Higher Education / Cultural PolicyAI-assisted English translation

When Science Becomes a Colonial Tool: How Higher Education Misplaces Indigenous Knowledge

Original Chinese title: 當「科學」成為殖民工具：高等教育如何把原住民知識放錯位置

When mainstream higher education claims to represent universality, objectivity, and neutrality, Indigenous Peoples' knowledge is often forced into the role of 'cultural material' rather than a 'knowledge system'. This article examines higher education, digital governance, and cultural data sovereignty to show that the real issue is not science itself, but how a single epistemology monopolizes what can be called knowledge.

Aciang Iku-Silan2026-07-18

Aciang Iku-Silan is a researcher in Indigenous Two-Eyed Seeing and digital technology whose long-term interests include Indigenous knowledge, education governance, cultural data sovereignty, AI ethics, and the practice of Two-Eyed Seeing.

Indigenous Peoples' EducationKnowledge ColonialismData SovereigntyTwo-Eyed SeeingHigher Education Reform

One side shows a modern university lecture hall with data charts, the other an Indigenous Peoples' knowledge sharing circle in a mountain landscape — If higher education continues to allow Indigenous Peoples' knowledge only as appendices, cultural misplacement will persist.

We often hear a familiar claim: universities are the highest institutions of knowledge, science is the most reliable method, and the academic system is a public machine for distinguishing truth. When this story becomes too easy to repeat, people forget to ask: Who defines “knowledge”? Who is kept outside its gates and permitted to enter only under the labels of “culture,” “experience,” “legend,” or “local material”?

For many Indigenous students and researchers, entering higher education is not simply entering a neutral space. It is entering a theater in which the seating order was arranged long ago. Science and engineering, medicine, law and public affairs, and the humanities and social sciences each possess a language that validates their own authority. Indigenous knowledge, by contrast, is often required to be translated, divided, and stripped of anything that does not fit mainstream logic before it can enter. Experience in mountains and forests must become ecological data; ritual contexts must become field descriptions; dream divination and taboos must be recast as cultural symbols; and elders’ oral accounts must be certified through an outside researcher’s methodology before they receive academic legitimacy. This is not a simple exchange. It is cultural misplacement structured by power.

I Agree with Minister Cheng-Wen Wu: Academic Research Cannot Be Measured Only by Publication Counts

Before criticizing the fixation on metrics in higher education, I want to state one point of agreement clearly. I support the direction proposed by Minister Cheng-Wen Wu of the National Science and Technology Council: academic research should not be evaluated only by the number of papers, but by its value and substantive contribution. This is not a polite aside. It is an institutional problem that higher education must confront. Publication began as a way to communicate research. Once paper counts, citation rates, and rankings become ends in themselves, researchers are pushed to pursue numbers that can be accumulated quickly instead of difficult, long-term work that responds to real social needs.

The National Science and Technology Council later formally called for a return to the essence of research and more diverse evaluation of outcomes, stating that scientific achievement should not be judged only by numerical publication metrics, but by research quality, originality, and long-term academic and social impact. I support that policy. For the same reason, we must take the question one step further. If the academic system can acknowledge that publication counts are not everything, it should also acknowledge that the contributions of different knowledge systems cannot always be judged by the same mainstream yardstick. Otherwise, the metrics have merely been loosened; the structural misplacement of Indigenous knowledge remains.

The argument is not that academic papers lack value or that research should be rejected. It is an argument against making numbers ends in themselves. International education and academic rankings can enable a small group of scholars fluent in mainstream rules to accumulate “impact” through reciprocal citation and closed networks, while land-based knowledge, community care, language transmission, and cultural responsibility—none easily quantified—remain outside the assessment framework. When an institution can see only what is countable, it mistakes what is easy to count for what matters most.

The Problem Is Not That Science Exists, But That Science Is Mythologized as the Only Pathway

To be clear, criticizing knowledge colonialism is not the same as opposing science. Observation, experiment, inference, and evidence are not the problem. The problem is an academic system that presents itself as the only valid way of understanding and reduces other knowledge systems to “objects” waiting to be sampled, translated, or explained. When science is mythologized as the sole path, it can turn from a method into an institutional weapon. It need not destroy another people’s knowledge overtly; it can politely reclassify that knowledge and place it where the institution believes it belongs.

Indigenous knowledge is consequently permitted to exist in three safe zones. The first is cultural performance, where audiences can learn about diversity, take photographs, and pay tribute. The second is data extraction, where researchers build models, publish papers, and apply for grants. The third is institutional remediation, where a university seeking to display inclusion and transitional justice offers a few apparently progressive courses or events. But if Indigenous knowledge cannot enter degree requirements, research ethics, data governance, and faculty standards as a complete knowledge system, “inclusion” merely places Indigenous peoples in a more attractive corner.

