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| From the series"1880 Crow Peace Delegation" by Wendy Red Star, Apsáalooke (Crow) |
This week we read "Epistemology and Research: Centering Tribal Knowledge" by Margaret Kovach. Epistemology is the theory of knowledge. It is the investigation of what distinguishes justified belief from opinion. Kovach describes Indigenous epistemologies as having holistic qualities and very spiritual. Kovach says, "tribal knowledge is pragmatic and ceremonial, physical and metaphysical." On the other hand, Western epistemology is based on the scientific method and centers around objective reasoning. Obviously, these are quite different from one another.
The buffalo hunt was an important occasion for the Plains Cree people. There were hundreds of thousands of buffalo in the Saskatchewan country, but unfortunately, European settlers slaughtered the majority of them, which led to the starvation and devastation of the Plains Cree economy. It was said that they would seek supernatural power to bring the buffalos and the hunters would gather them. Over the winter, hunters would build teepees and they would cut trees to make a circular enclosure about seventy yards across and fourteen feet wide. In the center was a big, lobbed tree. When they were ready, they would sing the buffalo song while two younger men would keep watch for buffalo. They would blow their whistles when the buffalo were in sight. They would lock the buffalo in the enclosure and the hunt would begin. After all of the meat was cut up, they would share it with other bands as a large feast.
Although their research methodology is very ceremonial; their buffalo hunts also had to be very methodical. The plan to trap the buffalos had to be well thought out and well executed. They had to carefully craft their teepees to keep them safe overnight and create a strong barrier to trap the buffalo in. Their method of hunting buffalo also leads me to believe that this has been tested by them throughout many years. Trial and error have taught them the perfect method for hunting buffalo. This relates to research methods that I was taught in school. We were not taught to conduct our research in ceremonial ways like the Plains Cree, I didn't get to sing a song in any of my science labs before conducting an experiment (although that would make it a lot more enjoyable). However, we were taught to have a solid plan when conducting experiments and we would tweak our experiments through trial and error.
People who speak multiple languages fluently will most likely have a better understanding of the other cultures whose language they are speaking. For example, in Spanish and Italian many words are gendered, which as a person who primarily speaks English, I was a bit confused about this concept when I was learning these languages (neither of them really stuck unless it was a really funny sentence). In Italian the word for door is Porta and when you look up the translation it literally says the word itself is feminine. This is a very interesting concept to me, but for someone who speaks Italian fluently, this would make total sense. There are also some languages that do not gender specific words as well. I learned this while watching an interview from a non-binary person in the beauty industry. They are an Asian beauty influencer, and they were asked how their elder family members address them when it comes to being non-binary. They explained that in their native language there is no distinction between male or female anyways, so it is not an issue. They are mostly referred to as, "my beautiful grandchild" essentially. This was when I first learned that gender and gendered language is not used worldwide. Some examples of languages that do not use gender are Turkish, Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Swahili. I'm sure there are many more.
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