Bibliographic record
Abstract
Traditional Indigenous knowledge is increasingly recognised and incorporated both in and beyond the university. In Canada's Northwest Territories, this recognition has been manifest as policy mandating that scientists incorporate the knowledge of elders and hunters into their environmental and climate change research. However, the recognition of traditional knowledge has not always been met with acceptance and understanding. This article analyses the book Disrobing the Aboriginal Industry by Francis Widdowson and Albert Howard (2008), which is highly critical of traditional knowledge. Widdowson and Howard advocate for cultural assimilation by arguing that traditional knowledge is incompatible with, and inferior to, modern Western science. In their line of reasoning, the current application of traditional knowledge transplants ‗neolithic‘ culture into modernity and stunts the ability of Aboriginal peoples to participate in modern Canadian (and dominant Western) culture. While other critics argue against the racialised and inflammatory discourse, I try to salvage insight from the authors' misunderstandings; Widdowson and Howard's failed grasp on traditional knowledge actually illuminates a fundamental problem. The problem is not in meshing Indigenous and scientific knowledge; rather, the problem is in bridging the gap between Indigenous and scientific ways of knowing. I engage the work of A. Irving Halowell, Tim Ingold and scholars of Dene knowledge and traditional lifeways to discuss how Indigenous religion and worldview create a unique approach to knowledge.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".