Culture is dynamic and capable of adapting to new conditions. Practices that are useful and harmless should be made available to those who need them. Many people believe the transmission of the indigenous knowledge will strengthen their cultural life. Attention should be given to the ways of preserving the knowledge. Some elders believe in their knowledge and prefer to see it being protected. Indigenous languages should be developed to become the media of instruction. After talking to people in communities, the researcher understands how important the knowledge is to them. They give attention to the mainstreaming of the knowledge. Some people believe culture molds their lives.Their beliefs about the past are more important than the actual sequence of events. Many believe traditional values emphasising mutual influences beteen various aspects of communities are combined with western beliefs, that place a high value on individuality and independence. Researchers believe each generation grow up in a mass of tradition and pass through. As they grow they learn different cultures, but only need guidance in learning them. People understand that cultural knowledge develops, changes and improves with time. Problems arise when individuals come into contact with other people of different cultures. / Prof. R.S. Chaphole

Indigenous peoples in North America have a long history of understanding their societies as having an intimate relationship with their physical environments. Their cultures, traditions, and identities are based on the ecosystems and sacred places that shape their world. Their respect for their ancestors and 'Mother Earth' speaks of unique value and knowledge systems different than the value and knowledge systems of the dominant United States settler society. The value and knowledge systems of each indigenous and non-indigenous community are different but collide when water resources are endangered. One of the challenges that face indigenous people regarding the management of water relates to their opposition to the commodification of water for availability to select individuals. External researchers seeking to work with indigenous peoples on water research or management must learn how to design research or water management projects that respect indigenous cultural contexts, histories of interactions with settler governments and researchers, and the current socio-economic and political situations in which indigenous peoples are embedded. They should pay particular attention to the process of collaborating on water resource topics and management with and among indigenous communities while integratingWestern and indigenous sciences in ways that are beneficial to both knowledge systems. The objectives of this paper are to (1) to provide an overview of the context of current indigenous water management issues, especially for the U.S. federally recognized tribes in the Southwestern United States; (2) to synthesize approaches to engage indigenous persons, communities, and governments on water resources topics and management; and (3) to compare the successes of engaging Southwestern tribes in five examples to highlight some significant activities for collaborating with tribes on water resources research and management. In discussing the engagement approaches of these five selected cases, we considered the four "simple rules" of tribal research, which are to ask about ethics, do more listening, follow tribal research protocols, and give back to the community. For the five select cases of collaboration involving Southwestern tribes, the success of external researchers with the tribes involved comprehensive engagement of diverse tribal audience from grassroots level to central tribal government, tribal oversight, on-going dialogue, transparency of data, and reporting back. There is a strong recognition of the importance of engaging tribal participants in water management discussions particularly with pressing impacts of drought, climate change, and mining and defining water rights.

The Pacific coast of Russia on the Kamchatka peninsula is home to a small indigenous group of traditional fishermen who call themselves Itelmens. The total population of Itelmens is a little over 3,000 people. Over the last three decades Itelmens have been successful in revitalizing their culture and maintaining traditional subsistence activities, cuisine, crafts, and dance. Sadly, this cannot be stated about the Itelmen language- “a severely endangered language-- which has about 5 native speakers left. Despite the language revitalization measures that have been actively undertaken by Itelmen language specialists since the 1980s, Itelmens continue to lose their speakers with no new speakers appearing. This sociolinguistic research aims to analyze the history of language loss, contemporary state of the language, spaces that the language is taught and practiced, and the circumstances that work for or against the active language revitalization among Itelmens. The intellectual merits of this study include gaining a better understanding of the nature of the reversing language shift processes and language vitality that occur in communities with a small number of speakers. The ultimate goal of this community-oriented research was to search for language revitalization initiatives that might work in the Itelmen case under the given social, political, and economic circumstances. Therefore, this study is offering multiple language revitalization initiatives that should be implemented both in rural and urban areas for fruitful development of the Itelmen language. These initiatives include the participation of all generations in the process and the introduction of multi-media and technology.

