Indigenizing or Appropriating? Navigating the Boundaries of Institutional Decolonization
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
As Indigenous researchers and advocates, we challenge the notion of decolonizing structures rooted in colonialism. We argue that systems built and established from, and with colonialism, cannot be fully decolonized due to their colonial foundations. Authentic decolonial praxis removes and/or abolishes colonial ways of being and knowing, making way for Indigenous ways of being and knowing. Many systems that claim to be decolonizing or decolonized are instead often either indigenizing or indigenized, adding in Indigenous aspects, traditions, knowledge or culture, without consideration of colonial foundations. Sometimes this involves the inclusion of Indigenous perspectives and authentic, culturally safe Indigenous knowledges or traditions to already established practices, but requires sensitivity to risks of appropriation, where Indigenous traditions, languages, or ways of knowing are misused, stolen, and/or decontextualized. Appropriation risks engaging in performative decolonization/indigenization, without abiding by Indigenous protocols, engaging in relationality, or appropriately relaying information and knowledge with appropriate permissions. Such language use is significant within the context of institutional attempts to engage in the work of both decolonization and indigenization. Through this paper, we unpack these nuances from our perspectives as a university professor and community social worker, who work within institutions such as education, carceral, and health systems.
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.
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 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.003 |
| 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 it