Accountability, Relationality and Indigenous Epistemology: Advancing an Indigenous Perspective on Academic Integrity

Abstract

Although the notion of academic integrity is advanced as a Western construct, Indigenous ways of conceptualising and mobilizing this construct represent a vast, diverse and enduring knowledge system that encompasses not only how sources of knowledge are attributed, but also serves as one of the ontological pillars that upholds honesty and truth-telling within a relationally oriented epistemology. Written from an Indigenous perspective, this chapter invites readers to critically reflect on the ways that academic integrity, as an ethical pillar of the Western academy, relies on institutionalized protocols that privilege a specific methodology of citation and referencing that elevates the written word whilst excluding Indigenous methodologies that are embedded within an ethic of truth-telling and relational accountability. Grounded in the scholarship that surrounds Indigenous knowledge as a participatory way of knowing and utilizing a values-based analysis, I highlight the conceptual parallels between Western understandings of academic integrity and an Indigenous relational epistemology that is rooted in accountability. In today’s social climate of reconciliation, academic institutions across Canada are seeking avenues to decolonize their pedagogies and practices. One such avenue is in the area of academic integrity which is underlain with distinct and established ways of transmitting knowledge that have all too often left Indigenous knowledge systems to exist as alternative, or less rigorous, approaches to knowledge production. Movement towards a more equitable, critical and comprehensive understanding of how we, as scholars, are being accountable to those voices that inform and shape our own requires the consideration of a trans-systemic approach.