Indigenous Pathways into Social Research

Voices of a New Generation

Donna M Mertens, Fiona Cram, Bagele Chilisa, Donna M Mertens, Fiona Cram, Bagele Chilisa

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781598746969
• eBook ISBN:
  9781315426679
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

A new generation of indigenous researchers is taking its place in the world of social research in increasing numbers. These scholars provide new insights into communities under the research gaze and offer new ways of knowing to traditional scholarly models. They also move the research community toward more sensitive and collaborative practices. But it comes at a cost. Many in this generation have met with resistance or indifference in their journeys through the academic system and in the halls of power. They also often face ethical quandaries or even strong opposition from their own communities. The life stories in this book present the journeys of over 30 indigenous researchers from six continents and many different disciplines. They show, in their own words, the challenges, paradoxes, and oppression they have faced, their strategies for overcoming them, and how their work has produced more meaningful research and a more just society.

Chapter 1
The Journey Begins

Fiona Cram, Bagele Chilisa, and Donna M. Mertens

The ways of Indigenous research are as old as the hills and the valleys, the mountains and the seas, and the deserts and the lakes that Indigenous people bind themselves to as their places of belonging. It is not that Indigenous peoples are anti-research. They have always conducted research. As Castellano (2004, p. 98) writes, "Aboriginal knowledge has always been informed by research, the purposeful gathering of information and the thoughtful distillation of meaning." So the "bad name" that research has within Indigenous communities is not about the notion of research itself; rather it is about how that research has been practiced, by whom, and for what purpose that has created ill-feeling.

For many Indigenous peoples, the boundaries of their lands have been redrawn by colonial powers and they have found themselves confined or shifted to territories not of their own choosing. Other Indigenous peoples have remained on their lands and have only just recently been confronted by forces that challenge their guardianship of their traditional territories. Still others have never had legally recognized land to call their own. In many ways, the journeys of the Indigenous researchers reveal struggles over territory that are similar to how Indigenous peoples have been positioned in relation to their lands. Indigenous researchers' stories provide increased understanding of how they caretake and illuminate the territory of Indigenous knowledge.

In this volume, Indigenous researchers from across the world share their experiences of awakening to the ways of research and their subsequent journeys to find pathways whereby research and evaluation could be of service to their people. The chapters are from researchers who come from the United States, Canada, Mexico, Panama, Vanuatu, New Zealand, Australia, Botswana, South Africa, Burkina Faso, Spain, Cameroon, Papua New Guinea, and Japan. Many of the Indigenous peoples writing here have suffered "European colonization and cognitive imperialism" (Battiste, 2000, p. xvi). In some instances, these researchers have decolonized and indigenized or harmonized European ways of knowing with Indigenous ways; in other instances, they have envisioned new ways of conducting research that resonate with the researched's cultures and ways of knowing.

The contributors reflect the diversity found within Indigenous communities in terms of where they are from, the length of time they've been engaged as researchers, the meanings they make of the type of research they conduct, what the research can be called, and the naming that connects them to this research. Some situate themselves as researchers, others as program evaluators, and still others as both. They are diverse about whether or not they define themselves as Indigenous researchers and what they call the research they do. They also offer their reflections about their Indigenous status, their awareness of it over their lifetime, and under what conditions they would actually be considered to be Indigenous.

Some of the researchers writing here grew up with a conscious awareness of their cultural and traditional ways. For others, this awareness came later in life as they struggled to understand educational settings where things were done and understood in ways that sat uneasily with them. The stories of their journeys into research provide us with an understanding of their negotiations with power, resistance to oppression, and the value that comes from understanding Indigenous ways of knowing in conjunction with research in culturally complex communities. It was the striving to privilege their own knowledge and ways of knowing that led these people to places where they can stand confidently as researchers and evaluators and define who they are and how they wish to be recognized as members of Indigenous communities.

