WALKING OUR TALK
Sitting in the misty and glooming light of dusk in the Ilyan province of Taiwan in November 2016, Lindsey MacDonald looked on as the Taiwanese Indigenous group started discussing his request to consider the statement cards in front of them. Turning to him, they pointed at the cards, gathered their seats around the tables in the courtyard and proceeded to completely change his university ethics approved research method. The elder of the group took control and informed Lindsey that they wanted to complete the research task as a group, not as individuals. Perhaps as a way of mollifying the ‘outsider’, they then offered him a very strong home-distilled alcohol and got on with answering the research question. In a matter of five minutes, they had taken over the research method – on their terms. The Indigenous participants gathered had protected their sense of the proper way to do things, their autonomy and self-determination.
At the end of 2009, Juan Tauri submitted his research ethics application for his doctoral research to the university research ethics committee as required. The committee rejected this initial application, on the grounds that he displayed potentially ‘unsafe’ research practice because for the Canadian component of his research he signalled that he would be using group-based informed consent protocols where consent could be given verbally. This approach violated the informed consent protocol of the committee, which gave preference to individual consent, evidenced through participants putting their names to a piece of paper. The protocols Juan included in his ethics application were constructed after extensive engagement with Indigenous participants, especially elders, as well as Indigenous academics and researchers. Had Juan followed the university research ethics board’s preferred protocol, it is likely he would have violated the preferred protocols of the Indigenous participants. After further engagement with elders, Juan re-submitted his application, which included an extensive critique of the committee’s initial decision, and a compromise, namely that he would offer participants a choice – their own protocols, or the university’s – and that he would proceed engagement based upon that decision. While the compromise did not satisfy the committee, it signed off on his application, and Juan proceeded to complete the project. All of the participants involved in this research project rejected the committee’s ‘ethics’ protocol and chose their own.
In 2015, near the beginning of what was to become a five-year series of projects on Māori youth development as a strategy for suicide prevention led by Lily George, at a whakawātea (feedback) meeting, the youth involved proceeded to let the research team know that their plan for the project was ‘boring’. Although part of the project design had included ‘consultation’ with youth, their voices could not be clearly heard in the final design. From that point on, youth voices were an integral part of the research processes for three projects, from design to dissemination. Given a space of safety from which to speak and in which they knew they would be heard, the youth were enabled to heal, connect more strongly to culture and people and develop their leadership abilities – themes they identified at the end of the first project as important to their growth.
The purpose of the anecdotes related above is to demonstrate the range of issues facing Indigenous scholars and researchers, as they prepare to enter into research with Indigenous participants. Lindsey’s, Juan’s and Lily’s experiences mirror a number of the core issues raised by authors in this collection, including that we as Indigenous researchers are beholden to the values, ‘rules’ and protocols that Indigenous communities have developed to govern the way their knowledge and experiences are gathered, by outsiders as well as community members themselves. For example, Lindsey’s experience highlights both the localised and global nature of Indigenous research, and especially ethics protocols, which in turn highlights the need to engage with Indigenous research participants during the design phases of research – what Lowe, George and Deger call ‘pre-ethics’ in their chapter. Juan’s experience demonstrates the resilience of Indigenous knowledge protocols, with the Indigenous participants rejecting the research ethics board’s individualised consent process and demanding that their own processes form the basis of the research relationship. Lily’s anecdote displays a factor common to many Indigenous groups – the importance of honouring our youth as rangatira mo apopo/leaders of the future – and the roles of adults and elders as guides for those journeys into leadership in the present. What all three anecdotes clearly demonstrate is the willingness of Indigenous communities to assert tino rangatiratanga, their right to sovereignty and self-determination in the research sphere by rejecting colonialist research practices and asserting their own, ethical protocols.
INDIGENOUS RESEARCH SOVEREIGNTY
As you shall see in this volume, making space for Indigenous sovereignty within research is now a global phenomenon. Such a global surge in Indigenous research – and research ethics – speaks to all the exciting and innovative possibilities that flow from research in which Indigenous peoples reclaim their past, present and future. As the volume also demonstrates, the diversity of ways of making space for that sovereignty is staggering. From the adoption of Kaupapa Māori Research principles in New Zealand (Hudson, Milne, Reynolds, Russell, & Smith, 2010; Smith, 1999), to the San people’s recently issued Code of Research Ethics (San Institute, 2017), and Inuit in Nunavut (Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami, 2018), the variety of Indigenous research ethics mirrors the diversity of Indigenous peoples across the globe. Such a multiplicity is necessary because the ethics of Indigenous research are local, particular and do not aspire to become ‘the’ way of doing things. Instead, as all the contributors emphasise, meeting Indigenous research participants ‘where they are’ is one of the fundamental principles of Indigenous research ethics. For example, in Puke and Lowe’s contribution, a conversation with an elder about Indigenous ways of knowing and research ethics takes place in an Indigenous community garden.
