Decolonizing Methodologies

“belief in the ideal that benefiting mankind is indeed a primary outcome of scientific research is as much a reflection of ideology as it is of academic training” ⤴️
“ell an alternative story: the history of Western research through the eyes of the colonized.” ⤴️
“These counter- stories are powerful forms of resistance which are repeated and shared across diverse indigenous communities.” ⤴️
“most indigenous peoples and their communities do not differentiate scientific or ‘proper’ research from the forms of amateur collecting, journalistic approaches, film making or other ways of ‘taking’ indigenous knowledge that have occurred so casually over the centuries.” ⤴️
“From some indigenous perspectives the gathering of information by scientists was as random, ad hoc and damaging as that undertaken by amateurs.” ⤴️
“inquisitive and acquisitive strangers.” ⤴️
“where stories about research and particularly about researchers (the human carriers of research) were intertwined with stories about all other forms of colonization and injustice.” ⤴️
“cautionary tales where the surface story was not as important as the underlying examples of cultural protocols broken, values negated, small tests failed and key people ignored.” ⤴️
“At a common sense level research was talked about both in terms of its absolute worthlessness to us, the indigenous world, and its absolute usefulness to those who wielded it as an instrument.” ⤴️
“It told us things already known, suggested things that would not work, and made careers for people who already had jobs.” ⤴️
“In a decolonizing framework, deconstruction is part of a much larger intent. Taking apart the story, revealing underlying texts, and giving voice to things that are often known intuitively does not help people to improve their current conditions.” ⤴️
“many indigenous communities continue to live within political and social conditions that perpetuate extreme levels of poverty, chronic ill health and poor educational opportunities.4 Their children may be removed forcibly from their care, ‘adopted’ or institutionalized. The adults may be as addicted to alcohol as their children are to glue, they may live in destructive relationships which are formed and shaped by their impoverished material conditions and structured by politically oppressive regimes. While they live like this they are constantly fed messages about their worthlessness, laziness, dependence and lack of ‘higher’ order human qualities. This applies as much to indigenous communities in First World nations as it does to indigenous communities in developing countries. Within these sorts of social realities, questions of imperialism and the effects of colonization may seem to be merely academic; sheer physical survival is far more pressing” ⤴️
“To resist is to retrench in the margins, retrieve ‘what we were and remake ourselves’. The past, our stories local and global, the present, our communities, cultures, languages and social practices – all may be spaces of marginalization, but they have also become spaces of resistance and hope.” ⤴️
“indigenous academics and researchers have begun to address social issues within the wider framework of self-determination, decolonization and social justice.” ⤴️
“Many indigenous communities and organizations have developed policies about research, are discussing issues related to control over research activities and the knowledge that research produces, and have developed ethical guidelines and discussion documents.” ⤴️
“demand an understanding of the ways in which we can ask and seek answers to our own concerns” ⤴️
“ethical, cultural, political and personal issues that can present special difficulties for indigenous researchers who, in their own communities, work partially as insiders, and are often employed for this purpose, and partially as outsiders, because of their Western education or because they may work across clan, tribe, linguistic, age and gender boundaries.” ⤴️
“Patricia Hill Collins refers to ‘the outsider within’ positioning of research.” ⤴️
“It has not been written, therefore, as a technical book about research for people who talk the language of research, but as a book which situates research in a much larger historical, political and cultural context and then examines its critical nature within those dynamics.” ⤴️
“The term ‘indigenous’ is problematic in that it appears to collectivize many distinct populations whose experiences under imperialism have been vastly different.” ⤴️
“For many of the world’s indigenous communities there are prior terms by which they have named themselves. There are also terms by which indigenous communities have come to be known, initially perhaps as a term of insult applied by colonizers, but then politicized as a powerful signifier of oppositional identity,” ⤴️
“Some of these terms are about the classification systems used within the local colonial context, and others are about a prior relationship with groups whose territories now span different states.” ⤴️
“It is a term that inter- nationalizes the experiences, the issues and the struggles of some of the world’s colonized peoples.7 The final ‘s’ in ‘peoples’ has been argued for quite vigorously by indigenous activists because of the right of peoples to self-determination.” ⤴️
