Ojibwe scholar challenges what is defined as knowledge
- Fraser Needham | March 13, 2015
Dolleen Manning Tisawii’ashii wants to challenge modern conceptions of what is considered knowledge.
The Ojibwe Anishinaabe scholar, artist and curator was in Saskatoon March 5-6 to talk about her research at both the University of Saskatchewan and Station 20 West.
Manning Tisawii’ashii is a doctoral student at the Centre for the Study of Theory and Criticism at Western University in Ontario.
Her PhD dissertation draws heavily on her Ojibwe cultural upbringing focusing on concepts such as Nii’kinaaganaa (all my relations/relatives) and gashka’oode (entanglement) to forward a theory of consciousness that is not given to a bounded subject but instead looks at “other-than-human” potencies.
As part of her doctoral research, Manning Tisawii’ashii examines traditional Indigenous language, culture and contemporary art as an alternative to Westernized ways of defining knowledge.
She says what she is studying and defining as knowledge cannot necessarily be found within a university library.
“This is knowledge that I live,” she says. “More than I live, it’s given to me in life and I feel as though that is a fundamental Indigenous philosophy. The West founds itself in its history of its textual citation whereas my citation is given to me in my birth, it’s intergenerational, it’s in my blood, it’s in my language – in ways that don’t necessarily translate into Western thought systems.”
Manning Tisawii’ashii’s research also draws influence from French phenomenological philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty.
Merleau-Ponty believed the body was the primary source of knowledge as opposed to the consciousness.
He emphasized the body and what it perceived could not be disentangled from one and other.
“When he (Marleau-Ponty) discusses bodies it’s not necessarily a human body or an animal, it can be any kind of an object and what you would say the space surrounding that,” Manning Tisawii’ashii says. “But how those two elements always make up one and other, in a sense they pass to one and other. But there’s always a division for him.”
She adds she hopes by speaking to both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal audiences, within academic and non-academic environments, she will challenge people to look beyond Westernized forms when they define what is knowledge.
“It’s really about opening up conversations across disciplines and across communities.”
The title of Manning Tisawii’ashii’s dissertation is “The Murmuration of Birds: An Ojibwe Ontology of Mnidou-Worlding.”
She also holds a Masters in Fine Arts from Simon Fraser University and a Master of Arts in Critical Theory from Western University.
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