Some of the issues they address are the meaning of Indigenous research and whether they can be called Indigenous researchers. In this chapter, therefore, we explore the meaning of indigeneity, complete with recognition of the challenges involved in determining who can legitimately describe themselves as Indigenous and who can speak on behalf of Indigenous peoples and communities. We examine literature that is bringing a wider lens to the meaning of Indigenous research, including the growing number of resources now available, such as Chilisa's (2012) Indigenous Research Methodologies, the American Higher Education Consortium's Indigenous Framework for Evaluation (LaFrance & Nichols, 2010), Linda T. Smith's (2012) Decolonising Methodologies, Marie Battiste's edited volume (2000) Reclaiming Indigenous Voice and Vision, and Shaun Wilson's (2008) Research Is Ceremony. These Indigenous thought leaders set the context for a discussion of what we call the research and evaluation work undertaken by Indigenous researchers and evaluators in this collection. We follow this introductory section with a brief summary of each of the chapters contributed by the Indigenous researchers telling their own stories of their journeys into social research.

Who Is Indigenous?

The recognition of who is Indigenous is fraught with tensions related to ethnicity, race, colonization, and culture. Definitions span from a drop of blood to self-identification, to more complex historical conceptualizations that involve race/ethnicity, colonization, marginalization, and/or relationship to the land (Daes, 2000). In some places, marriage to an Indigenous person can confer Indigenous status. The term "race" derives from periods of colonial expansion. Classifying humans according to appearance or race helped Europeans make sense of human diversity. This was then taken a step further in attempts to justify a hierarchy of mankind that places white men at the top and black men closest to gorillas and apes (Gould, 1981). Race assumes that the phenotype, or group of physical characteristics, is an appropriate way of classifying people into social groupings. From this, it is often assumed that biology determines other factors (e.g., intelligence, musical talent, propensity toward violence).

The promotion of the term ethnicity" marked a step back from a race-based reductionist approach to human behavior and value. Barth (1969) defined an ethnic unit as those individuals who say they belong to ethnic group A rather than ethnic group B and are willing to be treated and allow their behavior to be interpreted and judged as As and not Bs. However, ethnic identity is not solely about an individual's choice to define himself or herself as a group member, as it has both objective (other-defined) and subjective (self-defined) components.

Official government classifications of race and ethnicity have been used to deny rights to groups of people based on biology or physical characteristics (Hochchild & Weaver, 2007). At the same time, classifications that have been used to justify and advance inequalities can also be used by members of marginalized groups "to mobilize against their subordinate position" (Hochchild & Weaver, 2007, p. 160).

The connection between structural subordination and indigeneity led to the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) (United Nations, 2007), which acknowledges the dual reality of many Indigenous people who live in two worlds. In one world, they hold fast to their cultural traditions, beliefs, and values. The other world is that of a colonizing nation, and it is where many Indigenous peoples go for work, education, health care, and welfare services (Reid & Cram, 2004). There can be little doubt that this experience shapes the health and wellness of Indigenous peoples (United Nations, 2007). Not only are many Indigenous people marginalized from the societies they must now inhabit, many of those whose right it is to claim to be Indigenous are marginalized from their cultural traditions and membership in their respective tribe(s) (Smith, 2006).

UNDRIP (United Nations, 2007, p. 2) expresses concern over the injustices that colonization has wrought on Indigenous peoples, including their dispossession from their "lands, territories and resources." Such dispossession occurred in the absence as well as the presence of treaties between Indigenous peoples and newcomers that affirmed Indigenous sovereignty (Alfred, 2005; Lashley, 2000). How much, however, should this experience of subordination within contested territory define what it is to be Indigenous? The dominance of Australia, Canada, the United States, and New Zealand within Indigenous discourses has written dispossession and marginalization into the substratum of indigeneity legitimacy. However, when Indigenous peoples regain sovereignty, they will still be Indigenous—in spite of the loss of this seemingly defining characteristic.

In the early 1990s, Fleras and Elliot's (1992, p. 1) definition included the descendants of the first inhabitants of a territory, "Aboriginal peoples", were now subordinate members of a larger, dominant society. In this definition, a claim to be the first on the land, along with an experience of marginalization and colonization are seen as essential to the authorization of indigeneity. For example, Braun, Allison, and Tsark (2008, p. 329) define Native Hawaiians as "individuals who trace their ancestry directly to the Polynesians who peopled and governed the Hawaiian archipelago before the arrival of Westerners in 1778."