“The term has enabled the collective voices of colonized people to be expressed strategically in the international arena. It has also been an umbrella enabling communities and peoples to come together, transcending their own colonized contexts and experiences, in order to learn, share, plan, organize and struggle collectively for self-determination on the global and local stages.” ⤴️
“the world’s indigenous populations belong to a network of peoples” ⤴️
“They share experiences as peoples who have been subjected to the colonization of their lands and cultures, and the denial of their sovereignty, by a colonizing society that has come to dominate and determine the shape and quality of their lives, even after it has formally pulled out. As Wilmer has put it, ‘indigenous peoples represent the unfinished business of decolonization’. 9” ⤴️
“‘researching back’, in the same tradition of ‘writing back’ or ‘talking back’, that characterizes much of the post-colonial or anti-colonial literature.” ⤴️
“Research is one of the ways in which the underlying code of imperialism and colonialism is both regulated and realized. It is regulated through the formal rules of individual scholarly disciplines and scientific paradigms, and the institutions that support them (including the state). It is realized in the myriad of representations and ideological constructions of the Other in scholarly and ‘popular’ works, and in the principles which help to select and recontextualize those constructions in such things as the media, official histories and school curricula.” ⤴️
“research has been an encounter between the West and the Other.” ⤴️
“The transplanting of research institutions, including universities, from the imperial centres of Europe enabled local scientific interests to be organized and embedded in the colonial system. Many of the earliest local researchers were not formally ‘trained’ and were hobbyist researchers and adventurers” ⤴️
“the use of zoological terms to describe primitive people was one form of dehumanization.12 These images have become almost permanent, so deeply embedded are they in the way indigenous women are discussed.” ⤴️
“First Nation Canadian woman, Lee Maracle. ‘A female horse, a female Native, but everyone else gets to be called a man or a woman.’” ⤴️
“appealed to the downtrodden, the poor and those whose lives held no possibilities in their own imperial societies, and who chose to migrate as settlers. Others, also powerless, were shipped off to the colony as the ultimate prison. In the end they were all inheritors of imperialism who had learned well the discourses of race and gender, the rules of power, the politics of colonialism. They became the colonizers.” ⤴️
“racist practices and attitudes, ethnocentric assumptions and exploitative research, sounding warning bells that research can no longer be conducted with indigenous communities as if their views did not count or their lives did not matter.” ⤴️
“critical questions that communities and indigenous activists often ask, in a variety of ways: Whose research is it? Who owns it? Whose interests does it serve? Who will benefit from it? Who has designed its questions and framed its scope? Who will carry it out? Who will write it up? How will its results be disseminated” ⤴️
“These questions are simply part of a larger set of judgements on criteria that a researcher cannot prepare for, such as: Is her spirit clear? Does he have a good heart? What other baggage are they carrying? Are they useful to us? Can they fix up our generator? Can they actually do anything?” ⤴️
“The issues for indigenous researchers seeking to work within indigenous contexts are framed somewhat differently. If they are ‘insiders’ they are frequently judged on insider criteria; their family background, status, politics, age, gender, religion, as well as on their perceived technical ability. What is frustrating for some indigenous researchers is that, even when their own communities have access to an indigenous researcher, they will still select or prefer a non-indigenous researcher over an indigenous researcher.” ⤴️
“hat indigenous researchers may divulge confidences within their own community, or that the researcher may have some hidden agenda.” ⤴️
“ndigenous researchers work within a set of ‘insider’ dynamics and it takes considerable sensitivity, skill, maturity, experience and knowledge to work these issues through.” ⤴️
“My grandmother was not too thrilled with the idea of my being in a museum at all. Many other Maori people, I was aware, were scared of what lay in the cupboards, of whose bones and whose ancestors were imprisoned in those cases.” ⤴️
“I grew up in a world in which science and our own indigenous beliefs and practices coexisted” ⤴️
“I found that the particular issues I faced as an indigenous researcher working with indigenous research participants were never addressed by the literature, my own training or the researchers with whom I worked.” ⤴️
“In positioning myself as an indigenous woman, I am claiming a genealogical, cultural and political set of experiences.” ⤴️
“My whakapapa or descent lines come through both my parents.” ⤴️
