Indigenous Perspectives in School Mathematics: From Intellect to Wisdom

Abstract

When some Indigenous mathematizing is taught in school mathematics, something important and strange occurs. Not only does the achievement of Indigenous students dramatically increase, but the achievement of non-Indigenous students goes up on average as well. A clash between most Indigenous students’ worldviews and the worldview endemic to mathematics tends to be an obstacle for these students. For example, one fundamental epistemic difference between the Eurocentric worldview of mathematics and the Indigenous worldviews of mathematizing concerns what type of understanding is expected. On the one hand, conventional school mathematics deals with an intellectual tradition of understanding—only thinking with the content. And on the other hand, Indigenous mathematizing deals with a wisdom tradition of understanding—thinking, doing, living, and being with the content. Indigenous mathematizing is obviously richer. This worldview clash also exists but to a lesser degree for a majority of non-Indigenous students. Different worldviews reflect differences between cultures; in this case, between a student’s culture and the culture of mathematics. This research finding contradicts the Platonist belief that school mathematics is culture-free, value-free, universal, decontextualized, and purely objective; a challenging obstacle for many students’ success, especially for Indigenous students. Upon analysis, however, the Platonist belief turns out to be a deception, historically perpetrated in the nineteenth century when public education was being established. In Canada’s era of reconciliation with Indigenous peoples, it seems most appropriate to correct the detrimental deception and revamp the nineteenth century mathematics curriculum into a twenty-first century evidence-based pragmatic curriculum.