Interface Research and Education: Aboriginal and Western Knowledge Systems Combined Productively

Interface research and education require a productive balance between Indigenous methodologies and conventional academic methods, harnessing the energy of two systems in order to create new knowledge. To this end, international scientific organisations are now recognising and actively promoting the need to form a symbiotic relationship with bodies of knowledge previously rejected as primitive or exotic.

Knowledge Theft

It is even being acknowledged that much of the contemporary knowledge and technology attributed to western development has actually been stolen from or created through dialogue with Indigenous peoples. These dialogical histories have been silenced and omitted in western history to date, but their rediscovery now represents a precedent for the enormous creativity and possibilities of interface research and education.

But there is also a need for concern and caution there, in safeguarding against the historical tendency of western knowledge systems to appropriate shared knowledge unilaterally following such dialogue. There is a need for equal status in order for dialogue to occur sustainably, adopting a bi-culturally respectful stance.

Hybridity as Resistance

Eurowestern self-assertive thinking and values need not exist in opposition to more integrative and communal values of Indigenous communities, but rather each can complement the other within creative dialogue. Some even propose hybridity as an option for Indigenous language and culture revival. This uses the idea of congruence theory, proposing that elements common to both cultures are more likely to persist in the emergent recovering culture. Hybridity is even claimed as a mode of resistance for colonised peoples. Clearly, interface research and education with a focus on balance, respect and sharing opens up a world of possibilities for social action, emancipation and community development.

Alternative to Assimilation or Separation

This theory is difficult to implement in the face of globalising forces that promote universal knowledge in a way that offers us only two choices – assimilate or separate. But this third choice – to focus on the interface between knowledge systems, is becoming more and more valid this century.

Increasingly, Indigenous researchers are using the interface between fields like science and Aboriginal knowledge as a source of inventiveness, identifying opportunities for synergy rather than dominance, by harnessing the energy of two systems in order to create new knowledge. Politically, this opens the door for a deeper understanding of what reconciliation really means between indigenous and invader peoples. Also, as it promises such productivity, interface ways of thinking and knowing may become more and more attractive financially even to neo-liberal conservative colonial governments.