Ways of Knowing: The Diversity of Knowledge

Successful freshwater restoration has to be inclusive of people — and so we acknowledge the many diverse ways of knowing our world.

THE DIVERSITY OF KNOWLEDGE

Knowledge is generated when we process information and store it in memory. There are many ways to produce knowledge; through sensory perception, logic and reasoning, emotional and spiritual knowledge of a personal nature, and generational knowledge (all of the above passed down over generations).

WESTERN SCIENCE

Knowledge generation in Western Science is based on the scientific method of using empirical data and statistical tests to support or reject hypotheses. Data that is gathered must be based on observable phenomena, and hypotheses must be testable in order to produce knowledge. Science is incredibly useful (we are a research lab!), but it is not the only way humans interact with the world, and it is relatively inaccessible to the general public.

LAND STEWARDS AND SETTLER KNOWLEDGE

People who have lived in a place for a number of years also develop knowledge based on their observations, interactions, and personal lived experiences. You can imagine a farmer, who has planted on the same field for 30 years, might know a thing or two about the nature of that field. If you take your dog on the same walk every evening, you start to notice more about your environment and can observe patterns and cycles. Our lived experiences are a vast resource of knowledge about the landscapes we inhabit.

INDIGENOUS KNOWLEDGE

It’s been about 400 years since the first European settlements were established in Canada, the colonization, reduction, and displacement of Indigenous peoples that followed over the last 300 years, and the last federally funded residential schools closed in the late 1990s. Building on the last point, you can imagine that Indigenous communities would have ecosystem knowledge not just over a few generations, but over the 1000s of years that these communities lived and thrived in these ecosystems. There are even examples of knowledge of plant and animal species built into Indigenous language, with the name of a species describing the other organisms it interacts with.