Chapter 33

No Need to Whisper: Reclaiming Indigenous Knowledge and Education in the Pacific

It is a privilege to be invited to participate in this conversation, inspired by Tui Atua’s “Whispers and Vanities” paper. My perspective is framed by many lenses, some inherited from my Tongan culture, others acquired from foreign sources. In the course of this conversation, I beg to be forgiven for any inappropriate uttering that may seem unwise or disrespectful; it is my attempt to fulfil my obligations and assert the undeniable role of Pacific cultures and their indigenous knowledge in modern development, especially in education.

For millennia, Pacific people, together with their indigenous cultures and knowledge systems, have co-evolved with their tropical island environments and biodiversity. They used their knowledge of themselves and their environments to live, trade, work and communicate with one another, using their own languages and following the dictates of their own cultures. Less than 300 years ago, foreign – mainly European – cultures, have infiltrated and greatly influenced their lives, including the way they think, learn and communicate with one another. Within this transformational process, their knowledge systems, including the values that underpinned them, were marginalised, silenced or dispensed of, despite the fact that such systems provided the foundations upon which Pacific communities were sustained and which guided people’s struggle to survive many long and treacherous journeys that constantly threatened to destroy them. It is only in the last four decades or so that we – their descendants – have come to realise the need to recognise and protect these knowledge and value systems, because they are important for our cultural survival and continuity.

For my purposes, the term ‘indigenous people’ refers to descendants of the first people who identify with the land, irrespective of whether they belong to minority or majority populations in a country. It differs from that used by the international community, which recognises only those who are minorities in their own land. In many Pacific island countries and territories, including in Samoa, indigenous people make up majority populations. I use the term ‘indigenous knowledge systems’ (IKS) to refer to culture-specific systems of knowledge and practice, developed and accumulated over many generations and unique to a particular group or region. I distinguish between IKS and ‘western knowledge systems’ (WKS), which are generally centred around scientific knowledge and normally generated by universities, governments, research centres and industry.397

Although WKS and IKS are different on contextual, substantive and methodological grounds, both involve rigorous observation, experimentation and validation. However, while WKS often claim universality, IKS are specific to the culture that owns it. Moreover, while many western scientists tend to perceive ‘indigenous knowledge’ (IK) as a means of resolving the development problems of different communities, indigenous people themselves see IK as part of their overall culture398 and, therefore, important for their identities as well as their survival as people.399

Until recently, we had taken our knowledge and value systems for granted. More recently, however, we have come to realise that so many of our IKS have been lost and that more are in danger of disappearing. During the past four decades, a few of us, including His Highness, have become advocates (some silently, others vehemently) for the acknowledgement and valuing of our indigenous and local knowledges, as a way of ensuring the authenticity of our development and ourselves. In the area of education, acknowledging Pacific knowledge and value systems, and the processes associated with their learning and transmission, received encouragement during the UN Decade of Culture. In 1991, in Rarotonga, Pacific educators agreed that Pacific people needed to take control and ownership of their formal education and to pay more attention to the important role that culture plays in the successful learning of Pacific young people.400 It has been a privilege for me to be part of a journey of advocacy and struggle to make teaching and learning more culturally inclusive and democratic in our region. This journey culminated in the recent endorsement by the Pacific Ministers of Education of the Pacific Culture and Education Strategy, whose vision is ‘culturally inclusive education’.401 The strategy brings together the work of many Pacific people to reclaim and re-present themselves, their cultures and their knowledge systems at all levels of formal education, for the sake of our survival.402

This increased awareness of the importance of Pacific indigenous cultures and their knowledge systems is due to several factors. Firstly, many people are realising that there are more than a thousand vibrant, indigenous cultures in our region, most of which have been around for millennia and which have a right to be recognised and valued.403 Secondly, many educators are of the view that IK is needed to validate and legitimise (modern) educational development activities, particularly in the eyes of indigenous peoples themselves.404 Thirdly, there is the belief that recognising and incorporating aspects of IKS into the curricula of Pacific Island schools and universities would help make formal education more relevant and meaningful for students, many of whom continue to find formal education irrelevant and meaningless.405 Fourthly, there is the need, as Lawton406 suggests, for the curriculum of (Pacific) schools to reflect the ‘best’ of people’s cultures. Fifthly, there is a belief among some that valuing IKS would lead to mutually beneficial collaborations between indigenous and non-indigenous groups, and thus help improve their treatment of one another and their ability to live together peacefully.407 Sixthly, as urged in the Rarotonga Declaration, it is important for non-indigenous people and institutions to recognise the need for indigenous people to have ownership and control of their IK, rather than the academy, researchers or academics.408 And finally, there is a need for Pacific people to recognise that researching and studying their own cultures and knowledge systems is an important activity in itself.

