Reshaping the University: Responsibility, Indigenous Episteme, and the Logic of the Gift (review)

After a lengthy introduction that introduces and sets her metaphorical structure, featuring the author's homeland, the Deatnu River area, which provides a basic fluidity allegory for this volume, the author states her goal: to "expose ignorance and benevolent imperialism of the academy and to show how the academy is based fundamentally on a very narrow understanding of the world" (2). She makes the point that she is "focusing on the university itself rather than on the assumed problems of indigenous people" (2). Her specific direction is a focus on "the academy's role as a storehouse of knowledge and on its failure to fulfill its mandate in relation to indigenous people" (2). She goes on to discuss what she refers to as the "logic of the gift as it is understood in indigenous thought," and, utilizing this idea, the author provides new ways for the academy to make out and transmit indigenous-based knowledge or, as she labels it, the "marginalized epistemes in the academy" (2). I tried to look up epistēmē in my home dictionary. The word is not listed by itself but is included in the listing for the word epistemology and refers to the "19th C, from Gr. epistēmē, knowledge."¹ Kuokkanen discusses the term epistēmē as a concept and says its use is "broader than epistemology…. [I]t refers to and includes notion of world view" (57).

Basically, the author uses the indigenous foundation building block of reciprocity utilized and respected in many Tribal/indigenous societies to suggest new direction or, as she calls it, "new relationship" (2) for the academy. She goes on to discuss various current aspects of the academy as used with indigenous students and discusses whether these make sense or not. For example, she says she will "argue [in the book] against mainstreaming indigenous students as it serves little purpose," and instead she advocates mainstreaming "indigenous philosophies and worldviews" (2).

It is probably a good idea for the reader to pay close attention to the introduction, as it sets the pace for what follows in this interesting yet somewhat difficult book. It is slightly arduous to keep track of the various theories utilized during the mixture of pondering toward the book's goal and explanation of the ideas contained within. She uses the notion of the river mentioned earlier to speak of navigating between or rather among theories. Therefore, indigenous discourse, deconstruction, and Critical Theory are used to set context for discussion, explanation, and focus on new ideas. For example, more than twenty citations to Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and a dozen to Jacques Derrida (Kuokkanen mentions his analysis of Western metaphysics) in the bibliography provide readers with quite a listing if they want to delve further into understanding her theoretical stance. She advocates negotiating with the very dominant academy with the goal of interrupting and intervening, with negotiation and dialogue (xvi).

Besides the introduction and the time it takes to thoroughly read and understand it, the book itself is divided into three sections, with the philosophy of the gift and its discussion thereto in the first section. The second section is a serious discussion of the ignorance of the academy relative to indigenous knowledge, and in the third section Kuokkanen scrutinizes the academy's hospitality approach. She is concerned whether the placement of these sections is logical to the reader but elected to go with it to explain the gift logic to the reader.

I did find some lines of reasoning and interpretation problematic, probably due to a different way of looking at the examples offered as well as my experience growing up in an American Indian Ojibwe community and working with oral traditional Elder teachers all my life. In one instance Kuokkanen discusses the Mohawk (or, as they say, Onkwehonwe) scholar Taiaiake Alfred, from Kahnawake, a professor at the University of Victoria (Canada), and how he approaches or...