This is also highlighted by Motheo Koitsiwe in his chapter, when he cites Anaya's (2004) definition of Indigenous peoples as being those who are descended from the pre-invasion inhabitants of lands that are now occupied and dominated by others. Where does this definition leave those who know their ancestors were the first to walk the land, but whose tenure has remained unchallenged? Are their connections to the land and their claims to guardianship of it denied because of their membership in a majority culture? A definition of indigeneity that is linked to colonization makes sense for Indigenous peoples in the Americas, Russia, Australia, the Arctic, New Zealand, and parts of Africa and the Pacific. However, in those parts of Asia, Africa, and the Pacific where Indigenous peoples were not displaced by white settlers, the definition makes less sense (United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues [UNPFII], 2009).

In Africa, it is not common to use the term Indigenous. Native Africans who were in Africa before the arrival of European colonizers do not self-identity as Indigenous peoples (Kapoor & Shizha, 2010). It is common in Africa to narrowly define Indigenous peoples to mean specific peoples who are nondominant compared to other ethnic groups and who have close ties to the land, often depending on it for livelihood. When used in this sense, it refers to the San, Hadzaze, and Maasai who are mainly pastoralists and hunters as well as the Indigenous peoples of Somalia (Eversole, 2005). While African peoples rarely use the word Indigenous in reference to themselves, preferring ethnic group or tribe (Eversole, 2005): "All citizens of African origin who are African, not through being offspring of settlerism and colonialism, are accepted as Indigenous people" (Kapoor & Shizha, 2010, p. 3).

And what of those who may not have been the "first" but whose roots to the land now reach across thousands of years? Will their dispossession of ancients, or perhaps even the merging of two peoples many generations ago, prohibit a claim of indigeneity? An estimated 70% of Indigenous peoples are in Asia, and the majority of these peoples are not the original inhabitants of an area. In Asia, prior, rather than original, inhabitants are used to identity peoples as Indigenous. But why are definitions of who is Indigenous in research important? Where do they lead us and what do definitions on indigeneity contribute to researchers' efforts to build a body of literature on Indigenous research methodologies?

It can be argued that the (re)vitalization and future of Indigenous peoples is supported and potentially facilitated by Indigenous research methodologies and this is why these questions are important. Daes (2000, p. 2), for example, recounts the story told by Tezozomoc about the recovery of the Aztec people from their slavery by Spain. The Aztecs' ability to do so was because "their heritage and history survived in the memories and hearts of their elders." One lesson from this story is that if people continue to believe in and cherish their heritage, then even centuries of occupation and oppression will not destroy it. Another lesson is about the importance of methodologies that enabled the knowing of these elders to be gathered and used for the betterment of the people.

Chilisa (2012) provides a way out of the conundrum associated with defining who is Indigenous by conceptualizing indigeneity as a cultural group's ways of knowing and the value systems that inform their lives. When Chilisa's (2012) concept of indigeneity is applied to research, then we ask: What is the influence of ways of perceiving reality, ways of knowing, and the value systems that inform the research process? Using this perspective, Chilisa notes that Euro-Western paradigms of research are Indigenous to Euro-Western societies. However, there are major groups of people whose perspectives are not included in the Euro-Western paradigms.

The Indigenous perspectives of research that are included in this book are those that reflect the realities, knowledges, and values of Indigenous peoples who have been colonized in the Third World and those who were first to, or prior inhabitants of, their land and have not had their perspectives represented in Euro-Western paradigms of research. These are the voices that are being made visible through the recognition of Indigenous knowledge systems that serve to resist attacks on their cultures and look for pathways forward to increased human dignity.

Chilisa (2012, p. 13) identifies the following characteristics of Indigenous research:

1. it targets a local phenomenon instead of using extant theory from the West to identity and define a research issue;
2. it is context-sensitive and creates locally relevant constructs, methods, and theories derived from local experiences and Indigenous knowledge;
3. it can be integrative, that is, combining Western and Indigenous theories; and
4. in its most advanced form, its assumptions about what counts as reality, knowledge, and values in research are informed by an Indigenous research paradigm.

Postcolonial Indigenous Research Paradigm

If Indigenous peoples have different ways of knowing, then it follows that an Indigenous worldview needs to be brought to the research context. Chilisa (2012) and Wilson (2008) describe such a research paradigm that incorporates relational ontologies, relational epistemologies, and relational accountabilities. The emphasis on relational constructs emanates from Indigenous value systems that recognize the connections between people, past, present, and future, and all living and non-living things. As many of the contributors to this volume note, connectivity is important for the ethical basis it provides for making decisions about research. These values also impinge on the research process in the need to frame the research in ways that are respectful and reciprocal.