Interest in and research on IKS among academics is relatively recent. Western scholars’ early interest was often with IK of agricultural and rural development.409 Later IK became important in the areas of health care (where diseases that orthodox medicine were unable to cure were treated with ‘ethno-medicine’) and housing (where local materials were often seen as more heat resistant and durable for the tropics, and because building activity would help to conserve foreign currency as well as strengthen local industries). Some writers were interested in the different ‘stages’ people went through before accepting and using IK, while others emphasised the need to document and preserve IK in its place of origin, but warned that such documentation could benefit more powerful centres of knowledge creation and preservation, and thus defeat the purpose of using IK to help the poor, the oppressed and the disadvantaged.410 Most recently, IK has been recognised and acknowledged as a valid area of research in higher education by the UNESCO Asia Pacific Scientific Committee on Research in Higher Education.411

In Oceania, research and writing about Pacific IK and values have largely been associated with concerns about the underachievement of indigenous students in schools and universities.412 This movement is similar to recent studies of IKS in Africa and Canada, where IKS was seen as useful in providing alternative conceptual frameworks, enabling indigenous scholars to examine their new and acquired worldview (often framed and fixed by the colonial discourse of Cartesian and Newtonian dualism).413 In Oceania’s universities, IKS is seen as a new paradigm that is more congruent with many indigenous educators’ as well as students’ ways of thinking, because it emphasises complementarity and interconnectedness rather than duality.414

Disconnectedness and duality are of course legacies of our colonial education system, which has proven to be less than adequate or appropriate for dealing with the nature and profile of Pacific indigenous learners. This is largely because the underlying values, content, processes and conceptual structures of schools and universities tend to emphasise the social and cultural aspects of other (mainly migrant) groups, rather than those of indigenous groups. In almost all Pacific Island communities, formal education is ‘extractive’ in the sense that students acquire knowledge, skills and values that often do not allow them to fit easily back into their island communities, forcing them to seek work in urban areas or, as is increasingly the case, in the metropolitan centres of other countries. This situation has been accentuated by the dearth of Pacific university graduates and academics willing to seriously question their own fields of study, to see how they could better serve their indigenous home communities and the students those communities send away to school. Pacific Island educators are only now beginning to interrogate existing educational structures and processes and are seeing how these have marginalised IKS, together with the people and communities who produced them.

This marginalisation seems similar to what is happening globally in the area of intellectual property rights (IPR), where debates about issues such as bio-piracy are often held. Mishana415 believes that bio-piracy is the result of western-style IPR, rather than because poor countries that happen to be bio-rich lack their own IPR systems. He further suggests that bio-piracy is a double theft, in that it steals creativity and innovation at the same time as robbing the owners of IK of economic opportunities needed for their survival. The recently introduced IPR system may well result in the privatisation of both the physical and intellectual resources of indigenous communities, together with the monopolisation of new technologies (such as we have seen in the development of noni and kava products).

At the University of the South Pacific there is less-than-enthusiastic response to IK and indigenous education. It is obvious that the strong presence of western scientific traditions in higher education teaching and research at the university largely prevented an early interest in teaching and research about context-specific IKS. Despite the fact that by the late 1980s most Pacific island countries had become politically independent, the decolonisation process – especially in the area of education – consistently left unchallenged the nature and content of school and university curricula, as well as the structures of formal educational institutions, especially higher education. References to IK continue to be scarce, limited to discussions about culture and the arts or about how to make modern education and development more efficient and productive by integrating IK to current systems. This is unfortunate; IK is not only linked to better and more efficient development but also to the very identities and futures of Pacific Island people themselves.

