Introduction

Abstract

Any attempt to wade into indigenous waters in the Asia/Pacific and Africa is a daunting task on many levels—there are the demands of definition, of positionality/location/optics of the contributors/writing (the transgressions of outsiders and liberties taken), questions of boundaries and spaces, telling/not telling, knowledge divides/unity, essentialisms and cultural dynamisms, the politics of the analysis/depictions of relative power(lessness) and of colonization/resistance, and so on that this set of readings is perhaps no less/more successful at addressing or transcending as is probably the case with many of its predecessors. The collection seeks to be as much about the contributions of indigenous knowledges (IKs), struggles, and peoples today (in contrast to museumized-mothball approaches that negate contemporary critical colonial relevance and presence/gravity of the indigenous—see Grande, 2004; Red Pedagogy) as it is about engaging indigenous postmortems/critical appreciations and expositions of the colonial project of modernity and its tentacular manifestations; that is, amplifying the political genius that stems from multiple histories of addressing “colonial assimilation projects, neglect, diminishment, and racism” (Battiste, 2008, p. 85)- There is an attempt here to learn from and with, to politicize and amplify rather than to anthropologize and to stiflelobjectify in yet another act of colonial representation, that is, rather than setde for mere descriptive ethnography with no apparent purpose but to mine or engage in academic voyeurism, contributors have been encouraged to consider, through praxiological engagements, the political and cultural projects of indigeneity and the simultaneous re/shaping and disembedding of modern epistemic, knowledge, learning, education, culture, political economy, and human-ecology relations (to consider the contexts of coloniality see Mignolo, 2003; Quijano, 2000): how far the collective contribution and each contributor has succeeded in this task is a matter for the reader to ascertain, intentions and commitments notwithstanding.