The Potential Contribution of Indigenous Knowledge to Teaching and Learning Mathematics

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This is an interdisciplinary research project that focuses on collaborative, cross-cultural research into Indigenous knowledge systems via mathematics. The research team is made up of indigenous and non-indigenous researchers who will study the infusion of mathematics in Indigenous Knowledge systems (IKS) and studies how these mathematical knowledge systems are embedded and encoded into everyday activities. The central hypothesis of this project is that "...embedded in traditional indigenous knowledge systems--within their worldview, their way of knowing, and their way of doing...are elegant solutions that are mathematically rich." (from star navigation, to patterns for clothing to building a kayak...) The project will take place in three different arctic cultural, linguistic, and geographical regions: Yup'ik (Alaska), Sami (Norway and Sweden) and Koryak (Kamchatka) with a comparative site in Yap (a Federated State in Micronesia) as a control group. The project aims to do more than just document the ethnomathematics; the project will contextualize this kind of knowledge in broader cultural epistemologies and will also examine the indigenous pedagogies by which people learn the activities and the embedded mathematics. In addition to exploring mathematic conceptualizations the project will also record the language of mathematics, which is endangered among all of these groups and an aspect of language that is rarely captured by linguists working with endangered languages. Perhaps most importantly, it has the potential to add to human knowledge about how everyday problems and tasks are solved without using Western instrumentation; if similar mathematically-oriented processes are used across project sites this may well suggest will universal concepts rather than culturally particularlistic ones. Hence, this project has the potential to establish an alternative learning trajectory based on IKS for the teaching of mathematics in indigenous and non indigenous contexts.