Philosophiae Doctor - PhD / The basic premise of this study was that when a learner is confronted with two contradictory explanations of the same phenomenon, there is cognitive dissonance in the learner as the learner tries to determine which of the two explanations is correct. An argumentation-based instructional intervention programme (ABIIP) was created for and used on and by the Grade 10 learners in order to attempt to ameliorate this cognitive conflict. The purpose of this study was to determine the relative impact of that intervention programme on Grade 10 learners’ conceptions of lightning and thunder. The programme was designed to help learners to develop argumentative skills and use the acquired skills to negotiate and harmonise divergent and conflicting explanations of the nature of lightning and thunder that are propounded by different worldviews (Science and indigenous knowledge).

The purpose of this research activity is to determine how cultural astronomy manages natural disasters in the local communities. Study Area: Mahikeng in North West Province among the Barolong boora Tshidi. Indigenous people have contributed the least to world greenhouse gas emission and have the smallest ecological footprints on Earth. Yet they suffer the worst impacts not only of climate change, but also from some of the international mitigation measures being taken. Impacts on climate change affect people negatively, these may include droughts, floods, increased diseases in people, plants as well as animals, biodiversity extinct, high mortality rate, increased food insecurity to mention a few. This study aims to describe how knowledge of cultural astronomy manages natural disasters within our local communities. In this dissertation the history of Barolong using their knowledge of cultural astronomy to manage natural disasters is gradually fading away because of non-recognition of our knowledge custodians as they do not hold any formal education and those who have it only ended at primary level. Democracy brought a sense of mental decolonization unto us as South Africans. This brought light to some of our village members to acknowledge their identity which includes their customs and beliefs. This study unearthed that local communities have the rich indigenous knowledge to sustain their lives that is how some villages are able to prepare and manage natural disasters without the knowledge of cultural astronomy only. They practice other measures which also sustain them and are also easy to be passed on orally from generation to generation. In Barolong communities the knowledge of sky readers is regarded to be very important, it is information that can be relied on because sky readers are always correct. In addition, African traditional religious nature and structure endorses the practice to be acknowledged and be taken as African identity. In the light of the above, and after taking comments by the members of the communities, recommendations are made for an integrated study framework between the local knowledge and modern technologies or information of astronomy. It is also recommended that there should be proper documentation which is not distorted before it can be totally extinct. / Thesis (M.(Indigenous Knowledge Systems) North-West University, Mafikeng Campus, 2014

Published Article / The paper seeks to engage constructively with the challenges and opportunities Indigenous Knowledge (IK) may offer disciplines in Language Practice. The approach will be contextualized in terms of the theoretical shift in knowledge production and use, as well as the current debate pertaining to the feasibility of the incorporation of IK into curricula. Specific attention will be rendered to topics of Africanizing scholarship, a performance model of knowledge, the socio-cultural embeddedness of language, and brief thoughts on the translation of the oral. These thematic issues are of particular importance to Language Practice, perceived here to be at the gateway between theory of language/communication and receiver communities.

This dissertation examines the uses, functions, and meaningfulness of traditional personal names and naming practices in Niitsitapi (Blackfoot Indian) culture. The current study indicates that Niitsitapi personal names appear to play a major role in capturing and conveying various aspects of traditional Niitsitapi sociocultural knowledge. Niitsitapi personal names thus appear to form an integral part of Niitsitapi oral tradition, and also seem to play a powerful role in establishing and maintaining Niitsitapi conceptualisations of individual, as well as social and cultural, identity. This dissertation supports the position that, in addition to their nominative function, names contain and communicate sociocultural meaning, based on their associations with a wide range of non-linguistic factors which form part of the sociocultural environment within which they are used. The methodological approach stresses the importance of studying personal names in cultural context and strongly emphasises the use of indigenous knowledge as a means of explaining personal naming phenomena from a native cultural perspective. / Linguistics / M. A. (Sociolinguistics)

Micronutrient deficiency is a major challenge in South Africa. Traditional vegetables have been identified as one of the strategies towards alleviating the problem. The research addressed the availability of traditional vegetables at eMantlaneni village in Lusikisiki, Eastern Cape, the extent to which they were utilized and their potential future use. The data was collected using questionnaires, focus groups, and by the identification of traditional vegetables by a herbarium. Findings revealed that traditional vegetables are available, but that there is a decline in the use of traditional vegetables. Future use was threatened by negative attitudes and the associated loss of indigenous knowledge. There is a need for vigorous awareness campaigns to promote traditional vegetable use and nutritional education including proper cooking and preservation techniques. Further research on a bigger sample and hedonic tests acceptance are required.

