What Counts as Knowledge? Indigenous Ways of Knowing and the Assumptions We Bring to Work

Published September 18, 2026

Consider a familiar workplace problem. A team is trying to understand why an initiative has not worked as expected. Around the table are the things organizations usually turn to for answers: survey results, performance measures, project plans, and reports. Someone who works closely with the people affected by the initiative then describes a conversation they had several months earlier. Another employee mentions something they have repeatedly observed but that has never appeared in the data.

We might ask which of these sources the organization will trust. There is, however, a prior question: which of them will the organization recognize as knowledge in the first place? The distinction is important. Organizations inevitably classify information. A survey becomes ‘data;’ an employee's experience may become ‘anecdotal.’ Professional credentials establish expertise; years spent developing relationships within a community may be considerably harder to capture. A strategic plan becomes part of the organization’s formal record, while knowledge carried through memory, experience or relationships may never be recorded at all. Such distinctions are not necessarily unreasonable. Yet, we rarely stop to ask what assumptions about knowledge underlie them, or what may become obscured as a result.

It is here that I think Indigenous scholarship presents those of us who are not Indigenous with an important challenge. I use the word challenge deliberately. My purpose is not to extract a set of Indigenous practices that might be applied to contemporary organizations. There is no single Indigenous epistemology (i.e., how Indigenous people acquire knowledge) from which such a model could responsibly be constructed. First Nations, Inuit and Métis peoples have distinct intellectual traditions, and knowledge itself can be inseparable from particular peoples, languages, relationships and places. To remove selected concepts from those contexts and convert them into a workplace framework would risk reproducing precisely the abstraction this article asks us to examine.

The more modest question I want to pursue is what happens when we allow Indigenous thinkers to unsettle some of our own assumptions about knowing. If knowledge can be carried through story, as Jo-ann Archibald's work on Indigenous Storywork asks us to consider (Archibald, 2022), what have we missed by treating stories primarily as anecdotes? If knowledge exists through relationships, as Shawn Wilson argues (Wilson, 2008), what happens to our assumption that expertise resides principally within individuals? If, as Leanne Betasamosake Simpson writes specifically of Nishnaabeg intelligence, knowing emerges through relationships with land, family, community, language and lived experience (Simpson, 2014), can knowledge ever be entirely separated from the context in which it was formed?

These are not questions for which I think non-Indigenous organizations should expect simple answers. They may nevertheless expose something about the categories we already use. Perhaps the problem is not that our organizations lack knowledge. Perhaps we have become accustomed to recognizing only particular forms of it.

Story as a Way of Knowing

Consider again the employee who describes something they have observed or experienced. In many organizations, we might listen carefully to the story and even find it compelling. Yet, when it comes time to make a decision, we may still distinguish between the story and the ‘evidence.’ What exactly are we distinguishing? One possibility is reliability. A single person’s experience cannot tell us how frequently something occurs, whether it is representative of others’ experiences, or whether another explanation might better account for what happened. Those are legitimate limitations. Yet, describing a story as ‘anecdotal’ can do something more than identify those limitations. It can also determine, often before we have considered what the story might tell us, what kind of knowledge we believe it is capable of carrying.

Jo-ann Archibald's work on Indigenous Storywork offers a very different starting point. Drawing on her work with Stó:lō and Coast Salish Elders and storytellers, Archibald describes story as a means through which knowledge is carried, taught and understood. Her seven principles of Storywork—respect, responsibility, reciprocity, reverence, holism, interrelatedness and synergy—also make clear that the knowledge contained within a story cannot be separated easily from the relationships and responsibilities through which it is shared.

For those of us accustomed to organizational environments in which knowledge is often abstracted and recorded, this presents an interesting challenge. We tend to ask what information a story contains. Storywork invites a different question: what becomes knowable through the story? The distinction matters. A story may allow us to understand consequence and context in ways that a measure like ‘knowability’ cannot. It may preserve the relationship between an event and the person who experienced it. It may reveal how an organizational decision was actually encountered by someone living with its effects. None of this makes the story universally representative, nor does it mean that a story should be treated as interchangeable with quantitative evidence. It does suggest that the usual hierarchy between ‘evidence’ and ‘anecdote’ may conceal as much as it clarifies.

