Indigenous knowledge stewardship in AI-enabled Technology Education refers to the community-authorised governance of Indigenous technological knowledge as it is created, validated, transmitted, applied, protected and renewed in educational settings. Indigenous technological knowledge includes situated understandings, skills, practices, artefacts and responsibilities developed through sustained relationships among communities, materials, technologies and environments. Stewardship differs from unrestricted collection or dissemination because authority remains with legitimate knowledge holders and community structures. In digital repositories, learning platforms and artificial intelligence systems, responsible stewardship calls for continuing, purpose-specific consent; accurate provenance; preservation of language and context; differentiated access; purpose limitation; transparency about indexing and model training; reciprocal benefit; and workable mechanisms for correction, withdrawal and refusal. Whether any of these safeguards is a legally enforceable right depends on the jurisdiction, instrument and agreement concerned; the definition therefore combines legal requirements, soft-law norms, community governance principles and recommended ethical practice. Human and community verification remains necessary where AI systems translate, classify or generate explanations of Indigenous knowledge. In Technology Education, these principles support culturally responsive investigation, design, making, evaluation and communication while advancing epistemic justice, intergenerational continuity and education for sustainable development.
Indigenous Knowledge Systems (IKS) constitute accumulated yet continually evolving understandings generated through communities’ long-term relationships with particular places, materials, species, technologies and social institutions [1,2,3,4]. Such knowledge is frequently transmitted through demonstration, narrative, apprenticeship, observation and participation rather than through decontextualised written propositions. It is therefore both cognitive and practical, but also ethical and relational: knowing is inseparable from obligations to people, ancestors, land and future generations [4,5,6,7,8].
Technology Education offers an especially important setting for engaging IKS. Indigenous architecture, metallurgy, weaving, pottery, food preservation, water management, agricultural implements and climate-responsive design all embody purposeful technological activity. They involve the identification of needs, selection and transformation of materials, iterative testing, optimisation, systems thinking and evaluation of social and environmental consequences [1,2,3]. Nevertheless, conventional accounts of Technology Education have often narrated technological development through industrial and Euro-American histories, thereby positioning Indigenous technologies as cultural artefacts rather than as intellectually generative systems of design knowledge [1,2].
Recent South African scholarship has established the curriculum value of integrating Indigenous knowledge into Technology Education and has identified persistent barriers, including limited teacher preparation, resource constraints, curricular fragmentation and epistemological hierarchies [1,3]. Here, epistemological hierarchies mean institutional arrangements that rank one knowledge tradition as the default source of valid explanation while treating other traditions as supplementary or requiring external validation. The digital and AI era adds a different layer to this problem. Once an oral explanation, image, artefact, language sample or design process is digitised, it can be copied, reclassified, recombined and used to train computational systems. Increased visibility can support cultural continuity and educational access, but it can also facilitate decontextualisation, appropriation, commercial exploitation and the disclosure of restricted knowledge [9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16].
Against this background, the purpose of this entry is to clarify how Indigenous technological knowledge may be managed in education without reducing it to extractable information. The discussion is guided by three questions: What distinguishes Indigenous knowledge management from conventional organisational knowledge management? How should digital and AI-supported Technology Education govern Indigenous knowledge? How can such governance advance epistemic justice and sustainable development? The entry argues that stewardship—understood as accountable care under legitimate community authority—provides a more defensible orientation than capture, storage and dissemination alone.
This entry is adapted from the peer-reviewed paper https://doi.org/10.3390/encyclopedia6100220
