When it come to the world’s indigenous practices of wayfinding and voyaging, there is a lack of critical, ongoing documentation of this specialized knowledge, resulting in misunderstanding and even misrepresentation of these discoveries and concepts.
That was the finding of a research team led by Wayne Buente, an associate professor in the School of Communications in the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa’s College of Social Sciences (CSS), and Chad Kālepa Baybayan, navigator-in-residence at UH Hilo’s ‘Imiloa Astronomy Center.
The researchers confirmed previous findings that publications on indigenous practices of non-instrumental wayfinding and voyaging of Pacific Islanders were often ignored in widely used indexes such as the Dewey Decimal Classification in libraries, the Library of Congress and the Web of Science citation database.
Buente said a relatively simple solution to this dearth would be assigning unique subject qualifiers to distinguish among various contexts in which this concept is used.
“For example, working with Native Hawaiian cultural practitioners could help construct appropriate terminology to improve existing classification systems,” Buente said.
Added Baybayan, “It would greatly benefit the academic community, especially those doing research in traditional wayfinding and the voyaging arts, if a more complete system was used to index their data bases.”
Buente said the researchers will continue working with indigenous communities “to advocate for the fair and equal representation of cultural knowledge and its practice.”
There were three collaborators at Kent State University (KSU) in Ohio: Lala Hajibayova is an associate professor in the school of information. Mallory McCorkhill recently earned a master’s degree in library and information science. Roman S. Panchyshyn is an associate professor and head of metadata and cataloging at the KSU libraries.
