Indigenous Knowledge/Chad Martin Lawrence
What Counts as Knowledge? Indigenous Ways of Knowing and the Assumptions We Bring to Work
Organizations make decisions every day about what counts as knowledge. Data become evidence, professional credentials establish expertise, and written records acquire authority, while knowledge carried through story, lived experience, relationships or connection to place can be considerably harder to recognize. Drawing on the work of Indigenous scholars and knowledge holders, this article asks what Indigenous Ways of Knowing might reveal about these assumptions. For those of us who are not Indigenous, the purpose is not to extract Indigenous practices for use in our workplaces, but to allow different ways of knowing to challenge categories we may otherwise take for granted. In doing so, we may begin to ask not only what our organizations know, but how we have decided what knowing is.