There is another caution here. Indigenous Storywork should not be reduced to an organizational technique for making meetings more engaging or collecting better employee stories. Archibald’s work is situated within particular Indigenous intellectual traditions and carries responsibilities that do not disappear when the concept enters a workplace discussion. The point for non-Indigenous organizations is more modest: to allow this scholarship to make us examine what we already do. When someone tells us what they have experienced, do we listen only for information that can be extracted and verified elsewhere? Or do we remain open to the possibility that the form in which something is known—the story, the person telling it, the relationships surrounding it and the context in which it occurred—may themselves be part of the knowledge? That question changes what happens around the table. A story no longer needs to compete with the dashboard to become another kind of data point. It asks us instead to consider what the dashboard can tell us, what the story can tell us, and what may remain unknowable if we have already decided that only one of them constitutes evidence.

Listening is Part of Knowing

If we accept that a story may carry knowledge, then we also have to consider what is required of the person listening to it. This is where Archibald's Storywork presents another challenge. The responsibility for meaning does not rest with the storyteller alone; the listener also has a role in creating the conditions through which knowledge can be heard and understood. Listening, from this perspective, is not a passive act.

This is worth considering in organizational settings because we have become quite sophisticated at gathering input. We run engagement surveys and create opportunities for employees to provide feedback; yet, these activities may tell us more about our ability to collect information than our capacity to listen to it. What happens, for example, after someone tells us something we did not expect to hear? Our organizational instinct is often to process it. We identify themes, determine whether other people have reported something similar, assign actions, and move on. There are good reasons for doing this; organizations eventually have to make sense of what they hear and decide how to respond; nevertheless, the speed with which we move from listening to interpretation may also determine what we are able to learn.

Archibald’s work suggests a more active responsibility on the part of the listener. Storywork involves listening with attention, making meaning, and recognizing the relationship between the story, the storyteller, and those receiving it. A story may not disclose everything it has to tell us on first hearing. The listener may need to reflect on it, return to it, and resist resolving its meaning too quickly.

Sean Teuton's discussion of Native American oral literatures adds another dimension to this question. He describes oral traditions through which knowledge concerning history, ethics, ecology, governance, and relationships with ancestral lands could be carried across generations (Teuton, 2018). Such transmission placed considerable intellectual demands on memory. Listening was consequential: knowledge continued, in part, because people listened, remembered, and carried it forward.

I would not suggest that listening in a contemporary workplace is equivalent to listening within these Indigenous oral traditions: the comparison would collapse very quickly. What it does allow us to see, however, is how limited our own conception of listening can sometimes be. At work, listening is often treated as the preliminary stage before the more consequential work begins: analysis, decision-making, and action. Indigenous scholarship gives us reason to ask whether listening might itself be part of the work of knowing.

This notion becomes particularly important where organizational power is uneven. A CEO and an employee may sit in the same room and participate in the same conversation, but they do not necessarily assume the same risk in speaking candidly. Nor do they necessarily have the same ability to determine how what has been said will subsequently be interpreted. Listening responsibly may therefore require more than providing an opportunity to speak: it may mean remaining with an uncomfortable account long enough to understand it, asking rather than assuming what an experience means, and paying particular attention to the observation that does not align neatly with the organization’s prevailing interpretation.

Perhaps, then, the measure of organizational listening is not simply whether people have been given an opportunity to speak. A more difficult question is whether what they have said has been allowed to change what the organization knows.

Knowledge Exists in Relationship

Another assumption embedded in many workplaces is that knowledge resides primarily within individuals. We hire people for their expertise. Job descriptions identify what an individual should know, and performance systems evaluate individual capability. When a problem arises, we look for the person who has the answer.

Cree scholar Shawn Wilson offers a different way of thinking about the relationship between the knower and what is known. In Research Is Ceremony, Wilson describes an Indigenous research paradigm in which knowledge is relational. Relationships exist not only between people, but also with the land, the cosmos, ideas, and the knowledge itself. From this follows what Wilson calls ‘relational accountability:’ if knowledge is formed and held through relationships, then knowing also carries responsibilities to those relationships (Wilson, 2008, p. 11). This is a considerably different proposition from simply saying that relationships help us acquire knowledge. It suggests that, in some Indigenous epistemologies, knowledge cannot be fully understood as something an individual possesses independently of the relationships through which it has come to be known.