In Australia and New Zealand, debates on IK seem to focus on the need for developing an indigenous-directed partnership approach to ongoing negotiations about recognising IK, ownership of IK, and developing rules and protocols around the use of IK from an indigenous viewpoint. Indigenous scholars and researchers in these countries argue that IK is often categorised through the perspectives of non-indigenous people, who rationalise colonialism and, more recently, globalisation.416 Today an increasing number of Pacific postgraduate scholars are openly and critically examining modern development paradigms in light of their cultural knowledge and value systems. Previously the ‘objects’ of colonial analysis, they are now the ‘subjects’ who are ‘speaking back’ to the European constructions and definitions of IK.417

My interest in IK, and more specifically in indigenous education, dates back to the early 1980s, when I began to examine my own culture’s notions of learning, knowledge and wisdom, and how these might be reflected in Tongan teachers’ perceptions of their role. Since then, a small but enthusiastic group of Pacific Island educators have researched and written about their own cultural values and knowledge systems, emphasising the need that development in general, and educational development in particular, centre Pacific people and their cultures in discourses about, and activities associated with, Pacific Island development.418 The formation in 2001 of the ‘Re-thinking Pacific Education Initiative’ (RPEI) encouraged Pacific scholars and researchers to interrogate the educational ideas and theories that they had taken for granted. RPEI was formed after a regional colloquium concluded that the two main reasons why Pacific Island education systems were not fulfilling their development tasks, despite heavy financial investment by governments and donors, were: (i) the lack of ownership by Pacific people of formal education processes; and (ii) the lack of a clearly articulated vision of the role of formal education in the development of Pacific peoples and communities. Participants agreed about the need to reconceptualise education in a way that will allow Pacific people to reclaim ownership of their education and to articulate a Pacific vision for education.

Reconceptualising education in Pacific island countries has proven to be difficult, because of the apparent vacuum in the theorisation of Pacific IKS; Pacific perspectives on knowledge production, transfer and dissemination; as well as indigenous notions of politics, governance, economics, law, land, environment and health. Despite efforts to devise regional strategies for many types of development in the region, including in education (for example, the Pacific Education Framework), there are ever-widening gaps between formal education institutions and the majority of Pacific Island people and communities. In this context, some people, including international consultants, have been rather unhelpful stating their beliefs about the need for Pacific island countries to abide by development rules and regulations because they are ‘universal’ and ‘legal’, while ignoring indigenous peoples’ ideas and values because they are ‘cultural’ and ‘irrelevant’, and ‘barriers’ that need to be removed.

Older scholars and researchers in the Pacific would be familiar with failed development projects in many Pacific island countries. Many of these were based on development models premised on western, scientific, reductionist ideologies, with capitalist countries such as the United States being put up as role models for others to imitate.419 Today after numerous failures, the promise – that those who imitate this model by undergoing reform and restructure will find a place at the banquet table and will be duly rewarded – continues.420 A lot of Pacific people have become experts at waiting.

Those of us who have taken the plunge and pulled out of the race, in order to do our own thing, are now facing many ideological, philosophical, methodological and practical challenges and questions. Researching and teaching about IKS often requires that people interrogate the ideology of rationality, the ideological basis for liberal and scientific knowledge, introduced and propagated by European colonialists and missionaries for over two centuries, and which continues to be championed by many Pacific higher education institutions today. An increasing number of Pacific scholars are working to acknowledge IKS in their thinking as well as in their practices, so that they are better able to re-centre developing policies and practices, and thus re-claim the vital link between culture and development, especially in education.421 However, it is sometimes disconcerting to find the subtle epistemological silencing of, and indifference to, things ‘indigenous’, by non-indigenous as well as indigenous people alike. The efforts by a few to discourage the exchange of ideas about the role of IKS in addressing educational issues, saying that these are culturalist pursuits, is one such silencing.422 And, of course, other critics continue to see indigenous cultures and knowledge as ‘barriers’ to modern thinking and development, especially economic development; IKS are relegated to an inferior position, pushed to a so-called ‘informal sector’ and made difficult to measure in productivity terms.

There are, however, some encouraging signs from Pacific as well as western scientists and scholars, to whom many Pacific young people look for approval. Some scientists have been talking about traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) as a system that builds on generations of people living in close relationship with nature. In the area of climate change, for example, there is now recognition of ‘indigenous climate change assessments and observations’, built on countless generations of knowledge, since time immemorial. Scientists agree that TEK carries within itself empirical classifications and observations about the local environment and a system of self-management that governs sustainable resource use. They also agree that the responsibility for TEK lies with its carriers, the elders of indigenous communities, and because TEK accumulates and adapts knowledge in a holistic manner, scientists are now urging organisations such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to validate TEK in research and other scientific work on climate change, as well as in all environmental and resource-management work.423

Other scientists have argued that IKS should be considered a form of science, because indigenous medicines, farming practices, hunting techniques and use of fire require an intimate knowledge of natural ecology and biology. These forms of understanding require expertise associated with observation, classification and comparison – essential features of sound scientific methodology.424 This general acknowledgement of IK has largely been the result of an increasing flow of information from the South about the role of IK in agriculture, human and animal health, the use and management of natural resources, rural development, education and poverty alleviation.