Nevertheless, while the research stories with Indigenous peoples are enormously diverse, they are also linked by, for example, a pursuit of self-determination, and their description of Indigenous communities who consider themselves sovereign and so seek to throw off the colonial fetters. Given the extreme variety of research issues and topics under investigation today, and the multi-million-dollar industry surrounding research, it becomes extremely important to ensure that research with Indigenous peoples is ethically as well as methodologically relevant, according to the needs and desires of Indigenous peoples themselves. As noted by Te Puni Kōkiri (1994),
Ethics is about values, and ethical behaviour reflects values held by people at large. For Māori, ethics is about ‘tikanga’ [cultural concepts and rituals] – for tikanga reflects our values, our beliefs and the way we view the world. (Cited in Hudson et al., 2010)
In her seminal work, Decolonizing methodologies (1999), Linda Tuhiwai Smith wrote that:
One of the challenges for Māori researchers has been to retrieve some space – first, to convince Māori people of the value of research for Māori; second, to convince the various, fragmented but powerful research communities of the need for greater Māori involvement in research; and third, to develop approaches and ways of carrying out research which take into account, without being limited by, the legacies of previous research, and the parameters of both previous and current approaches. What is now referred to as Kaupapa Māori approaches to research … is an attempt to retrieve that space and to achieve those general aims. (p. 183)
Smith (1999) could have been writing about many other Indigenous peoples and challenges related to claiming research space. Brant Castellano (2004) wrote that in a meeting involving Aboriginal people, some protested, ‘We’ve been researched to death!’ However, ‘an Elder … spoke quietly from a corner of the room. ‘If we have been researched to death’, he said, ‘maybe it’s time we started researching ourselves back to life’ (p. 98). There have been many advances in developing Indigenous research, and Indigenous ‘methodologies vary according to the ways in which different Indigenous communities express their own unique knowledge systems’ (Louis, 2007, p. 130). Nevertheless, challenges remain.
Colonialism has created a formidable and ever-present set of structures and practices in societies that the contributors make clear are still far from overcome. So, we are perhaps not ready to declare the arena of Indigenous research ethics as ‘post-colonial’; the assertion and demonstration of Indigenous sovereignties in research methods and ethics does not mean the colonial yoke of research has been fully shaken off by Indigenous communities (Tolich & Smith, 2014). Instead, the demonstration of sovereignty is that there are courageous Indigenous communities who know the value of their own knowledges and whose work demonstrates that research with Indigenous peoples can be a place of Indigenous sovereignty. Together with Indigenous researchers and non-Indigenous allies, Indigenous communities have reaffirmed ways of working that enable Indigenous agency in research to flourish. This is an incredibly vulnerable action since it opens the community up to change – and to criticism from external forces. Given the damage done by earlier research, such vulnerability is an incredibly brave act, therefore this volume can be seen by readers as both an honouring of the courage of these Indigenous communities and a call to courage for other researchers and communities.
VOLUME SECTIONS
Part One – Challenges of Mainstream Institutions
This volume is separated into three parts, which are nevertheless interconnected. Part One presents Indigenous research as strong and self-determined – with the ethics of our research, as with our methodologies and methods that we use as Indigenous people, arising from our unique cultural concepts. Yet there have been many challenges along the way, including the challenge of working within mainstream institutions that do not always see our methods and methodologies as legitimate ‘science’.
Louis (2007) notes that ‘research on Indigenous issues should be carried out in a manner which is respectful and ethically sound from an Indigenous perspective … [which] naturally challenges Western research paradigms’ (p. 130). Indeed, as Ball and Janyst (2008) state, ‘Enacting ethical principles and practices in research involving Indigenous peoples is among the most contested issues in the current research environment in Canada’ (p. 33). Indigenous scholars such as Tauri (2014) question research ethics boards and the ‘general lack of experience of [board] members in researching with Indigenous peoples’, resulting in the privileging of a ‘Eurocentric conceptualization of the autonomous research subject … [and] an over-reliance on formulaic main-streamed (white-streamed) assessment processes that sideline the importance of the social context’ (p. 135).
A pervasive theme that binds our contributors is that Indigenous research ethics are necessary because the practices they produce are perhaps the safest and, therefore, most productive way to gather Indigenous knowledge. They create safety by ensuring researchers work with and for Indigenous peoples themselves. Moreover, by offering those communities agency and control over their voices and knowledge, we can allow a space in which the community can see itself represented with dignity, in the scholarly journals and books of our time. Without that safety for Indigenous communities, it is unlikely those communities will pass on their knowledge. And that knowledge is crucial because it increases the range of individual, community and global possibilities. Indigenous knowledges are vital because they expand the range of what is humanly possible; Indigenous research ethics thus makes possible the transmission of ideas from communities that were silenced by colonialism and yet have fundamental and valuable contributions to make to our understanding of all arenas of human existence.
Part Two – Indigenous Research
In Part Two, we examine notions of working ‘with, for, and by’ our people (s...
