The Equal Status of Indigenous Knowledge and Scientific Knowledge in the Academic Curriculum: The Case from Mētis

This paper focuses on Elizabeth Anderson’s application of the epistemological idiom of mētis in debates concerning the equal status of indigenous knowledge and scientific knowledge within the academic curriculum. Against critics who deny this equal status to indigenous knowledge or science, Anderson defends what one might term a conciliatory view, the view roughly that indigenous knowledge meets the criteria of scientific knowledge presupposed by these critics, and it is continuous with the agroecological form of mainstream scientific inquiry. I argue that the conciliatory view does not rest substantively on mētis as an epistemological idiom since the view is based on the direct conceptual relation between the notion of indigenous knowledge and the notion of scientific knowledge or inquiry. Moreover, the view amounts to appealing to critics of the equal status of indigenous knowledge on the terms of those critics and leaves unchallenged those very core assumptions that ground their denial of the equal status of indigenous knowledge in the first place. Building on Anderson’s fruitful analysis of mētis, I attempt a sketch of an alternative view that vindicates the equal status of indigenous knowledge and scientific knowledge in the academic curriculum but avoids those drawbacks.