Marie Battiste and James (Sa'ke'j) Youngblood Henderson similarly describe Indigenous Knowledge as emerging through particular peoples, languages, places, experiences, and relationships (Battiste & Henderson, 2000). Once again, the specificity matters. These scholars are not describing a universal Indigenous way of knowing, nor should relational accountability be extracted from Wilson's work and converted into a corporate leadership model. What their scholarship can do is expose an assumption that may otherwise remain largely invisible in our organizations.

Consider the question we routinely ask when making a decision: Who owns this act/outcome? The question serves an obvious purpose. Organizations need accountability and clarity about who has authority to act. Yet, it also frames the decision in a particular way. What might we notice if, alongside asking who owns a decision, we also asked: Who is connected to it? For example, on an organizational chart, we might see that positions move, reporting relationships change, and responsibilities are redistributed. Yet, the boxes on the chart tell us very little about the relationships that have developed around them. An employee may have spent years building trust with a particular community. Another may carry an understanding of how work actually moves between two departments that has never been formally documented. Someone relatively junior in the hierarchy may know why a particular process works because they have lived within the relationships that make it work. What happens to this knowledge when the relationship is disrupted?

The question matters because organizations can sometimes assume that knowledge is readily transferable. We document a process, conduct a handover, move a responsibility from one position to another, and presume that the knowledge has moved with it. Some knowledge undoubtedly can be transferred this way; and yet, relational knowledge complicates that assumption. Trust built over time, an understanding of a community, knowledge of how particular people work together, or the ability to recognize when something is changing may exist precisely because someone has participated in those relationships.

This also complicates how we think about expertise. Formal authority and knowledge do not necessarily follow the same organizational lines. A manager may know the policy exceptionally well, while an employee delivering the service knows how that policy is experienced by the people it affects. Neither form of knowledge necessarily displaces the other. The more interesting question is what becomes visible when they are brought into relationship.

For those of us working in non-Indigenous organizations, Wilson's concept of relational accountability should remain more challenging than prescriptive. It does not give us a new management technique. It asks us to reconsider something more basic: whether knowledge can always be separated from the relationships through which it was formed. If it cannot, then changing a relationship may also change what an organization is capable of knowing.

Knowing Where We Are

The idea that knowledge exists through relationships leads to another question: what happens when those relationships are also relationships with place? This is perhaps where those of us working in non-Indigenous organizations need to proceed most carefully. Indigenous relationships with land cannot be reduced to familiar organizational language about ‘being grounded’ or ‘connecting with nature.’ Nor is land simply another source from which useful knowledge can be acquired. Relationships with land are situated within particular Indigenous peoples, territories, histories and responsibilities.

Nishnaabeg scholar Leanne Betasamosake Simpson makes this specificity particularly clear in Land as Pedagogy. Simpson is writing about Nishnaabeg intelligence and Nishnaabeg relationships with land, family, community, Elders, other living beings, spirituality and language. Learning within this context occurs through doing, observing, experimenting, listening, storytelling, practising and developing relationships over time. Land is not simply the setting in which this learning takes place. Simpson describes it as both the context and the process through which Nishnaabeg knowledge is generated (Simpson, 2014, pp. 9-11).

There is something here that can be difficult to reconcile with the way knowledge often functions within organizations. We tend to value knowledge precisely because it can be abstracted from its original context. We identify a ‘best practice,’ document it, and reproduce it elsewhere; we develop competencies that can be carried from one organization to another; we collect information from communities and incorporate it into reports. Knowledge becomes particularly useful when it is transferable. Simpson's work, however, asks us to consider what might be lost through that process of abstraction.

If some knowledge emerges through sustained relationships with particular lands, communities, languages and experiences, can it ever be fully understood once separated from those relationships? The question resembles the one raised by relational knowledge in the previous section, but place makes the problem more concrete. Where something is known may be part of what is known.

This also does not mean that non-Indigenous organizations can simply adopt Nishnaabeg land-based pedagogy as a workplace practice. Simpson’s argument is grounded explicitly in Nishnaabeg intellectual and political traditions. Describing Indigenous Knowledge more generally as ‘place-based’ can itself become problematic if it implies that there is a single Indigenous understanding of land that can be generalized across First Nations, Inuit and Métis peoples. Canada’s Indigenous Knowledge Policy Framework similarly emphasizes that Indigenous Knowledge is community-specific and connected with Indigenous Peoples’ particular relationships with their territories ("Indigenous Knowledge Policy Framework for Project Reviews and Regulatory Decisions," 2022).