Land reform in South Africa is premised on land restitution. land redistribution and security of terlllre as its major components. It has the following objectives amongst others, to address the injustices of racially-based land dispossession; inequitable distribution ofland ownership; need for security of tenure for all: need for sustainable use of land: need [or rapid release of land for development: need to record and register all rights in property: and the need to administer public land in an effective manner. Over two decades of the democratic dispensation, lack of proper funding and capacity by government official to expedite the land reform processes deprives the rural communities like the Morebene community the enjoyment of their land rights and proper redress after devastating land dispossession. The research has managed to establish the serious pain and suffering that has been brought by incompetent implementation of six phases of land restitution process by Limpopo RLCC to the commuillty of Morebeoe. Lack of capacity to implement land restitution processes has been found to have been a major setback to lhe Morebene communjty to an extent that their restitution processes were abandoned by the Limpopo RLCC at project execution stage. The community composed of nearly 81% of rhe youth and middle aged people bas been left without jobs and no property rights and development all of which are caused by the lack of expertise from the oHicials of the RLCC. No restitution grants and development gTants were granted to the community and no formal or informal training let alone workshops held in relation to the government"s expectations from the land reform policies and legislation. / Development Studies / M.A. (Development Studies)

Arctic ecosystems are undergoing rapid environmental transformations. Climate change is affecting permafrost temperature, vegetation structure, and wildlife populations, and increasing human development is impacting a range of ecological processes. Arctic indigenous communities are particularly vulnerable to environmental change, as subsistence harvesting plays a major role in local lifestyles. In the Inuvialuit Settlement Region (ISR), in the western Canadian Arctic, indigenous land-users are witnessing a broad spectrum of environmental changes, which threaten subsistence practices. Local cumulative effects monitoring programs acknowledge the importance of subsistence land use; however there are few cumulative effects assessments that measure the impact of environmental change on land-based activities. My MSc addresses this gap with a broad-scale spatial inventory that measures the distribution of multiple disturbances in the mainland ISR, and assesses their overlap with community planning areas, land management zones, and caribou harvesting areas. I also generated nine future disturbance scenarios that simulate increases in both human development and wildfire occurrence, in order to understand how additional environmental change may affect the availability of un-impacted harvesting lands. I used the conservation planning software, Marxan, to assess the impact of increasing environmental perturbations on the availability and contiguity of 40 subsistence harvesting areas. Results show that the study region is already impacted by multiple environmental disturbances, and that these disturbances overlap considerably with wildlife harvesting areas. This limits the success of Marxan runs that attempt to conserve high percentages of subsistence use areas. It becomes increasingly difficult to conserve large, contiguous assortments of wildlife harvesting areas when using Marxan to assess conservation potential in future disturbance scenarios. In a separate study, I conducted 20 semi-structured interviews in the communities of Inuvik, Aklavik, and Tuktoyaktuk that explored the impact of environmental change on Inuvialuit land-users. Participants in my study indicated that wildlife harvesting in the region is being affected by a range of environmental disturbances and that this change is typically considered to be negative. Climate change-related disturbances were noted to affect travel routes, access to harvesting areas, wildlife dynamics, and the quality of meat and pelts. Human activity, such as oil exploration, was noted to impact both wildlife populations and harvesters’ ability to use the land. These observations are an important contribution to local cumulative effects monitoring because they highlight local accounts of environmental change, which are often missed in broad-scale assessments, and they emphasize the concerns of local land-users. This underscores the importance of including indigenous insights in cumulative effects monitoring and suggests that combining quantitative assessments of environmental change with the knowledge of local land-users can improve regional cumulative effects monitoring. / Graduate

