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Exploring Trust and Design Through the Indigenous Medicine Wheel
Abstract
This chapter discusses the authors’ experiences with collaboration through initiatives aimed at preserving and promoting Indigenous cultural heritage (ICH) in the digital age. Establishing trust and creating a safe environment among Indigenous and non-Indigenous stakeholders is essential for the success of these collective projects. The Indigenous perspective of a holistic approach, as presented in the medicine wheel model, proposes avenues for reflection and action to foster trust within groups and communities through four interdependent dimensions: emotional, spiritual, physical and intellectual. This chapter, presented in the form of an essay, encourages readers to become aware of the overlooked dimensions of collaboration—the emotional and spiritual dimensions—which are viewed as essential for cultivating a dynamic of trust (harmony) in collective practices centred on ICH. A holistic approach helps maintain a balance in the engagement and organisation of collaborative projects in an Indigenous context.
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When Indigenous and non-Indigenous Peoples come together in a project to address issues relating to Arctic communities, how do fruitful collaborations come to be? Among the elements that constitute the approach for genuine cooperation and creativity in complex projects, trust is an indispensable ingredient. From a systemic and complexity paradigm and design lens, this article explores the “dynamic” of trust in collaborative projects involving Indigenous Knowledge and Peoples in the Arctic. How does the dynamic of trust within a collaborative project operate, evolve, and re-organise in action and how can we conceptualise it? What factors influence cooperation and trust in Arctic collaborative projects? Guided by action research and project-grounded strategies in design, the research draws from the two-year Dialogues and Encounters in the Arctic (DEA) project that took place in the Indigenous Sámi context. Multiple qualitative tools were employed, including seven semi-directed interviews, two reflective journals, one workshop, and one post-project online group discussion. The research involved twelve DEA collaborators (both Indigenous Sámi and non-Indigenous). Our findings present results from a preliminary analysis, shedding light on the dynamic nature of trust in the DEA project through the example of in-person project encounters and ethical framework development, reflecting how trust weaves itself into a project's very fabric. We found that, amidst the complexities and various influences on trust dynamics (e.g., socio-political contexts, a global pandemic, or individual personalities), fostering consistent interaction between project collaborators emerges as an effective strategy to nurture a dynamic of trust. An ‘organising’ design approach is seen as being favourable to such processes.
Cet article s’intéresse à la manière de ré-« concilier » l’appui à l’entrepreneuriat en contexte autochtone à partir de l’étude du cas de StartUp Nations, un programme d’accompagnement en entrepreneuriat collectif pour les jeunes des Premières Nations au Québec. Basé sur une approche qualitative décoloniale permettant la mise en valeur de points de vue des personnes selon leur propre cadre culturel, cet article montre comment l’approche pédagogique et le contenu théorique du programme ont été adaptés. La démarche de ré-« conciliation » peut être résumée en six actions concrètes prises par StartUp Nations pour répondre aux besoins et aspirations des jeunes, ainsi qu’aux réalités des Premières Nations.
The Medicine Wheel is used in many Indigenous communities across Turtle Island (North America) with many different teachings and symbolisms. The Medicine Wheel is a circle with four equal quadrants representing vast teachings, which are specific to local First Nations, which can used as the conceptual framework as well as theory. Through a rapid narrative review of literature on the Medicine Wheel and associated uses as well as the authors’ Anishinaabe teachings, we examine four research uses of the Medicine Wheel in academics and with Indigenous community research to apply it as a theory, conceptual framework, analysis, and evaluation practices. The Medicine Wheel ontologies and epistemologies lend the teachings to be used as a conceptual framework (visual representation of a research project), evaluation framework (as a methodology for conducting research), a data analysis tool (providing a method to see patterns, themes, and connections not easily seen in linear research methods), and the multi-layered knowledge within the Medicine Wheel can be seen as a theory for examining Indigenous research with an Indigenous lens instead of western worldviews or theories. We provide examples of how the Medicine Wheel can be used through the Anishinaabe teachings of the Medicine Wheel. It is possible to expand our abilities to see patterns, themes, connections, and wholism by looking beyond linear positivistic methods through many ways to use Medicine Wheel teachings.
