Exploring Indigenous Ways of Knowing in the Great Lakes Region explores concepts and values distinctive to indigenous ways of knowing (IK) in the Great Lakes Region through readings, video segments, and lectures. Five structural concepts or key themes - local knowledge, relational knowledge, empirical knowledge, spiritual knowledge, and traditional knowledge - provide a conceptual framework for understanding indigenous cultures and knowledge production and their unique contributions to western society in the 21st century. Students will be introduced to the Algonquian cultures of the Great Lakes Region and to the Ojibwe (Anishinaabeg), Odawa, and Potawatomi (Three Fires) cultures in particular. This course will introduce students to the distinctive ways indigenous people experience, understand, and know the world through their relationship with the land or region to which they belong. Too often, colonizers around the world have ignored indigenous knowledge systems even though these ways of knowing have sustained peoples, cultures, and environments for thousands of generations. Because these ways of knowing are generally preserved and transmitted through stories, music, ceremony, and embodied traditions, they are seldom understood and frequently dismissed by those who control the production of knowledge in the modern world. The knowledge of the indigenous peoples of the Great Lakes region will, in this course, be presented as an empirically grounded scientific body of knowledge and theory comparable and complementary to the European tradition and, in specific ways, enhancing the sustainability of western scientific knowledge and practice. This course is a prerequisite for the Maymester field experience - Exploring Indigenous Ways of Knowing among the Ojibwe CED 401 which offers students an opportunity to experience indigenous ways of knowing by engaging with Ojibwe educators, traditional knowledge holders, elders, and families in several of the three largest Ojibwe reservations in the US.
- Subject
- RSOC
- Credits (min)
- 3
- Credits (max)
- 3
- Credit unit
- Credits
- Type
- course
- Edition
- 2026
- Source
- bulletins.psu.edu