World Indigenous Nations Higher Education Accreditation System

• In Event: Education in the North: Challenges in Formal Education for Indigenous Peoples in Circumpolar Regions

Abstract

In August of 2002, representatives of Indigenous higher education institutions from around the world, ranging from Maori Wananga in New Zealand to U.S. Tribal Colleges, assembled in Kananaskis, Alberta, Canada, and established the World Indigenous Nations Higher Education Consortium. WINHEC was created to provide an international forum and support for Indigenous Peoples to pursue common goals through higher education, including “creating an accreditation body for Indigenous education initiatives and systems that identify common criteria, practices and principles by which Indigenous Peoples live.” A year later, after a series of extended planning meetings in Albuquerque, New Mexico and Otaki, New Zealand, the WINHEC Executive Board at its 2003 annual meeting in Honolulu brought this goal to reality with the formation of the WINHEC Accreditation Authority and the approval of a Handbook to guide Indigenous-serving institutions and programs as they prepare for a new form of accreditation self-study and review. Since then, the WINHEC Board of Affirmation/Accreditation has conducted formal reviews and granted approval of five programs and five institutions over the past eight years. Three of these are Canadian programs and institutions, and one is a Sami institution in Norway. In addition, a draft MOU for a partnership between WINHEC and the National Indigenous Accreditation Board in Canada is pending.

The international partnerships associated with the WINHEC Consortium are essential to its success, particularly as it relates to gaining a deeper understanding of the relationship between indigenous knowledge systems and western forms of schooling. The primary benefits of such collaboration related to the examination and application of indigenous knowledge systems are the opportunities for scholars and graduate students to engage in cross-cultural comparison and analysis of data from diverse indigenous settings to delineate what is particular to a given situation vs. what is generalizable across indigenous populations and beyond. There are also considerable economies of scale and synergistic benefits to be gained from such collaborations, since many of the indigenous populations are relatively small in number and thus are seldom able to engage in large-scale comparative endeavors on their own.

The success of this endeavor will be determined by the extent to which indigenous people continue to provide leadership and guidance such that they can forge a reciprocal relationship that has relevance and meaning in the local indigenous contexts, as well as in the broader social, political and educational arenas involved. By focusing on an agenda guided by indigenous leaders and scholars, the WINHEC accreditation initiative is well positioned to ensure that the community, institutional participants and the infrastructure supporting them will move forward on a pathway to becoming self-sufficient and sustainable well into the future.

This presentation will describe the rationale for and implementation of the WINHEC accreditation system and its unfolding contributions to Indigenous self-determination in higher education. As WINHEC gains further experience in implementing the WINHEC accreditation system, they are continuing to refine and adapt the process to take into consideration the diversity of higher education initiatives that are being developed to serve indigenous people’s around the world.

Author

• Ray Barnhardt, The University of Alaska - Fairbanks