In this paper, we discuss factors that influence the digitisation of cultural heritage resources and outline differences in the challenges faced by memory institutions in developed and developing countries. Increasingly, memory institutions (galleries, libraries, archives and museum) are taking advantage of digital technologies, including social Web technologies to digitise, share and preserve heritage resources to create national repositories with the hope of eliminating gaps in future memory. They also seek opportunities to engage with and involve owners of cultural heritage resources and key stakeholders in the digitisation of their heritage collections. Nevertheless, memory institutions have faced various challenges in doing so. In developed countries, memory institutions are mainly challenged by how to navigate the enormity of the collections that need to be digitised and preserved. In developing countries, different forms of negative attitudes towards digitisation hinder progress in digital preservation management. Owners of cultural heritage resources fear permanent loss of their heritage, key stakeholders lack interest in heritage digitisation, and information professionals have conflicting ideas on how to go about the digitisation process. Our analysis reveals attitudinal issues can have a significant impact on digital preservation. Even though attitudinal issues have been mentioned in previous studies, they are often treated more at an implicit level. We argue that in the context of cultural heritage digitising and preserving involving source communities and various stakeholders, the attitudinal dimension ought to be a key consideration and as such, should be made explicit in discussion of these.
This chapter presents our latest interventions within the ongoing digitization of cultural heritage of the ovaHerero and ovaHimba indigenous communities in pastoral Namibia. It describes the communicative and technical processes undertaken in a number of sessions at four different sites over a one and a half year period. These sessions were part of the co-design, co-development, and future implementation of an Indigenous Knowledge (IK) Crowdsourcing Management System that aims to provide and to empower elders from rural ovaHerero and ovaHimba communities with extended tools to gather, store, classify and curate their traditional knowledge. Applying co-design as the process aims to ensure users are involved in the design process ensuring their needs and concerns are elicited and suitably addressed. As such this chapter introduces first the background, rationale and scaffolding of the project. Then it pronounces the aims regarding the technologies intended for deployment, their current co-design and co-development phases, and the methods positioned in each session discussed in order to progress in the design endeavours of our multidisciplinary team of researchers and local communities in four villages, namely Erindi-Roukambe and Okomakuara for ovaHerero, and Ohandungu and Otjisa for the ovaHimba ethnic group. Further, it details the initial take-on, engagement, and participation of partakers in Usability and User Experience co-design sessions. The chapter closes stressing the challenges revealed and the future projections thus-far unfilled.
The intention of this article is to demonstrate how Indigenous and allied health promotion researchers learned to work together through a process of Two-Eyed Seeing. This process was first introduced as a philosophical hermeneutic research project on diabetes prevention within an Indigenous community in Quebec Canada. We, as a research team, became aware that hermeneutics and the principles of Haudenosaunee decision making were characteristic of Two-Eyed Seeing. This article describes our experiences while working with each other. Our learning from these interactions emphasized the relational aspects needed to ensure that we became a highly functional research team while working together and becoming Two-Eyed Seeing partners.
Wikipedia has established itself as the top content site on the World Wide Web and the largest and most successful general reference work. Its vision to provide access to the sum of all Human knowledge, however, is far from being realised. Through its Western focus, its strong alignment with existing encyclopaedias and its Internet-savvy editor base it has not even begun to penetrate knowledge that is not codified purely in writing. This paper presents preliminary results from an empirical experiment of oral information collection in rural Namibia converted into citations on Wikipedia. The intention was to collect information from an indigenous group which is currently not derivable from written material and thus remains unreported to Wikipedia under its present rules. We argue that a citation to an oral narrative lacks nothing that one to a written work would offer, that quality criteria like reliability and verifiability are easily comparable and ascertainable. On a practical level, extracting encyclopaedic like information from an indigenous narrator requires a certain amount of prior insight into the context and subject matter to ask the right questions. Further investigations are required to ensure an empirically sound approach to achieve that. We demonstrate that oral citations are possible and viable additions to Wikipedia as a global knowledge repository.
Archives, libraries and museums (memory institutions) around the world are widely engaged in
digitization for several decades. However, the current situation shows that technical infrastructure and
digitization management practices in memory institutions evolve much more quickly than understanding
of the roles and obligations of these institutions in the contemporary society. This is also the reason of
scarce discussions of ethical digitization issues in comparison to those related to information management and technological processes. However, many praised advantages of digitization also became a source of
various ethical issues that are faced by archives, libraries and museums converting their collections into
digital format. Those ethical issues are pre-conditioned by the fact that digitization is not a mere technical
activity but a part of complex roles and processes in memory institutions. Those relate to communication
of memory, heritage as a public good, as well as the obligations of memory institutions to ensure the
human rights to seek and get necessary information, to use quality and authoritative information, to learn
and express their opinion by (while) using cultural heritage. The presentation is aimed at describing major
ethical issues in digitization, providing an overview of solutions (if they are in place) and encouraging
discussion. It is focused on several themes: a) issues of (mis)interpreting heritage and the past of the
communities; b) solving issues of privacy and the demand for accessibility of heritage collections; c)
providing access to heritage that generates conflicting interpretations and breakthroughs of hatred;
d)commercial exploitation of heritage, collaboration with business and possible limitations of access; e)
ensuring authenticity of digitized surrogates that do not convey all features of the original heritage
objects. Some ethical issues are well-known to memory institutions and common to different activities,
while others – specifically generated by digitization. Discussion of these issues benefits not only everyday
practice and problem-solving in memory institutions, but also raises questions about the roles of memory
institutions and how they should be performed.
