Indigenous Research Methodologies: X-Marks in the Age of Community Accountability and Protection

In an ongoing exchange about the potency and promise of Indigenous Research Methodologies (IRMs) for academic knowledge production, I respond in this article to Windchief and Cummins. I do so by considering a challenging example of Indigenous knowledge production, clarifying additional misunderstandings between us, and complicating persistent oppositions and essentialisms that are neither intellectually defensible nor characteristic of contemporary Indigenous life and experience. Instead, I propose that IRMs are productively conceived as x-marks (or historical American Indian treaty signatures), which encapsulate the paradoxes, contradictions, and predicaments of modern American Indian life in ways that resist clean oppositions and confound rigid binaries. In this respect, the x-mark signifies that which lies between two readily identifiable options, something new and potentially promising despite the indeterminacy and ambivalence it elicits, if only we will face and embrace such ambiguity.

Digital Support for Indigenous Research Methodologies

Research undertaken by outsiders into issues of concern to Aboriginal communities frequently ignores community culture and the knowledge embedded within Aboriginal communities. Methodologies are adopted which perpetuate the colonialist mindset of non-indigenous Australians leading to failed solutions to Aboriginal problems. This paper describes an Aboriginal-led community-based research project, exploring the role of Aboriginal Australians in caring for, and transforming, their own communities. It focuses on the roles that Information Systems can play when providing an accessible platform for Aboriginal voices. The authors conducted an in-depth case study of one Aboriginal Community Controlled Organisation (ACCO), the Illawarra Koori Men’s Support Group (IKMSG). The research consisted of a social network analysis (SNA) of the inter-organisational links of the IKMSG; interviews and focus groups with members of the IKMSG and the co-design of their first website. The prominence of the IKMSG in the SNA maps suggests that its work in the community is highly respected and that the model produced by this research can act as a guide for success in other ACCOs. The findings have been used to develop a theoretical model of Aboriginal community engagement and intervention. This model can enable authentic outcomes to projects which address Aboriginal concerns and support the conduct of community-led research in Aboriginal communities.

Considering Indigenous Research Methodologies: Bicultural Accountability and the Protection of Community Held Knowledge

As part of a continuing conversation related to Indigenous methodologies in Western academic contexts, this manuscript includes a summary of the scholarly dialogue by providing background information and situatedness to an exchange that is positioned in the academy and Indigenous community simultaneously. The dialogue thus far includes a keynote presentation and a series of manuscripts that collectively help explain Indigenous research methodologies (IRMs) and delineates important considerations for practitioners and communities who relate to Indigenous research. The authors share where they agree, and where they diverge as well as their rationale for continuing the discourse in an academic forum. The paper concludes with an alternative method for dissemination (a winter count), that reimagines epistemological pluralism and knowledge protection through bicultural accountability. We consider the repatriation of Indigenous knowledge to be paramount in this process.

Understanding the Application and Use of Indigenous Research Methodologies in the Social Sciences by Indigenous and Non-Indigenous Scholars

Indigenous research methodologies articulate how researchers and Aboriginal communities engage in research together. These methodologies are informed by Indigenous cultural and ethical frameworks specific to the Nations with whom the research is being conducted. This study explores how such research relationships were articulated in the dissemination phase of research. We carried out an Indigenous qualitative content analysis of 79 peer-reviewed articles published January 1996 to June 2018, predominantly in the fields of social sciences. Our findings show that most articles were written by Indigenous researchers or a research team composed of Indigenous and non-Indigenous researchers. Such collaborations articulated the principles of Indigenous methodology (IM) much clearer than those authored by non-Indigenous scholars or when partnerships with Indigenous communities were less evident with respect to the principles guiding the research process. The principles of IM that were manifest in these research partnerships were relevance, respect for Indigenous knowledges, responsible relationships, wholism, and Indigenous ethics. The findings of this study will help to guide future researchers who work with Indigenous peoples, especially with respect to the need for a deeper understanding of how such research relationships are sustained over time to bring about meaningful change for Indigenous peoples and their communities.