Thesis advisor: Lauri Johnson / This exploratory case study examined family-school-community engagement in a small New England school district and town that is home to a federally recognized Indigenous Tribe that has inhabited the area for 12,000 years and whose children represent the largest group of racially minoritized students in the public schools. Using Indigenous protocols and methodologies that included relational accountability, individual semi-structured conversations, talking circles, and participant observation, this study explored the ways that Indigenous families and community members as well as district educators conceptualized and practiced family-school-community engagement and whether or not their conceptualizations and practices were aligned and culturally sustaining/revitalizing. Family-school-community engagement has been touted in research literature as a remedy to the problem of low achievement that prevails in many schools serving minoritized students, including Indigenous students. However, a more pertinent reason to study this topic is due to “ongoing legacies of colonization, ethnocide, and linguicide” committed against Indigenous families and their children by colonial governments and their educational institutions (Brayboy, 2005; Grande, 2015; McCarty & Lee, 2014, p. 103). This study was thus conducted and data were analyzed using a decolonizing lens and culturally responsive leadership (Johnson, 2014), culturally sustaining pedagogy (Paris & Alim, 2014), and culturally sustaining/revitalizing pedagogy (McCarty & Lee, 2014) as theoretical frameworks. Findings revealed distinctions in the priorities and engagement practices of educators versus Tribal members. While educators conceptualized and reported to practice an open-door model of engagement in which families have a plethora of opportunities to get involved in the schools, Indigenous parents and community leaders engaged as ardent advocates for the equitable treatment of their children and for the expansion of language and culture-based programming for tribal students in educational spaces within and outside of the public-school system. Also, Educators and Tribal members alike acknowledged that district staff lack cultural awareness and sensitivity and needed to be better educated. These findings and others offer important implications for local Indigenous communities and school districts serving Indigenous families. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2019. / Submitted to: Boston College. Lynch School of Education. / Discipline: Teacher Education, Special Education, Curriculum and Instruction.

Muiscas figure prominently in Colombian national historical accounts as a worthy and valuable indigenous culture, comparable to the Incas and Aztecs, but without their architectural grandeur. The magnificent goldsmith’s art locates them on a transnational level as part of the legend of El Dorado. Today, though the population is small, Muiscas are committed to cultural revitalization. The 19th century project of constructing the Colombian nation split the official Muisca history in two. A radical division was established between the illustrious indigenous past exemplified through Muisca culture as an advanced, but extinct civilization, and the assimilation politics established for the indigenous survivors, who were considered degraded subjects to be incorporated into the national project as regular citizens (mestizos). More than a century later, and supported in the 1991’s multicultural Colombian Constitution, the nation-state recognized the existence of five Muisca cabildos (indigenous governments) in the Bogotá Plateau, two in the capital city and three in nearby towns. As part of their legal battle for achieving recognition and maintaining it, these Muisca communities started a process of cultural revitalization focused on language, musical traditions, and healing practices. Today’s Muiscas incorporate references from the colonial archive, archeological collections, and scholars’ interpretations of these sources into their contemporary cultural practices. They also rely on knowledge shared with other indigenous groups related to them. This dissertation examines the revitalization of Muisca musical and language practices as part of a larger cultural process. This revitalization demonstrates how indigenous communities navigate the challenges of multicultural politics designed, at least in principle, to support ethnic and cultural difference. To this end: I analyze the Andean-oriented musical practices of current Muisca communities in the Bogotá savanna that are performed in public events; and I examine the Muisca affective attachments to música andina and its role in shaping a Muisca indigeneity according to present time. The ethnographic study of Andean music as it is performed in current Muisca cabildos also demonstrate the connection between sound and politics. I explore how Muisca song and language help in dealing with the contradictions of reemerging indigenous groups under the nation’s multicultural governmentality. I study how música andina style, including the stereotype of Andean indigeneity advanced by the sounds, instruments, and lyrics, contributes to the development of a Muisca identity and supports cultural revitalization and official recognition. In this way, I argue that the sonic revitalization provides an aural identity formation beyond the nation-state’s essentialistic parameters of indigeneity, thus contributing to guarantee minimal conditions for survival as an indigenous community. Out of the different sociolinguistic situations where Muysc cubun (the Muisca language) is used, I trace the details and difficulties of the process of language revitalization through the analysis of a corpus of Muisca songs. It is time to recognize that many of the previous studies of colonial Muysc cubun sources followed the grammarian approach of missionaries, and consequently neglected the description of sound. Most importantly, it is time to pay attention to the sociolinguistic discourse of current Muiscas. Today’s Muisca people who have viscerally lived the long history of silencing, and territorial and cultural dispossession have a say in what has been lost and what can be built. They put forward an update of the colonial reduced general language as part of the way to build themselves as indigenous in the 21st century and rewrite the history of the nation.