Higher Education's Greatest Strength Is Often Cutting Living Knowledge Into Manageable Fragments

Universities favor modularity, standardization, and material that can be cited. These qualities can be useful and sometimes necessary. The harm arises when an institution accepts only the parts of Indigenous knowledge that can be detached from their context. Land, kinship, ritual, language, ethics, and taboo are interrelated, yet curricula split them into units, research projects into variables, and databases into fields. The result may be a great deal of “content” without a complete body of knowledge.

This is where cultural misplacement occurs most often. Few people say outright that Indigenous knowledge does not matter. Instead, the institution requires that it first lose the parts that matter most but are hardest to quantify. Some knowledge may be spoken only in a particular season or place, and only by people who hold a particular relationship. Some knowledge is not information, but responsibility. Some derives its validity not from being tested in isolation, but from its place within a worldview practiced over generations. Remove those conditions and what remains is an attractive but rootless sample.

Digitalization and AI Are Not Necessarily Preservation; They May Be a New Round of Detachment

Many people assume that digitizing a language, story, body of plant knowledge, or local rule is the same as preserving it. But digitization never moves something into a computer unchanged. It is a sequence of re-encoding, indexing, renaming, and granting new permissions. Who creates the labels? Who decides which fields exist? Which material may be public? How does a model tokenize, vectorize, and generate from it? These choices appear technical, but each carries a profound question of governance.

The risks become even clearer in the AI era. Language is divided into tokens, stories become training data, and restricted knowledge enters searchable databases. People may believe they are preserving cultural traces while simultaneously turning knowledge—with boundaries, conditions of consent, and relational responsibilities—into a resource that anyone can extract, mix, and reproduce. If culture is treated as a library of content instead of a knowledge system with knowledge holders, rules, and a right to refuse, digital preservation can become digital colonialism.

This is why data sovereignty is not a fashionable term, but a minimum safeguard for Indigenous peoples in the digital age. Data are not neutral assets. They raise questions about who decides, who gains access, who may reuse them, who bears the risk, and who shares the benefits. If universities and research institutions want Indigenous data without changing who holds governing authority, they have merely moved an old model of collection onto new servers.

Two-Eyed Seeing Is Not a Pretty Slogan; It Requires Structural Adjustment

Many institutions now invoke Two-Eyed Seeing as though adding the phrase to a report or course proposal resolves conflicts between knowledge systems. Its real difficulty lies not in the terminology, but in requiring both knowledge systems to remain whole and to collaborate across clear boundaries with mutual respect. A university therefore cannot treat Indigenous knowledge as a supplementary case or require it to be translated completely into mainstream academic formats before collaboration is possible.

True Two-Eyed Seeing must confront at least three questions. First, do curricula and degree systems recognize Indigenous knowledge holders as intellectual authorities, rather than merely as cultural speakers? Second, do research-ethics processes allow communities to set boundaries around restricted knowledge, require that data and results be returned, and exercise a right of refusal? Third, can assessment recognize forms of expression and validation other than the mainstream academic paper? Without these changes, Two-Eyed Seeing easily becomes decorative rhetoric: the left eye displays diversity while the right eye keeps making the decisions.

The Debate over a Comprehensive Indigenous University Is About Interpretive Authority, Not Its Name

I have therefore long argued that Indigenous higher education cannot stop with dedicated Indigenous programs, Indigenous Student Resource Centers, or a few multicultural courses on an existing campus. The real question is whether Indigenous peoples hold interpretive authority over knowledge systems, faculty standards, research ethics, data governance, and degree frameworks. Without that authority, adding courses can still amount to a segregated display inside a mainstream institution.

The vision of a comprehensive Indigenous university should not be misunderstood as confining Indigenous peoples to an educational reservation. It would establish a complete structure of higher education grounded in Indigenous knowledge logics. It could exchange with mainstream academia without making assimilation a condition, collaborate with science without surrendering its own methods and ethics, and enter the digital age without handing the fate of all knowledge to platforms and models.

This is especially urgent in Taiwan. We too easily treat the mere visibility of Indigenous peoples as progress without asking how they are being seen: as data, resources, decoration, and subject matter, or as people with the authority to define the position of their own knowledge? If the answer remains closer to the former, the colonial character of higher education has simply changed into more civilized clothing.

Conclusion: What Truly Needs Re-Placement Is Not Indigenous Peoples Knowledge but Institutional Arrogance

Indigenous knowledge does not suffer from a lack of science. It is forced into institutions unwilling to recognize multiple epistemologies. The answer is not to make Indigenous knowledge resemble mainstream science, but to make higher education stop treating itself as the sole judge of truth. Cultural misplacement will continue as long as universities keep Indigenous knowledge in a subordinate position. Data sovereignty will remain empty language as long as digital systems seek extraction without shared governing authority.

Real progress does not mean inviting Indigenous peoples into a classroom and then telling them what qualifies as knowledge. It means recognizing that multiple knowledge systems already exist on this land and enabling them to coexist with dignity, boundaries, decision-making authority, and the capacity to illuminate one another. When science is no longer used as a colonial tool and returns to its role as a method situated within ethical collaboration, Two-Eyed Seeing can become a practice rather than a slogan.