Local Journal Makes International Waves

Local Journal Makes International Waves

For immediate release Friday 3 August 2007

Ngā Pae o te Māramatanga celebrated two years of bringing groundbreaking Māori research to global audiences today with the launch of a new website for their journal AlterNative: An International Journal of Indigenous Scholarship.

Ngā Pae o te Māramatanga has a strong history of helping indigenous academics to publish their work as New Zealand’s national Māori Centre for Research Excellence. Since its inception in 2002, the Centre has enabled over 2,500 local and international indigenous scholars engage in research. In 2005, Ngā Pae o te Māramatanga undertook the ambitious project to extend this mandate to scholars around the world by founding AlterNative. Two years on, the journal is gaining recognition around the world for its significant contribution in shaping social policy.

“It is our goal to create a forum to establish international understandings of indigenous academic research”, says Professor Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Joint Director of Ngā Pae o te Māramatanga. “We launched the journal at the close of the United Nations’ first International Decade of Indigenous Peoples in response to a growing understanding that the development of policies regarding indigenous peoples would need to be supported by indigenous participation in robust academic debates.”

AlterNative is unique in its emphasis on presenting native knowledge through native eyes. Published twice a year, the journal provides an innovative forum where indigenous scholars can dialogue, record their experiences and share knowledge to enable social and cultural transformation. AlterNative challenges indigenous authors to balance traditional knowledges and protocol from their communities with the demands of their academic discipline. The result is a diverse weave of cultures and ways of thinking united by the experience of being indigenous.

To date AlterNative has featured contributors representing cultures such as Māori, Samoan, American Indians, Aborigines, Palestinian Bedouin and the Sami people (the “reindeer” tribes of Scandinavia), to name just a few. Topics have ranged from indigenous perspectives on tourism, health, social policy and education to musical hybridity and environmental science. While the journal is published in English for wide accessibility, each issue contains one article in its original language in recognition of this process.

The diverse range of material covered by AlterNative requires the focus of a large Editorial Committee and International Advisory Board, many of whom are regarded as world leaders in their field.

“The launch of a new website for AlterNative allows Ngā Pae o te Māramatanga to further our vision of an international dialogue between indigenous peoples by enabling the journal to be accessible for communities around the world”, says Smith.

Indigenous peoples today account for 370 million of the world’s population, representing over 5,000 distinct cultures across 72 nations.

www.maramatanga.co.nz/alternative

ENDS

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