Who has the right to hold knowledge? Who has the right to access it? And what does our reaction to the answers to these questions say about us?

A recent column in the National Post questioned the growing influence of Indigenous ways of knowing in Canadian policy and education, arguing that Western societies were built on the idea that knowledge should be universal, open to questioning, and accessible to everyone. The concern, as it was framed, is that we are drifting toward a system where some knowledge belongs only to certain people, and where identity, rather than evidence, determines who gets to speak with authority.

Now, for background, this was a column, not something that the Big Brains at the National Post Editorial Board (these are the folks who write the op-eds) came up with – it was an opinion column written by Warren Mirko, executive director of the Alberta-based watchdog group Public Land Use Society (PLUS). Both the column and its origin are hardly surprising, nor is it at all shocking that it ended up in the National Post, Canada’s “conservative” newspaper, “conservative” in Alberta looking increasingly like “right-wing” which, dear reader, isn’t always the same thing at all. Now then.

An Actual Reading Of the Facts

Mirko raises a serious question. Public policy should not be built on ideas that cannot be examined, and any society that values inquiry should be cautious about placing knowledge beyond discussion but the argument rests on an assumption that deserves a closer look — the assumption that Western society has ever truly been a place where knowledge was equally open to all.

Canadian history tells a very different story. In fact, as I read – my eyebrows crawling up my increasingly astonished forehead – I began to wonder if Mirko and I even lived in the same province.

For most of Canada’s existence, access to education, property, political power, and professional authority has depended very much on who you were, perhaps even solely on who you were. Women were excluded from universities and the vote. Chinese immigrants paid a head tax to enter the country. Japanese Canadians were interned. Indigenous children were sent to residential schools where their languages and traditions were deliberately suppressed. The experience of life for these communities was shaped by white cultural supremacy — the belief that there was one correct way to understand the world and one set of acceptable solutions. Anyone who fell outside those narrow boundaries lived a life constrained. That is not an interpretation of history. That is history.

And just so we’re 1000 per cent clear, the power holders of the time parsed “whiteness.” If you were Catholic, Jewish, Irish, Eastern European, working class or spoke with an obvious not-British accent, your white was less white than WASP white. Power was held, defended, and meticulously defined by a very small sliver of society. Today, many of the descendants of those early brokers — corsets loosened, but not entirely discarded — find themselves in a world that has fractured into a multiplicity of identities and ways of knowing, and they are not entirely comfortable without the old certainties. It’s out of that unease that these arguments intended to uphold “open” and “frank” discussion and debate are rooted. Too often it isn’t about transparency or accessibility, it’s about shoring up out-dated concepts and a refusal to countenance unfamiliar models.

Context is Everything

The ideal of universal knowledge has always existed in Western thought – it’s one of the central pillars of that hilariously misnamed period scholars call “The Enlightenment”. But in practice, it has been unevenly applied, and often enforced by those who assumed their own perspective was the neutral one while in reality, their perspective was simply the dominant one. Not the same thing, pigeons. Not even close.

When it comes to land more specifically, even within farming communities, the knowledge of people who worked the land was often dismissed in favour of policies designed far away from the places they affected. How many rural Albertans like to rail to the heavens about policy decisions taken in conference rooms in Ottawa? Or Edmonton? What we know about the land we work or the animals we raise is barely acknowledged — and my heavens, don’t we love to screech about it when it happens to us.

So when we look at the growing recognition of Indigenous knowledge within our wider Canadian culture, is it the truly the end of open inquiry or is it – gasp! – a widening of it?

Generosity, Humility, Patience . . . and Land

That is not a refusal to share. It is a refusal to pretend that knowledge exists in a vacuum.

In Western culture, we are used to the idea that information can be detached from context, written down, standardized, and applied anywhere. Sometimes that works but equally, sometimes it doesn’t. Much of the environmental damage we are now trying to repair was done under the assumption that land could be managed through universal rules, applied without regard for local conditions or long experience.

On the Prairies, we plowed native grasslands that had taken centuries to form. We drained wetlands, suppressed fire, overgrazed fragile soils, and replaced diverse ecosystems with monocultures because the science of the time (and currently) said it was efficient. Only later – when it was far too late in some cases – did we realize that efficiency is not the same as resilience.

Indigenous land management, by contrast, often treated knowledge as something inseparable from relationship — to the land, to the animals, to the seasons, and to the community responsible for them. Modern ecology is beginning to rediscover many of these principles, sometimes after learning the hard way. In many cases, it’s not even the knowledge itself that is questioned but rather the method of holding it – we have an unfortunate habit here in the West of disregarding knowledge that isn’t written down. If it’s an oral tradition, we tend to treat it with suspicion and relegate it to “superstition” or, at best, “folklore.” With respect, I would point out that if scientists had paid attention to Inukpujijuk back in 1869, Franklin’s doomed ship The Erebus would have been found some 145 years earlier. That’s just one example of oral knowledge being swept aside for “modern” scientific methods.

But here’s the thing. If the people who carry knowledge ask that it be learned with respect for its origins, why should that surprise us? It’s hardly a foreign concept. Every knowledge system has boundaries. Universities grant degrees, trades require apprenticeships, churches define doctrine and scientific disciplines have peer review. In none of those cases do we assume that knowledge is meaningless because not everyone gets to define it. In fact, in most of these cases, we want people who not only understand the “what” but also the “why” and the “how.” We like to call it “being well-rounded.” A doctor who can look at a patient and diagnose the issue is good but a doctor who can look at a patient, talk to them, asks them questions, perhaps even speaks with family and friends and gets a good idea of not just what’s going on within the body but why and how it came to be, is gold.

Why should Indigenous knowledge be the only tradition expected to exist without context, authority, or responsibility?

New Ideas, New Feelings and the Fine Art of Practice

Underlying positions such as the one outlined by Mirko are often – though not always, I suppose – a strong sense of disgruntled entitlement. As a member of the dominant culture, I am often checking myself on the origin of my own inculcated, knee-jerk reaction to new ideas. Too often to be comfortable, I discover that what’s got my nose out of joint is a schoolyard equivalent of “That’s not fair” simply because I find I am not on the winning side. For many white, Euro-origin Canadians, we are – possibly for the first time ever – discovering what it means to not have all the cards and we don’t like it. Put it down to a lack of practice. Unlike so many of our countrymen, we haven little experience of stretching the muscles of coexistence and true humility – it’s about time we learned and if UNDRIP is to be one of our testing grounds, so be it.

None of this means that public policy should abandon evidence, or that ideas should be accepted without question. In a pluralistic society, decisions must be made in ways that can be explained and debated. But debate does not require us to pretend that all knowledge comes from the same place, or that the only valid way of knowing is the one we inherited from Europe and comes bound by the constraints of written language.

If anything, the real lesson of Western history is that we have often been most certain of ourselves just before discovering we were wrong.

The question is not whether Indigenous ways of knowing should replace science, or whether Western traditions should be set aside. The question is whether we are willing to learn from people who have lived on this land far longer than we have, even when their understanding does not fit neatly into our categories.

That is not a threat to knowledge.

It is an expansion of it.

This is a Living post, a post to share my thought processes, my experience and the philosophy that underpins our activities here at the homestead. It is not a how-to, “expert advice” or meant to reflect a wider experience than just my own, on my farm, here with my sheep.