Edited by Léo-Paul Dana, Professor, Dalhousie University, Canada and Montpellier Business School, France....
Dr.
Research profile: Leo‑Paul Dana
Since the 1980s, Leo Dana has been researching for and with Indigenous peoples – those whose ancestors were living in an area prior to colonisation or within a nation-state prior to its formation.
He defined Indigenous entrepreneurship as self-employment based on Indigenous knowledge and worked on a team to develop a relevant model.
The focus of Dr. Dana’s PhD thesis was First Nations and Inuit. He subsequently embarked on detailed studies of Alaska Native people, Berbers in Morocco, Guarani people in Paraguay, the Mapuche economy in Chile and reindeer herding among the Sami in Fennoscandia.
There is rich heterogeneity among Indigenous peoples and some of their cultural values are often incompatible with the basic assumptions of mainstream theories of entrepreneurship.
This makes research very rewarding, especially since Indigenous entrepreneurship often has non-economic explanatory variables. Some Indigenous economies display elements of egalitari