Native Knowledge
Integrating Traditional Knowledge and Science
Traditional Native Knowledge
- holistic
- includes physical and metaphysical world linked dto moral code
- emphasis on practical applicate of skills and knowledge
- trust for inherited wisdom
- practical experimentation
- qualitative oral record
- local verification
- communication of metaphor and story connected to life, values, and proper behavior
- integrated and applied to daily living and traditional subsistence practices
Common Ground
- Organizing Principles
- universe is unified
- body of knowledge stable but subject to modification
- Habits of Mind
- honesty, inquisitiveness
- perserverance
- open-midedness
- Skills and Procedures
- empirical observation in natural settings
- pattern recognition
- verification through repetition
- inference and prediction
- Knowledge
- plant and animal behavior, cycles, habitat needs, interdependence;
- properties of objects and materials
- position and notion of objects;
- cycles and changes in earth and sky
Western Science
- part to whole
- limited to evidence and explanation within physical world
- emphasis on understanding how
- skepticism
- tools expand scale of direct and indirect observation and meqasurement
- hypothesis falsification
- global verification
- quantitative written record
- communication of procedures of evidence and theory
- discipline-based
- micro and macro theory (e.g. cell biology and physiology, stomic theory, plate tectonics, etc.)
- mathematical models
The Website for National Science Foundation Grant No. ES1-9910219
Last Modified on May 20, 2002 by Sidney Stephens