The respectful researcher "listens, pays attention, acknowledges, and creates space for the voices and knowledge systems of the Other" (Chilisa, 2012, p. 22). Such a researcher draws on the spirit of ubuntu to provide ethical guidance; ubuntu is an African principle based on the premise that "I am because we are." Desmond Tutu (1999, p. 33) explains the meaning of ubuntu:

A person with ubuntu is open and available to others, affirming of others, does not feel threatened when others are able and good, for he [or] she ... belongs in a greater whole and is diminished when others are humiliated or diminished, when others are tortured or oppressed, or treated as if they were less than they are.

Throughout this volume, the researchers describe ethical value systems based on respect, connectivity, reciprocity, and a desire to see research contribute to a better future. This ethical stance has implications for the relational nature of epistemology that is discussed in the next section.

Contesting “Knowledge”: The Question of Epistemology

Research and the contestation over what counts as knowledge are just as implicated in the marginalization of Indigenous peoples as are Christianity, disease, warfare, and constitutional maneuvering (Ormond, Cram, & Carter, 2006). Early documentation by newcomers described Indigenous peoples within the worldview of these "others", often with the result that Indigenous peoples came to be seen at best as "exotic" and "noble savages" and, at worst, as the "problem" and other than human (Janke, 1998). The acceptance of these new "truths" and the common sense they created about Indigenous peoples under the auspices of colonial rule helped push Indigenous peoples into "minoritized spaces" (Ermine, Sinclair, & Jeffery, 2004; Laguerre, 1999). Linda Smith (1992, p. 7) describes the majority of these pakeha (Maori word for white people) researchers as "willing bedfellows of assimilationist, victim-blaming policies."

Scheurich and Young (1997) have argued that "White racism or White supremacy became interlaced or interwoven into the founding fabric of modernist western civilization" (p. 7) through "racially biased ways of knowing" (p. 4). The resulting exclusion of other epistemologies has impacted severely on non-white peoples around the globe (Bishop & Glynn, 1999; Smith, 1999). Indigenous knowledge has been marginalized as an interesting add-on rather than something that has its own epistemological and ontological traditions (Kovach, 2009; Wilson, 2008). The new...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Preface
• Chapter 1 The Journey Begins
• Chapter 2 The Process that Led Me to Become an Indigenous Researcher
• Chapter 3 I Never Really Had Any Role Models
• Chapter 4 Indigenism, Public Intellectuals, and the Forever Opposed—Or, the Makings of a "Hon Academic"
• Chapter 5 Becoming a Kaupapa Maori Researcher
• Chapter 6 An African Narrative: The Journey of an Indigenous Social Researcher in South Africa
• Chapter 7 Drawn from the Traditions of Cameroon: Lessons from Twenty-One Years of Practice
• Chapter 8 Indigenous Research with a Cultural Context
• Chapter 9 Being and Becoming an Indigenous Social Researcher
• Chapter 10 Indigenous Researcher's Thoughts: An Experience from Research with Communities in Burkina Faso Using Participatory Methods
• Chapter 11 Becoming an Indigenous Researcher in Interior Alaska: Sharing the Transformative Journey
• Chapter 12 An Aboriginal Health Worker's Research Story
• Chapter 13 Nurturing the Gift of Understanding Different Realities
• Chapter 14 Inuujunga: The Intricacy of Indigenous and Western Epistemologies in the Arctic
• Chapter 15 The Context within: My Journey into Research
• Chapter 16 Prospects and Challenges of Becoming an Indigenous Researcher
• Chapter 17 Hinerauwhāriki: Tapestries of Life for Four Māori Women in Evaluation
• Chapter 18 Research in Relationship with Humans, the Spirit World, and the Natural World
• Chapter 19 Lens from the "Bottom of the Well"
• Chapter 20 Neyo way in ik issi: A Family Practice of Indigenist Research Informed by Land
• Chapter 21 A Native Papua New Guinea Researcher
• Chapter 22 From Refusal to Getting Involved in Romani Research
• Chapter 23 Interpreting the Journey: Where Words, Stories Formed
• Chapter 24 The Onward Journey
• Index
• About the Editors