Indian Education, including but not limited to Indian Residential Schools and Indian Day schools, are one part of an ongoing system of elimination of Indigenous people in Canada. I argue that Indian Education in 19th – 20th century British Columbia, controlled and operated by churches and state, intended to destroy Indigenous collectives, constituting genocide. I follow this analysis with a oral history of four Gitxsan elders who experienced Indian Education in different forms. These interviews reveal the impact on Indian Education on self, family, community and nation. Most importantly, the elders express their vision for Gitxsan people to know who they are, to heal and to thrive in their homelands. / Graduate / 2020-08-07

In the era of Global Climate Change, forced displacement and resettlement will affect coastal communities around the world. Through resettlement, the local production of culturally supportive environments can mitigate culture-loss. While previous vernacular architecture studies suggest that the influence of imported architecture leads to culture change, this study investigates the continuity of generative structures in the production of culturally supportive built-environments, demonstrating resilience. In addition, this study expands the discourse on the dialectic relationship between culture and the environment by investigating the role of Indigenous Design Knowledge in the production of culturally supportive space. The dissertation investigates the dialectic relationship between Marshallese culture and the built-environment and uncovers the continuity of deep cultural patterns (DCP) in the production of the Marshallese built-environment. These DCPs are forms of local knowledge production that generate culturally supportive environments. The study takes a theoretical position that persistent DCPs are resilient and provide cultural capital. A multi-sited case study was conducted across rural and urban communities in the Marshall Islands. Historical ethnographies and archaeological studies of the Marshall Islands were examined for cultural patterns present in the built-environment. Interviews, participant observation, site documentation, and a survey were assessed for persistent cultural patterns in the built-environment that supported everyday life. Qualitative analysis uncovered persistent patterns in everyday cultural behavior, such as the cookhouse, and quantitative analysis uncovered spatial and syntactic relationships that demonstrated persistent, underlying cultural structures, such as the shared genotype of urban and rural housing. While outside influence has impacted the production of the Marshallese built-environment and the Marshallese cultural evolution, I argue that DCPs generate everyday cultural spaces and aid in the reproduction of Marshallese place-identity. DCPs represent Indigenous Knowledge and should be applied to design frameworks for climate forced displacement and resettlement.

