Note: The Forbes article is behind a paywall, but Forbes allows a certain number of free articles to non-subscribers.

Article

These discussion questions assume that students have read the 2022 article “The Leading Edge: What Inuit Can Teach Us About Climate Monitoring And Adaptation” in Forbes Magazine.

Discussion Questions

“That’s anecdotal. We need data to believe you.”

  • What’s the difference between anecdotal evidence and data?
  • What are the advantages of requiring decisions to be made with data instead of anecdote? What are the drawbacks?
  • Do you agree that “talking to other hunters and elders” can be considered “a kind of peer review system?” Do you agree that Indigenous knowledge has always had a kind of data behind it? What are the advantages of Indigenous knowledge over the kinds of knowledge that academics consider “data driven”? What are the advantages of the academic type of data?

Indigenous knowledge and science

  • Can you envision a scenario in which Indigenous knowledge gets the answer to a question right, while the academic approach gets it wrong? Can you imagine a scenario in which the opposite happens?

Consider knowledge-making as a process by which we increase our degree of confidence about certain claims (NOT as a yes/no proposition in which we either know something or we don’t.)

  • If knowledge-making is about increasing degrees of confidence, how could Indigenous knowledge and academic approaches work in harmony with one another?