Perhaps the question this leaves for a non-Indigenous organization is therefore not How can we use land-based knowledge? That question already assumes that the knowledge is available for us to take and apply. A more appropriate question may be: Do we actually know where we are? Most organizations know their location in one sense. We know our address, the city in which we operate, the market we serve and perhaps the communities represented among our employees or clients. Yet, knowing where we are can ask considerably more of us. Whose territory are we operating on? Which Indigenous Nations have longstanding and continuing relationships with this place? What happened here before our organization arrived? What relationships, if any, do we have with those Nations today? These questions can make the limitations of a land acknowledgement particularly visible. An organization can name the territory on which it operates without allowing that knowledge to affect anything it does. The acknowledgement may be entirely sincere, yet remain disconnected from how the organization understands its own presence in that place. What would change if knowing where we are carried consequences?

The answer will necessarily differ according to the organization and the place. It might affect whose knowledge is sought when a decision has consequences for Indigenous peoples or lands. It could expose the absence of relationships an organization assumed it had. In other circumstances, it may require an organization to understand histories that complicate its own account of itself. The point here is that knowledge of place may bring relationships and responsibilities into view that were previously absent from any given organization’s understanding.

This returns us to a problem running throughout this article. We often treat knowledge as something we can separate from the conditions in which it was produced: the story from the storyteller, expertise from relationships, information from place. Indigenous scholars such as Simpson give us reason to question whether those separations are always possible. If where we know from matters to what we know, then knowing where we are may be more than context. It may change what we are capable of understanding.

Holding More than One Way of Knowing

The argument developed here might seem to leave us with a choice. If we take story, relational knowledge, and place seriously, must we become less confident in data, written evidence, professional expertise or scientific knowledge? The question itself may be part of the problem.

Mi’kmaw Elder Albert Marshall’s concept of Etuaptmumk, or Two-Eyed Seeing, offers another way of approaching different systems of knowledge. Developed through work involving Elder Albert Marshall, Elder Murdena Marshall and researcher Cheryl Bartlett, Two-Eyed Seeing has been described as learning to see from one eye with the strengths of Indigenous knowledges and from the other with the strengths of Western knowledges, while learning to use both together for the benefit of all (Bartlett, 2012, p. 335). Importantly, their work emphasizes co-learning. One system of knowledge is not simply incorporated into the other and made to conform to its categories.

This distinction brings us back to the problem with which this article began. When an organization encounters different forms of knowledge, it does not do so from a neutral position. It already has conventions for deciding what constitutes evidence, who possesses expertise, how knowledge should be documented and what makes something sufficiently reliable to inform a decision. New knowledge may therefore be welcomed while still being required to pass through those existing categories before it is taken seriously. What happens, then, when another way of knowing does not conform easily to them? Two-Eyed Seeing does not provide non-Indigenous organizations with a simple answer to that question, nor should it be treated as a generic model for combining different perspectives. Etuaptmumk emerges from Mi’kmaw knowledge and the work of particular Mi’kmaw Elders; yet, it does make visible another possibility: different knowledge systems might be brought into relationship without requiring one to establish its legitimacy entirely according to the terms of the other.

That possibility also carries a responsibility that can easily be overlooked. If Indigenous knowledge is relational, community-specific and connected with particular peoples and places, then recognizing it as knowledge does not make it available for others simply to possess. The question is not simply whether an organization is willing to listen to Indigenous knowledge, but whether it recognizes Indigenous authority over that knowledge. Here the implications can become quite concrete. The First Nations Information Governance Centre’s principles of OCAP®—Ownership, Control, Access and Possession—assert that First Nations have control over processes of data collection and ownership over how their information is stored, interpreted, used and shared ("The First Nations Principles of OCAP," 2026). FNIGC is equally clear about the specificity of the framework: OCAP® belongs to First Nations, is not a generic Indigenous framework, and individual First Nations may interpret and express its principles according to their own circumstances.

OCAP® concerns information governance rather than Indigenous Ways of Knowing in their entirety, and the distinction is important; nevertheless, it provides a concrete example of a principle that has surfaced repeatedly throughout this discussion. Knowledge does not necessarily become ours because we have heard it, collected it, recorded it or found a use for it. Knowledge can remain connected to the people and communities from whom it comes, and those relationships can carry continuing responsibilities.

