking very much about how power informs, influences, and limits the possibility of a much more humane and just approach to learning to knowledge and understanding.
