Unthinking historical thinking: lessons from the Arctic

Abstract

In a 2017 book chapter on the continuing erasure of Indigenous epistemes in academia, the Sami scholar Rauna Kuokkanen posed an important question: is it acceptable for a site of learning to be so ignorant? Foregrounding Indigenous scholarship from the Arctic, this article examines the potential of history education to address this question. Based on previous research on Arctic gender history and the coloniality of knowledge, I suggest a paradigm shift, in view of the new UNESCO Education for Sustainable Development framework (May 2021). The research investigates the challenges and opportunities that history education offers in terms of epistemic and cognitive justice within the context of Arctic memory cultures. The article concludes that much can be learned from (not about) Indigenous scholarship, which has long demonstrated a range of critical and sustainable methodologies that offer opportunities to seek epistemic justice and the restitution of cultural memory.