As one of the international academics for the Graduate Certificate in Indigenous Business Leadership, Dr Joseph Gladstone brings a Native American perspective to his subject, Indigenous Philosophy of Business.
Joseph Gladstone is an Associate Professor of Management at Washington State University and one of the few Native American faculty in America’s higher education system. He’s also an international academic for the University of Melbourne’s Graduate Certificate in Indigenous Business Leadership. His work investigates the nuances of Indigenous Peoples and western-influenced philosophies as they apply to business and management, exploring how they can be approached equally and applied collaboratively in both educational and organisational spaces.
Growing up in Seattle, Joseph spent a lot of his everyday life in non-Native spaces. However, as a member of the Blackfeet Tribe of Montana and a recognised Nez Perce descendant, he was immersed in reservation culture and mannerisms through his parents and extended family members, including regular visits to the reservations they grew up on. He and his family were also active in urban Indian communities, which kept them connected to Native environments while in the city.
“I can say that I was rather blessed to be exposed to both Native and non-Native environments growing up. It makes existing in these worlds rather natural for me today,” says Joseph. He likens the experience to being raised in a family that doesn’t speak English at home. “Children raised in these homes are fluently bilingual. They can switch from one language to another flawlessly, including proper accents. Not only can they switch languages, but they can also think in both languages without needing to translate in their heads.”
Some might identify this as code switching; Joseph refers to it as a part of transmotion. A neologism and philosophy by Anishinaabe cultural theorist and writer Gerald Vizenor, transmotion is the unrestricted action of passing on Native values and knowledges to future generations through everyday cultural practices, creative storytelling, and domestic and international legal instruments. Much of Joseph’s work is rooted in transmotion. His efforts to create a ‘home’ for Indigenous management scholars by founding the Native and Indigenous Peoples Caucus (NAIPC) in the Academy of Management is a prime example.
“It is a cultural faux pas to openly admit it, but I find the Caucus my greatest professional accomplishment to date,” says Joseph. “However, the Caucus was only a start; it has since brought many people from various parts of the globe together and is now recognised as the go-to place to find like-minded scholars and a support network. It has inertia and can exist without me. My vision of placing Indigenous wisdom as equal to western ontology will eventually come to fruition. Perhaps not in my lifetime, but as we grow new scholars grounded in our thinking, it will eventually happen.”
Tracing the timeline of his career, it’s clear that his participation in the PhD Project helped model this behaviour for Joseph. The organisation’s goal to diversify the corporate landscape by first diversifying the teachers in higher education classrooms has been successful many times over. Since their inception in 1994, they’ve helped grow the number of historically underrepresented business professors in the US from 294 to 1700, with Joseph among them. Now both an alum and faculty member of the PhD Project, Joseph “challenges the paradigms of doctoral education” with his work and continues to pass his knowledge on to aspiring professors completing their doctorates.
“You can say that my involvement [in the PhD Project] was divine intervention. I recall it was a Monday in 2003 that I decided I was going to pursue my PhD in business administration. The next day I received a copy of Winds of Change, the magazine for the American Indian Science and Engineering Society (AISES), and the first page I saw when I opened it was a PhD Project ad asking: ‘Have you considered becoming a business professor?’ My response was: ‘Yes. Yesterday!’.”
For students taking Indigenous Philosophy of Business, this way of thinking is taken as the standard, while western thought is introduced as a possible additional source of innovation. “What’s good in one community could be good for another, but in a different way,” says Joseph. “This pragmatic thinking allows Native and Indigenous people to adopt useful western ideas in ways they find practical, but not always exactly how the West says it’s supposed to be done. This is how students in my class are taught to think.”
Joseph explains the key practical skill he teaches students is patience. Using what he calls the ‘Native Socratic Method’, he asks a lot of open-ended questions to prompt discussions, often playing devil’s advocate to encourage students to think critically about the topic at hand. His aim is to help students achieve a clear sense of self while gradually building their knowledge so that they can make informed decisions in their careers and lives.
His advice to prospective students of the Graduate Certificate in Indigenous Business Leadership is to “Give us a try. Discover what it’s like to learn in an environment that doesn’t just ‘respect’ your way of thinking but encourages you to take what you learn about the West and refine it to fit your and your community’s needs.”