This makes the challenge for non-Indigenous organizations somewhat more difficult than simply becoming open to different ways of knowing. Openness can still leave the organization at the centre: What can we learn? What can we use? How might this improve our practice? Those questions may be well intentioned, but they continue to assume that the purpose of encountering another knowledge system is ultimately to bring something back into our own.

Perhaps we need to become more comfortable with a different possibility. We can encounter knowledge that challenges our own assumptions without claiming it as our own. We can recognize another way of knowing without translating it immediately into an organizational practice. We can learn that the categories through which we understand knowledge are not universal without assuming that other knowledge systems therefore exist for our use. For those of us who are not Indigenous, that may be one of the more consequential things Indigenous Ways of Knowing can ask of us: not simply to expand what we know, but to examine how we have decided what knowing is, and to recognize that some knowledge comes with relationships, authority and responsibilities that remain with others.

Conclusions

Indigenous scholars give those of us who are not Indigenous reason to examine our assumptions more carefully. Storywork asks us to consider what can become known through story and what responsibilities belong to the listener. Relationality complicates the idea that knowledge resides principally within individuals. Land-based knowledge challenges the assumption that knowledge can always be separated from the places and relationships through which it was formed. Etuaptmumk asks us to consider whether different ways of knowing can be held together without requiring one to be translated entirely into the categories of another.

None of these ideas gives us a new organizational model, and perhaps that is precisely the point. The temptation for organizations is to move quickly from learning to application: What can we take from this? How can we use it? What practice should we change? Yet, Indigenous Ways of Knowing do not exist as a collection of practices waiting to be incorporated into our workplaces. Some knowledge belongs to particular peoples, and communities. It may carry protocols, relationships and responsibilities that remain theirs.

For those of us who are not Indigenous, there may therefore be value in resisting the urge to arrive too quickly at a set of actions. We can begin by listening to Indigenous thinkers on their own terms and recognizing the limits of our own understanding. We can become more conscious of the assumptions through which our organizations determine what constitutes evidence, where expertise resides, and whose knowledge carries authority. We can also recognize that becoming aware of another way of knowing does not necessarily give us the right to claim or use it.

This brings us back, finally, to the question of what an organization knows. Someone’s story may reveal something the data cannot; the person closest to a community may understand something that is invisible from the executive table; a decision that appears entirely rational when represented as a set of deliverables may look different when we consider the relationships it affects. Even the place in which an organization operates will carry histories, knowledge, and responsibilities absent from its strategic plan.

Perhaps, then, the question is not simply whether our organizations possess enough knowledge. We might also ask how we have determined what knowledge looks like in the first place, what our categories have allowed us to see, and what they may have rendered invisible. Indigenous Ways of Knowing need not provide us with the answers to those questions. Their challenge may be more fundamental: to recognize that our own ways of knowing are ways of knowing, rather than knowing itself.

Bibliography

Archibald, J.-a. (2022). Indigenous Storywork: Educating Heart • Mind • Body & Spirit. Retrieved from https://indigenousstorywork.com/

Bartlett, C., Marshall, M., Marshall, A. (2012). Two-eyed seeing and other lessons learned within a co-learning journey of bringing together indigenous and mainstream knowledges and ways of knowing. Journal of Environmental Studies and Sciences, 2, 331–340.

Battiste, M., & Henderson, J. S. k. j. Y. (2000). Protecting Indigenous Knowledge and Heritage: A Global Challenge: UBC Press.

The First Nations Principles of OCAP. (2026). Retrieved from https://fnigc.ca/ocap-training/

Indigenous Knowledge Policy Framework for Project Reviews and Regulatory Decisions. (2022). Retrieved from https://www.canada.ca/en/impact-assessment-agency/programs/aboriginal-consultation-federal-environmental-assessment/indigenous-knowledge-policy-framework-initiative/indigenous-knowledge-policy-framework-project-reviews-regulatory-decisions.html#toc5

Simpson, L. B. (2014). Land as pedagogy: Nishnaabeg intelligence and rebellious transformation. Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, 3, 1-25. Retrieved from https://whereareyouquetzalcoatl.com/mesofigurineproject/EthnicAndIndigenousStudiesArticles/Simpson2014.pdf

Teuton, S. (2018). Native American Literature: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Wilson, S. (2008). Research Is Ceremony: Indigenous Research Methods: Fernwood Publishing.

Chad Martin Lawrence

Director, Technical Writing and Data Analytics