Indigenous Research Methodologies in Water Management: Learning From Australia and New Zealand for Application on Kamilaroi Country

Indigenous Research Methodologies (IRMs) for considering cultural values of water are a missing component of water management in Australia. On this dry, flat and ancient continent Traditional Knowledge has been passed on from generation to generation for millennia. The profound knowledge of surface and groundwater has been critical to ensuring the survival of Indigenous peoples in a dry landscape, through finding, re-finding and protecting water. Indigenous Research Methodologies can provide a basis for the exploration of this knowledge in a way that that is culturally appropriate, and which generates a culturally safe space for Indigenous researchers and communities. The development of IRMs has occurred slowly in Australia over the past decades with the intention of shifting the research paradigm away from studying Indigenous peoples through non-Indigenous research methodologies, to partnering in developing methods appropriate to Indigenous knowledge systems. Indigenous Research Methodologies are rooted in Indigenous epistemologies and ontologies and represent a radical departure from more positivist forms of research (Wilson 2001). This allows the Indigenous researcher to derive the terms, questions and priorities of what is being researched, how the community is engaged, and how the research is delivered. Here, a brief overview is provided of Indigenous engagement in water management in Australia and Aotearoa or New Zealand, with reference to local case studies. These more general models are used as the basis for developing an IRM appropriate to the Kamilaroi people in the Gwydir Wetlands of northern NSW, Australia.

wahkotowin: Reconnecting to the Spirit of nêhiyawêwin (Cree Language)

The Spirit of the Language project looks to the Spirit of nêhiyawêwin (Cree language), sources of disconnection between nêhiyawak (Cree people) in Treaty 6 and the Spirit of nêhiyawêwin, and the process of reconnection to the Spirit of the language as voiced by nêhiyawak. The two researchers behind this project are nêhiyaw language-learners who identify as insider-outsiders in this work. The work is founded in Indigenous Research Methodologies, with a particular respect to ceremony, community protocol, consent, and community participation, respect and reciprocity. We identified the Spirit of the language as having three distinct strands: history, harms, and healing. The Spirit of Indigenous languages is dependent on its history of land, languages, and laws. We then identified the harms or catalysts of disconnect from the Spirit of the language as colonization, capitalism, and Christianity. The results of our community work have identified the methods for healing, or reconnecting to the Spirit of language, by way of autonomy, authority, and agency.

Approaching Nonhuman Ontologies: Trees, Communication, and Qualitative Inquiry

Consideration of trees has historically been confined to disciplinary, quantitative perspectives embedded in botany, earth sciences, resource management, environmental sustainability, and sustainable development wherein trees are largely viewed as senseless, bio-mechanical matter to be controlled and used for human consumption and economic gain. In this article, I reflect selectively on methodologies and methods I used in a broader, interdisciplinary project to study the sentient, intelligent relationality of trees as agentic, conscious, innovative entities embedded in unique, community-based lifeways. My research framework integrated Indigenous research methodologies, public ethnography, ontological emergence theory, plant science, philosophies of plant and nonhuman knowing, interspecies communication, and filmmaking. Herein, I focus on how perspectives and approaches based on qualitative, ethnographic inquiry and Indigenous epistemologies support and broaden research, (re)presentation, and engagement with trees and other nonhumans. Methods I discuss include the practices of cultivating tree/human communication and fostering human sensitivity and embodied knowing.

Silent Voices, Absent Bodies, and Quiet Methods: Revisiting the Processes and Outcomes of Personal Knowledge Production Through Body-Mapping Methodologies Among Indigenous Youth

At the interface of Western and Indigenous research methodologies, this paper revisits the place of the “personal” and “autobiographical” self in qualitative visual research. We outline a community and partnership-based evaluation of a theater program for Indigenous youth using arts-based body-mapping approaches in Saskatoon, Canada, and explore the methodological limitations of the narrator or artist’s voice and representations to translate personal visual-narratives and personal knowledges they hold. In so doing, we describe how body-mapping methods were adapted and improvised to respond to the silent voices and absent bodies within personal visual-narratives with an epistemological eclecticism handling the limitations of voice and meaningfully engaging the potentiality of quietness. Extending the conceptual and methodological boundaries of the “personal” and “autobiographical” for both narrator and interlocutor, artist and observer, we contribute to debates on the processes and outcomes of personal knowledge production by articulating a generative, ethical, and culturally-grounded project mobilizing body-mapping as a quiet method that pursues self-work—the passionate and emergent practices of working on one’s self and making self appear in non-representational and ceremonial ways.