In his article, GIS, Indigenous Peoples, and Epistemological Diversity, Rudstrom expounds upon the power hierarchies that contextualize doing GIS. He boldly asserts that doing GIS as a “technoscience” reinforces and perpetuates narratives of dominance that disenfranchise indigenous ways of thinking. Therefore, if GIS adheres to Western epistemology, then is it really appropriate to apply these systematic ways of knowing to indigenous ways of being? Any process that involves structuring and classifying the world around us are inherently exclusive in nature. Therefore, how can we ethically claim that our way of mapping the world could encompass the entirety of non-western ontologies? I’m not sure if these questions will ever be answered fully, but as GIS users we must entertain the the possibility that how we do GIS may have extreme ethical implications. For example, if certain geographic knowledge is privileged in indigenous societies, then do we have the right to map them for the sake of the long term preservation of knowledge and culture?
In addition, generalizing indigenous communities suggests that there is an inherent nature to indigenous epistemologies. However, indigenous communities in Northern Quebec have very different ways of perceiving and managing their environment compared to indigenous communities in Central America. Conflating indigenous epistemologies does a disservice to the complexity and diversity of how space and processes of thought engage with one another.
I hope that more community participation in GIS and the geospatial web may tackle some of these problems. Such work will be crucial for understanding the ethical and practical implementations of doing GIS in the future.
-GeoBloggerRB