IK has also been evident in international conferences, many sponsored by UNESCO, such as the 2000 PROAP/ACEID conference in Bangkok, which examined the interface between indigenous and global knowledge. Emphasised in these fora are the need to preserve multiple wisdoms in the Asia Pacific region, and mainstreaming IK in the work of international organisations such as UNESCO and the World Bank.425

In the Asia Pacific region, the need to revalidate IKS is being approached from an educational perspective. For example, Thailand, Vietnam, India and Indonesia are coming up with innovative new curricula and new approaches to the transfer of knowledge. The aim is to link local and global knowledge, and to give IK full recognition. Incorporating IK into higher education curricula is one way of recognising the importance of IK, especially for indigenous students. But there remains a need to develop new methods (for example, participatory, interdisciplinary research) to elicit and generate local knowledge, as well as to develop innovative teaching methods that involve alternative forms of knowledge transfer, and to produce teaching materials adapted to local situations. The recent endorsement by Pacific Ministers of Education of the Pacific Culture and Education Strategy is a positive step towards ensuring the improved transmission of Pacific cultural knowledge and values, at all levels of education, as well as towards strengthening the cultural sector.

My own work in advocating and promoting cultural knowledge in education has been both challenging as well as fulfilling. In theorising about my own education, I drew inspiration from both western and Pacific indigenous epistemologies. My personal philosophy of teaching, as well as my research framework, Kakala, involves three major processes: toli, tui and luva.

Toli is the gathering of the material needed for making a kakala (garland) using different types of flowers, leaves, etc.426 This process requires knowledge of and experience in picking and gathering the appropriate materials at the right time and the right place, and of storing them in a cool and safe place to ensure freshness until they are ready to be made into a kakala. Tui refers to the actual making of a kakala and requires special knowledge and skills of different types of kakala and of their appropriateness for the occasion and/or the person who would wear the kakala. Luva, the gifting or presenting of a kakala to someone else, symbolises the deep values of ofa (compassion) and faka’apa’apa (respect) in Tongan culture in particular, and in Polynesian traditions in general.

A complex etiquette is associated with different kakala based on their histories and mythologies. For me, Kakala has proven to be a useful, culturally meaningful indigenous philosophy and framework. It ensures authenticity and cultural inclusivity and provides for ownership of the educational development process.427 It has been a privilege to share Kakala with colleagues from the Asia Pacific region and beyond, as we remind one another that we live and share the Pacific Ocean and that the ocean is indeed in us. Today there is a growing demand for Pacific education systems that are tailored to local needs and that uphold their own identities. The EU/NZ-funded PRIDE Project, based at the University of the South Pacific, was largely a response to this need. Furthermore, the University of the South Pacific is increasingly expected to be more responsive to the needs and aspirations of Pacific communities. Clearly, pressure is growing for the right of Pacific communities to have more say in determining their future development. The recently endorsed Pacific Culture and Education Strategy will go a long way towards ensuring culturally inclusive education and research in the region and will further enhance the work of educational and other researchers to document and disseminate IK. Kakala, although sourced from Tongan culture, is a synthesis of Tongan and western knowledge, and as such represents the many possibilities and potentials we have, if only we are willing to learn and take risks.

His Highness Tui Atua reminds us of the many worthwhile aspects of our traditional cultures that we can use and learn from. Two aspects that I believe are so important for modern-day life, and that are valued in indigenous education, are: (i) flexibility and openness to new knowledge, and (ii) humility in acknowledging the sources of such knowledge. The search for humility, as expressed in the Samoan notion of tofā saili (search for wisdom), is so central to our understanding of where we came from and where we wish to go. If we were humble, we would see those aspects of our cultures that are ‘borrowings’ from other cultures not as examples of domination but rather of adaptation; and we would see the new creations as examples of meaning-making, rather than feeling guilty about our new creations. Finally, it is important for us, Pacific people, to work together and form partnerships in order to help theorise, re-claim and re-think our education, in the way Tui Atua has done for religion. We need to continue to actively interrogate the models of teaching, learning and research that we have inherited from the wisdom of our elders, as well as from our received wisdom. In this way, we would be able to leave our children with a less materialistic and more holistic, peaceful, sharing, sustainable and spiritual (as opposed to churchy) way of life; one where they would not (again) apologise for the beauty and relevance of their cultural heritage. Indeed, it is the sunscreen that will protect them from the powerful rays of globalisation and its homogenising and deadly glare.