Micronutrient deficiency is a major challenge in South Africa. Traditional vegetables have been identified as one of the strategies towards alleviating the problem. The research addressed the availability of traditional vegetables at eMantlaneni village in Lusikisiki, Eastern Cape, the extent to which they were utilized and their potential future use. The data was collected using questionnaires, focus groups, and by the identification of traditional vegetables by a herbarium. Findings revealed that traditional vegetables are available, but that there is a decline in the use of traditional vegetables. Future use was threatened by negative attitudes and the associated loss of indigenous knowledge. There is a need for vigorous awareness campaigns to promote traditional vegetable use and nutritional education including proper cooking and preservation techniques. Further research on a bigger sample and hedonic tests acceptance are required.

Student Number : 8707660F - MA research report - School of Literature and Language Studies - Faculty of Humanities / This paper considers the interaction between the process of producing a documentary video film ‘The Medicine Bag’ and an indigenous knowledge system from the Northern Cape where herbalists or traditional healers are known as ! aixa (Qaiga). These healers use indigenous plants and other raw materials, sounds, rubbing or massaging techniques, incisions and other methods to heal or to harm members of the community. The Schwartz family, Namas who hail from this region, have for many years passed the knowledge and the skills for healing on from generation to generation. For as long as the family can remember, members of each generation, specially gifted and interested in acquiring these skills, have been selected and trained to recognise and harvest medical plants, prepare medicines and apply the various skills required to heal the sick. The raw herbs, potions and medicines have been kept in a medicine bag, made from a tanned springbuck hide. Research for a documentary video to record oral accounts and practices attached to the medicine bag, revealed various themes related to the interaction between oral accounts and the process of recording and transcribing these narratives. These themes included the absence of a fixed storyline or a single ‘correct’ text as is often assumed when one engages with written literature; shifts in meaning that occur when the physical forms of the accounts change as each recording or re-editing acquires a ‘performative aura’ and issues such as the importation of cultural authority and resources on the participants, their active participation in the process of memory and archive creation as well as the impact of the process on the filmmaker/researcher that included an enriched understanding of the scope and possibilities of working with oral texts

Indigenous knowledge systems are ―a body or bodies of knowledge‖ which Africans have survived on for a very long time (Mapara, 2010). This study intends to examine the various communicative and indigenous strategies that are employed by the Zimbabwean Ndebeles in issues of peace and conflict management. It is necessitated by the realisation that there is an increase in conflict in the region and country as a result of political and socio-economic challenges. The study adopts a bottom-up approach where conflict management becomes a process that starts from the grassroots going outward. This should also provide an opportunity to demonstrate that indigenous people are as sophisticated as every other society in dealing with their challenges (Warren, 1991). At the same time, it seeks to examine effectiveness of the indigenous and communicative conflict management strategies used by the Ndebele people. The study makes use of research questionnaires and interviews as well as descriptive and content analysis for data gathering and analysis respectively. The main theoretical concept guiding this study is ubuntu because it is considered best for Afrocentric approach to African studies. This is emphasised by Moyo and Lantern (2015:103) who state that ―... the philosophy of ubuntu should be the guiding philosophy in a Zimbabwe poisoned by ill-understood and often ill-digested ontological philosophies of individual rights that give rise to selfishness, violence, fragmentation and the sterile, barren philosophy of each man for himself‖ which continues to tear our society apart. The study focuses mainly on the Ndebele speaking communities in Silobela District of Zimbabwe. The study helps the nation in combating and addressing cases of conflict by ushering in the cultural dimension which is albeit not foreign in the worldview of the local people. This compliments all other efforts being made by the government to address socio-political challenges. By documenting (indigenous knowledge systems) that which has been otherwise ignored and side-lined for a long time, the study is part of an on-going process of mental decolonisation of the African people at the same time empowering them to face a globalising world with confidence and pride. / African Languages