Foundations of Indigenous Knowledge Systems: Epistemology, Ontology, and the Philosophy of Knowing

FOUNDATIONS OF INDIGENOUS KNOWLEDGE SYSTEMS: Epistemology, Ontology, and the Philosophy of Knowing — Volume One IKS Global Textbook Series, Book One

What counts as knowledge? Who is authorised to know? And what happens when the answer to those questions has been shaped, for five centuries, by the logic of colonial conquest?

This foundational textbook establishes that indigenous knowledge systems are not curiosities or alternatives to Western science — they are among the most sophisticated, empirically grounded, and ethically serious intellectual traditions on the planet, and among the most unjustly marginalised.

Volume One covers the eight constructive chapters of Book One. Part One builds the philosophical core: the politics of defining indigenous knowledge, the relational ontologies of Ubuntu, Lakota, Andean, Māori, and Aboriginal traditions, the epistemological practices of ceremony and elder teaching, and the argument — following Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o — that colonial language suppression was an intellectual catastrophe of the first order. Part Two situates that philosophy in its lived contexts: land as epistemological infrastructure, indigenous pedagogy and the damage of residential schooling, the ethics of knowledge and the mechanics of biopiracy, and the gendered social architecture through which indigenous knowledge is governed.

Drawing on traditions from sub-Saharan Africa, the Americas, the Pacific, South Asia, and Aboriginal Australia, and engaging the work of Marie Battiste, Mogobe Ramose, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Shawn Wilson, and Boaventura de Sousa Santos, this book offers not just a survey of other ways of knowing — but a sustained challenge to assumptions about knowledge that most students have absorbed so deeply they do not know they hold them.

This is the gateway textbook for serious IKS scholarship. Volume Two covers colonialism, science, law, decolonising education, research methodologies, and the futures of indigenous knowledge.

Part of the ten-volume IKS Global Textbook Series