396 Helu Thaman, K. (1999). Thinking. In Songs of love: New and selected poems (1974–1999) (p.15). Suva, Fiji: Mana Publications.

397 Kolawole, O.D. (2001). Local knowledge utilization and sustainable development in the 21st century. Indigenous knowledge and development monitor, 9 (3), 13–15.

398 I use ‘culture’ here to refer to a way of life of a people, including their knowledge and value systems, expressed through their language, rituals and art.

399 Dewes, W. (1993). Introduction. In S.H. Davis and K. Ebbe. (Eds.), Proceedings of a conference on traditional knowledge and sustainable development (p.3). Washington D.C: World Bank. Introduction retrieved from http://www.greenstone.org/greenstone3/nzdl;jsessionid=8757DECD2AC3D1E1D882F71584574B52?a =d&c=edudev&d=HASH0120c255ae4f16a2630d1b2d.5.1&sib=1&oc=0&p.s=ClassifierBrowse&p.sa&p.a=b&p.c=edudev.

400 Teasdale, R. and Teasdale, J. (Eds.). (1992). Voices in a seashell: Education, culture and identity. Suva, Fiji: UNESCO/IPS.

401 See Forum Education Ministers’ Meeting, 13–14 October 2010, Session Sixteen, Pacific culture and education strategy 2010–2015, held PNG. Paper was prepared for this meeting by SPC as a proposal for a Regional Strategy on Culture and Education 2010–2015.

402 See for example: Thaman, K. (1988). Ako and Faiako: cultural values, educational ideas and teachers’ role perceptions in Tonga (PhD thesis, University of the South Pacific, Fiji); Thaman, K. (1995). Concepts of Learning, Knowledge and Wisdom in the Kingdom of Tonga. Prospects: UNESCO Quarterly Review of Education, 25(4), 723–735; Thaman, K. (Ed.). (2003). Educational ideas from Oceania: Selected readings. Suva, Fiji: Institute of Education, University of the South Pacific; Ministry of Justice. (2003). The needs of Pacific people when they are victims of crime (Report prepared for the New Zealand Ministry of Justice), Wellington, New Zealand: A. Koloto; Smith, L.T. (1999). Decolonising methodologies: Research and indigenous peoples. Dunedin, New Zealand: University of Otago Press; Sanga, K. (2000). Learning from indigenous leadership: Module 6: Pacific Cultures in the teacher education curriculum series. Suva, Fiji: Institute of Education, University of the South Pacific; Taufe’ulungaki, A.M and Benson, C. (2002). Tree of Opportunity. Suva, Fiji: Institute of Education, University of the South Pacific; Nabobo-Baba, U. (2006). Knowing and learning: an indigenous Fijian approach. Suva, Fiji: Institute of Pacific Studies (IPS), University of the South Pacific; Nabobo-Baba, U., Koya, F., and Teaero, T (Eds.). (2010). Education for sustainable development: survival and continuity. Suva, Fiji: University of the South Pacific; Vaioleti, T. (2010). Talanoa, Manulua and Founga Ako: frameworks for using ancient concepts in contemporary Tongan education in Aotearoa/New Zealand. (PhD thesis, University of Waikato, Hamilton, New Zealand).

403 UNESCO. (2002). Local & Indigenous Knowledge. Retrieved from http://www.portal.unesco.org/en/ev.php-URL_ID=5065&URL_DO=DO_TOPIC&URL_SECTION=201.html.

404 Teasdale and Teasdale (1992).

405 Taufe’ulungaki and Benson (2002).

406 Lawton, D. (1975). Class, culture and the curriculum. London, U.K.: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

407 Thaman, K. (2010). Re-claiming and re-presenting indigenous knowledge in higher education research. Keynote address at International Austronesian Conference, Taipei, Taiwan.

408 Teasdale and Teasdale (1992).

409 Brokensha, D.W., Warren, D.M. and Werner, O. (Eds.). (1980). Indigenous knowledge systems and development. U.S.A.: University Press of America.

