Indigenous Knowledge

Indigenous ethics and feminist care ethics offer a range of related ideas and tools for environmental ethics. These ethics delve into deep connections and moral commitments between nonhumans and humans to guide ethical forms of environmental decision making and environmental science. Indigenous and feminist movements such as the Mother Earth Water Walk and the Green Belt Movement are ongoing examples of the effectiveness of on-the-ground environmental care ethics. Indigenous ethics highlight attentive caring for the intertwined needs of humans and nonhumans within interdependent communities. Feminist environmental care ethics emphasize the importance of empowering communities to care for themselves and the social and ecological communities in which their lives and interests are interwoven. The gendered, feminist, historical, and anticolonial dimensions of care ethics, indigenous ethics, and other related approaches provide rich ground for rethinking and reclaiming the nature and depth of diverse relationships as the fabric of social and ecological being.

Cultures around the world find meaning in the shapes of stars and features in the Milky Way. The striking appearance of our galaxy in the night sky serves as a reference to traditional knowledge, encoding science and culture to a memory space, becoming part of their overarching cosmologies. This paper examines traditional views of the Milky Way from cultures around the world, primarily in the Southern Hemisphere. These views comprise dark constellations: familiar shapes made up of the dark dust lanes in the Milky Way, rather than the bright stars. Some of the better-known examples include the celestial emu from Aboriginal traditions of Australia, and the llama in Inca traditions of the Andes. We conduct a comparative analysis of cultural perceptions of dark constellations in the Milky Way, examining common cultural themes and meanings at the crossroads of Indigenous Knowledge and Western science.

This report sets out the findings of a cross-cultural collaborative project to develop an understanding of the role that the Integrated Kaipara Harbour Management Group (IKMHG) plays in enabling mātauranga-informed management of the Kaipara Harbour. Moving towards a truly integrated and mātauranga-informed approach requires monitoring the extent to which mātauranga Māori sits alongside western science within the IKHMG, and the strengthening of Ngāti Whātua position in resource management decision making.

This article provides an update for 2019.

The indigenous peoples of Namibia include the San, the Ovatue and Ovatjimba, and potentially a number of other peoples including the Ovahimba and Nama. Taken together, the indigenous peoples of Namibia represent some 8% of the total population of the country which was 2,533,244 in 2018. The San (Bushmen) number between 27,000 and 34,000, and represent between 1.06% and 1.3% of the national population. They include the Khwe, the Hai||om, the Ju|’hoansi, the !Kung, the !Xun, the Kao||Aesi, the Naro, and the !Xóõ. Each of the San groups speaks its own language and has distinct customs, traditions and histories. The San were mainly hunter-gatherers in the past but, today, many have diversified livelihoods. Over 80% of the San have been dispossessed of their ancestral lands and resources, and are now some of the poorest and most marginalised peoples in the country.

The Ovatjimba and Ovatue (Ovatwa) are largely pastoral people, formerly also relying on hunting and gathering, residing in the semi-arid and mountainous north-west (Kunene Region) and across the border in southern Angola. The Ovatue are considered to have traditionally inhabited the more remote mountainous areas. The Ovahimba are a larger and locally dominant pastoralist group who reside over a greater area of Kunene. Closely related but separate to the Ovahimba is a smaller group called the Ovazemba. The Ovahimba, Ovatue, Ovatjimba and Ovazemba number some 26,000 in total. The Nama, a Khoe-speaking group, number over 100,000 and live mainly in central and southern Namibia and the northwest of South Africa. Related to the Nama are the Topnaars (≠Aonin) who number approximately 2,600 and who reside in the Kuiseb River Valley, in Dorob National Park, and in the area in and around Walvis Bay in the Erongo Region.

The Namibian government prefers to use the term “marginalised communities” when referring to the San, Otavue and Ovatjimba, support for whom falls under the Office of the President: Division Marginalised Communities. The Constitution of Namibia prohibits discrimination on the grounds of ethnic or tribal affiliation but does not specifically recognise the rights of indigenous peoples, and there is currently no national legislation dealing directly with indigenous peoples, though there is a new draft white paper on the rights of indigenous and marginalised communities that is to be brought before the Cabinet soon. Namibia voted in favour of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) when it was adopted in 2007 but has not ratified ILO Convention No. 169. Namibia is a signatory to several other binding international agreements that affirm the norms represented in UNDRIP, such as the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights (ACHPR), the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (ICERD), and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR). The Namibia government office responsible for indigenous peoples and minorities is the Division for Marginalised Communities (DMC), now under the Office of the President. The office considers its main objective to be integrating marginalised communities into the mainstream national economy and improving their livelihoods.

This fact sheet introduces the issues raised by the appropriation and commodification of cultural heritage, outlining risks and
benefits and how also to avoid the pitfalls of misappropriation. While these issues are faced by all cultural groups, there is a
long history of Indigenous cultural heritage being used by non-Indigenous people for commercial and other purposes.

This edited volume introduces highlights of the academic interests and research activities of a number of staff at Unitec’s Department of Communication Studies, demonstrating the breadth and scope of the engagement of this academic collective with contemporary communication issues.  Edited by Giles Dodson and Evangelia Papoutsaki, it is clear from the work that communication in Aotearoa New Zealand remains complex and continually under negotiation, as this country continues to be formed and reformed by processes of cultural encounter, by political and institutional change and by voices seeking to assert, to contest and to claim their presence – to represent and to be represented within contemporary New Zealand.