Our task is to adopt a multidisciplinary view
of trust within and between firms, in an effort to
synthesize and give insight into a fundamental
construct of organizational science. We seek to
identify the shared understandings of trust
across disciplines, while recognizing that the
divergent meanings scholars bring to the study
of trust also can add value.
This chapter presents our latest interventions within the ongoing digitization of cultural heritage of the ovaHerero and ovaHimba indigenous communities in pastoral Namibia. It describes the communicative and technical processes undertaken in a number of sessions at four different sites over a one and a half year period. These sessions were part of the co-design, co-development, and future implementation of an Indigenous Knowledge (IK) Crowdsourcing Management System that aims to provide and to empower elders from rural ovaHerero and ovaHimba communities with extended tools to gather, store, classify and curate their traditional knowledge. Applying co-design as the process aims to ensure users are involved in the design process ensuring their needs and concerns are elicited and suitably addressed. As such this chapter introduces first the background, rationale and scaffolding of the project. Then it pronounces the aims regarding the technologies intended for deployment, their current co-design and co-development phases, and the methods positioned in each session discussed in order to progress in the design endeavours of our multidisciplinary team of researchers and local communities in four villages, namely Erindi-Roukambe and Okomakuara for ovaHerero, and Ohandungu and Otjisa for the ovaHimba ethnic group. Further, it details the initial take-on, engagement, and participation of partakers in Usability and User Experience co-design sessions. The chapter closes stressing the challenges revealed and the future projections thus-far unfilled.
Purpose
This paper aims to demonstrate the work being done to develop a trusted digital archive for social sciences data relating to the indigenous peoples of Australia. It explores the issues that arise through respectful engagement with both indigenous communities and research communities as well as the development of pragmatic and effective data management planning strategies for higher education researchers.
Design/methodology/approach
As a conceptual paper, the approach consists of a review of the current situation, a discussion of the work already undertaken by the project team, and an analysis of the challenges being faced and plans for ongoing development of the project.
Findings
There are major challenges in tackling a project with issues of such complexity but the project has great significance because its success could contribute enormously to the indigenous communities to which the research relates while building the capacity of researchers to design respectful and effective data management strategies.
Practical implications
This project is rapidly evolving and the strategies for managing it are dynamic as the layers of complexity are unfolded and the project team addresses issues arising from the materials and groups with which it is working.
Social implications
The impact of this project has already reaped dividends for the communities involved. Indigenous communities whose intellectual property or knowledge has seeded the research are having material returned to them in digital formats that are useful to them and which provide accurate portrayals of their knowledge, communities and culture. Researchers using the service provided by ATSIDA are confident that their material is being curated and reused appropriately. The work done by the ATSIDA team in building protocols and guidelines around research data will influence public policy, particularly in the work of collecting agencies and in their application to situations other than indigenous.
Originality/value
ATSIDA fills a gap in informed research management. There is no other project like it anywhere in the world. This paper is valuable to anyone working in or considering higher education research in an indigenous area and is applicable to other research dealing with identifiable and vulnerable communities.
The indigenous knowledge (IK) initiative in development has met with limited success. The cultural relativity of knowledge - i.e. what qualifies as justified belief - may partly explain why. Drawing on New Guinea Highlands' ethnography, I explore the implications for dominant capitalist development discourse of constituting and verifying knowledge differently. Trust emerges as a central issue. Highlanders' approach to knowing attends to the subjective nature of understanding and potential for disagreement. The grammar of language - such as that spoken by the Wola of the Southern Highlands Province - reflects these concerns, notably attention to the source/reliability of any professed knowledge. This evidential interest relates to oral traditions, enskilled knowing, and individual knowledge variability, in addition to the trust to be put on any expressed knowledge. It relates also to how stateless political contexts preclude the imposition of views, such as what comprises economic development; albeit what shape an alternative 'acephalous development' might take is currently unclear.
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