410 Agrawal, A. (1995). Indigenous Knowledge. Monitor, 3, 1–9.

411 Meek, L.V. and Charas, S. (2006). Higher education, research, and knowledge in the Asia Pacific region. New York, U.S.A.: Palgrave Macmillan.

412 Pasikale, A., Yaw, W. and Apa, K. (1998). Weaving the way: Pacific Islands peoples’ participation in the provision of learning pathways for Pacific Island learners – Volume 3 of the Pacific Islands education series monograph. New Zealand: Education and Training Support Agency, Pacific Islands Education Unit; Manu’atu, L. (2002). Tuli ke ma’u ho no ngaahi malie: pedagogical possibilities for Tongan students in New Zealand (PhD thesis, University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand); Vaioleti (2010).

413 Ntuli, P.P. (2002). Indigenous knowledge systems and the African Renaissance. In C.A.O. Hoppers (Ed.). Indigenous knowledge and the integration of knowledge systems: Towards a philosophy of articulation (pp.53–66). Claremont, South Africa: New Africa Books.

414 Thaman, K. (1992). Looking towards the Source: A Consideration of (Cultural) context in Teacher Education. In, C. Benson & N. Taylor. (Eds.), Pacific Teacher Education Forward Planning Meeting: Proceedings (pp.98–103). Suva, Fiji: Institute of Education, University of the South Pacific.

415 Mshana, R. (2002). Globalisation and Intellectual Property Rights. In, C.A.O. Hoppers (Ed.). Indigenous knowledge and the integration of knowledge systems (pp.200–208). Claremont, South Africa: New Africa Books.

417 Smith (1999); Manu’atu (2002); Fatnowna, S. and Pickett, H. (2002). The place of indigenous knowledge systems in the post-modern integrative paradigm shift. In, C.A.O. Hoppers (Ed.), Indigenous knowledge and the integration of knowledge systems (pp.257–285). Claremont, South Africa: New Africa Books; Vaioleti (2010).

418 See for example, Nabobo-Baba (2006); Vaioleti (2010).

419 Esteva, G. (1992). Development. In W. Sachs (Ed.), The Development Dictionary: guide to knowledge and power. London, U.K.: Zed Books.

420 Hoppers, C.A.O. (Ed.). (2002). Indigenous Knowledge and the Integration of Knowledge Systems. Claremont, South Africa: New Africa Books, p.viii.

421 See for example, Johansson-Fua (2006). The Sustainable Livelihood and Education Project (SLEP): a report. Suva, Fiji: Institute of Education, University of the South Pacific; Sanga, K. and Thaman, K. (2009). Re-thinking the Pacific Education Curriculum. Wellington, New Zealand: Institute for Māori and Pacific Research, Victoria University of Wellington.

422 Burnett, G. (2005). Language games and schooling: discources of colonialism in Kiribati education. Asia Pacific Journal of Education, 25(1), 93–106.

423 Thaman, K.H. & Thaman, R.R. (2009). Pacific Island Principles: learning to live wise and sustainable lives. In, P.B Corcoran & P.M Osano. (Eds.), Young people, education and sustainable development: Exploring principles, perspectives, and praxis (pp.63–76). The Netherlands: Wageningen Academic Publishers.

424 Higgins, C. (2000). Indigenous knowledge and occidental science: How both forms of knowledge can contribute to an understanding sustainability. In C. Hollstedt, K. Sutherland, and T. Innes (Eds.), Proceedings, From science to management and back: a science forum for southern interior ecosystems of British Columbia (pp.147–151). Kamloops, B.C.: Southern Interior Forest Extension and Research Partnership. Retrieved from http://www.citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?rep=rep1&type=pdf&doi=10.1.1.214.2841.

425 Larson, J. (1998). Perspectives on indigenous knowledge systems in Southern Africa. World Bank Discussion Paper, No. 3. Washington D.C.: World Bank.

426 Kakala is a generic Tongan term that refers to flowers and other plant materials used to fashion garlands. The actual plants or trees from which these originate are known as ‘akau kakala. The garlands or products that are made are also referred to as kakala. Similar products are called salusalu in Fijian and hei in Cook Islands. See Thaman, K. (2006). Research and indigenous knowledge in Oceania. In L. Meek & C. Swanwela (Eds.) Higher Education Research and Knowledge in the Asia Pacific Region. Palgrave Macmillan Publishers.