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 preserveforms of indignity and injustice. We then propose 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 of dispossession, and as refusal to allow dispossession and indignity to influence the present and future