Este trabalho apresenta os estudos realizados de alguns aspectos semânticos da língua Munduruku (do tronco lingüístico Tupi), falada por mais de 7500 índios da nação conhecida pelo mesmo nome, que estão distribuídos por cerca de noventa aldeias no Pará, Amazonas e inclusive no Mato Grosso. Este trabalho circunscreveu-se ao grupo pertencente à aldeia Munduruku \"Praia do Mangue\", no oeste do Pará. Após uma sucinta apresentação do povo, parte-se para uma breve descrição morfossintática da língua, onde deparamos com o tema principal dessa dissertação: os classificadores nominais. Nesta língua, os substantivos são acrescidos de afixos nominais, que possuem a função de estabelecer uma relação associativa entre o nome e seu referente espacial. Neste trabalho busca-se provar que os classificadores geram significado através da carga semântica que possuem e, para poder chegar a esses resultados, revisamos as teorias da motivação ou arbitrariedade do signo lingüístico, a metáfora e suas peculiaridades, a metonímia com suas relações e a possível migração de uma estrutura metafórica existente para uma metonímica. O fundamento principal dessa dissertação é a propositura de Ullmann de que, em muitas línguas, palavras surgem das relações associativas que o falante tece em sua mente, estabelecendo um vínculo metafórico entre referente e referido. Tipo de relações que, nesta dissertação, transportamos para os afixos classificadores da língua Munduruku. Aplicando-se tais teorias aos classificadores usados nesta língua, consegue-se provar o fundo semântico inserido nos afixos e mais; a migração de um classificador de origem metafórica para uma metonímia. / This dissertation presents studies accomplished regarding some semantic aspects of the language Munduruku (Tupi language of the Munduruku family) spoken by over 7500 individuals of the homonymous nation. These people are spread around ninety villages situated in the states of Pará, Amazonas and also Mato Grosso. The developed research is restricted to the Munduruku indigenous village \"Praia do Mangue\" in western of Pará. After a succinct presentation of the Munduruku nation, we approach some aspects morphological and syntatics of the language. Finally, the subject matter involved in this dissertation: The nominal classifiers. In this language nouns are added with nominal affixes with the function to establish an associative relation between the noun and its spatial referent. In this work, we tried to demonstrate that classifiers generate meaning trough their semantic contents. To reach these results we checked the theory of motivation, the arbitrariness of the linguistics signs, the metaphor and its particularities, the metonymy and its relationship, as well as the posible migration fom a metaphorical structure to a metonymy. The theoretical fundaments adopted here are the Ullmann\'s propositions that says that in several languages, words become from the associative relationship that the speaker accomplish in his mind establishing a metaphorical bond between referring and referred. This kind of relationship we transported to the Munduruku language and its classifier affix. Applying these theories to the classifiers used in the Munduruku language, we can to prove the semantic properties inserted in the affixes, and more: the migration from metaphorical classifiers to another figure to speech; the metonymy.

Thesis advisor: Lisa Patel / The participatory project described here is framed by the theories of Tribal Critical Race Theory and Red Pedagogy and describes a series of focus groups that included six Mashpee Wampanoag community members who used cultural values that they identified themselves to outline the educational needs of their Tribal youth in order to contribute to the process of developing a culturally-based strategic plan to serve Tribal students. The project was an act of self-determination for the participants who chose to commit to the work of making positive changes for the future of their community in a way that only they could as insiders in their community. Participants compiled a list of skills they felt were necessary to the health and success of their young people, separated into categories of "life skills," "academic skills" and "traditional skills." Also discussed are issues of insider research in Tribal communities, Indigenous connections land, Tribal identity, and aboriginal rights. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2014. / Submitted to: Boston College. Lynch School of Education. / Discipline: Teacher Education, Special Education, Curriculum and Instruction.

Thesis advisor: Hiroshi Nakazato / In Latin America, Indigenous peoples still exhibit markedly lower qualities of life compared to their nonindigenous peers. One of the most direct ways to change this cycle is through reforms to existing and implementation of new systems of education, such as intercultural bilingual education (EIB), to reflect a greater understanding of and sensitivity to Indigenous linguistic and cultural needs. Through an exploration of EIB in Peru, Bolivia, and Guatemala countries, this study determines some of the primary conditions necessary for EIB’s success to be: national and regional stability; governmental support in both legal and fiscal terms; funding and resources; community support and participation; and system design, program adaptation, and flexibility. If these prerequisites are met, EIB can be an effective way to provide an education to Latin America’s Indigenous peoples in such a way that it is adequate according to local, national, and international standards while simultaneously fulfilling the Indigenous groups’ articulated desire and need for an educational system that appropriately respects, preserves, and fosters the distinct languages and cultures existing within a multicultural state. / Thesis (BA) — Boston College, 2012. / Submitted to: Boston College. College of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: College Honors Program. / Discipline: International Studies Honors Program. / Discipline: International Studies.