Section Three Editorial: Indigenizing Practices

Abstract

In the work of many of the scholars whose research is included in this special issue, we are reminded that the influence of colonization continues unabated in the academy. It exists not as an overarching or overbearing systemic mandate, but more often in the small practices of the institution and its scholars. In The True Worlds: A Transnational Perspective Johann Galtung (1980) describes colonization as structural violence, as a process whereby through dominance or internal imperialism one society dominates another in the same political borders. He explains that it is dominance "not as a series of deliberate actions by dominance-oriented people, but as a pattern of billions of acts, almost all of them routine, spun around the four themes of exploitation, penetration, fragmentation and marginalization" (p. 150). It is in this landscape that Indigenous scholars and their allies are working to create a space for Indigenous Knowledges to be respected in the academy.