Ethnomathematics owes both its power and its limitations to its origins in the Western conceptual axioms of culture and mathematics. We explore potentially contradictory impulses inherent to ethnomathematics that prevent richer applications to mathematics education, as well as some ways through which these contradictions sometimes preserve forms of indignity and injustice. We then proposes alternative foundations for the program of ethnomathematics grounded in post-colonial notions of dignity, recognition, and reconciliation, connecting these ideas to forgiveness as both critical awareness...
"Culture" does not give answers to problems of mathematics education; issues of power, authority, and policy need to be included in any attempt to understand culture and mathematics learning. Unless these and other issues of postcolonial intercultures are centered in out analyeses, we run the risk of limiting ourselves to naive yet symbolically violent versions of assimilation and acculturation to the dominat culture.