“I believe that our survival as peoples has come from our knowledge of our contexts, our environment, not from some active beneficence of our Earth Mother. We had to know to survive. We had to work out ways of knowing, we had to predict, to learn and reflect, we had to preserve and protect, we had to defend and attack, we had to be mobile, we had to have social systems which enabled us to do these things. We still have to do these things.” ⤴️
“Politically, my dissent lines come down through my tribal lines but also through my experiences as a result of schooling and an urban background.” ⤴️
“Despite the very powerful issues which locate many First World indigenous peoples in Third World social conditions we still, comparatively speaking, occupy a place of privilege within the world of indigenous peoples. That does not mean that indigenous peoples from the First World have better ideas or know anything more. It may mean that such things as access to food and water can be taken for granted or that the politics of food and water can be played out in vastly different ways within the First World than is possible within developing states.” ⤴️
“One of the many criticisms that gets levelled at indigenous intellectuals or activists is that our Western education precludes us from writing or speaking from a ‘real’ and authentic indigenous position.” ⤴️
“it may be dismissed as some modernist invention of the primitive.” ⤴️
“Many indigenous intellectuals actively resist participating in any discussion within the discourses of post-coloniality. This is because post-colonialism is viewed as the convenient invention of Western intellectuals which reinscribes their power to define the world.” ⤴️
“Language and the citing of texts are often the clearest markers of the theoretical traditions of a writer. In this book I draw on selected ideas, scholarship and literature. These may or may not be attributed to either Western or indigenous traditions.” ⤴️
“The selection of ideas has been informed by a preference for, and a grounding in, particular forms of analysis which are probably already evident.” ⤴️
“I read some texts for my formal course of study and another set of alternative readings to keep sane, to keep connected to the rest of my life and, more importantly, to make sense of things that were happening around me. Much of that alternative reading course is now collected in anthologies labelled as cultural studies.” ⤴️
“In addition to this literature, however, are the stories, values, practices and ways of knowing which continue to inform indigenous pedagogies. In international meetings and networks of indigenous peoples, oracy, debate, formal speech making, structured silences and other conventions which shape oral traditions remain a most important way of developing trust, sharing information, strategies, advice, contacts and ideas.” ⤴️
“In Maori language there is the expression Kanohi kitea or the ‘seen face’, which conveys the sense that being seen by the people – showing your face, turning up at important cultural events – cements your membership within a community in an ongoing way and is part of how one’s credibility is continually developed and maintained.” ⤴️
“In Australia Aborigine researchers speak also of the many levels of entry which must be negotiated when researchers seek information. Other indigenous researchers speak of the long-term relationships which are established and extend beyond a research relationship to one involving families, communities, organizations and networks.” ⤴️
“Some methodologies regard the values and beliefs, practices and customs of communities as ‘barriers’ to research or as exotic customs with which researchers need to be familiar in order to carry out their work without causing offence. Indigenous methodologies tend to approach cultural protocols, values and behaviours as an integral part of methodology.” ⤴️
“This does not preclude writing for academic publications but is simply part of an ethical and respectful approach” ⤴️
“Two important ways not always addressed by scientific research are to do with ‘reporting back’ to the people and ‘sharing knowledge’. Both ways assume a principle of reciprocity and feedback.” ⤴️
“Reporting back to the people is never ever a one-off exercise or a task that can be signed off on completion of the written report.” ⤴️
“Sharing knowledge is also a long-term commitment.” ⤴️
“The old colonial adage that knowledge is power is taken seriously in indigenous communities and many processes have been discussed and enacted in order to facilitate effective ways of sharing knowledge.” ⤴️
“an Aborigine woman telling me that ‘we are always waiting for them [white Australia] to catch up. They still don’t know.’” ⤴️
“the responsibility of researchers and academics is not simply to share surface information (pamphlet knowledge) but to share the theories and analyses which inform the way knowledge and information are constructed and represented.” ⤴️
“referred to as project workers, community activists or consultants, anything but ‘researchers’. They search and record, they select and interpret, they organize and re-present, they make claims on the basis of what they assemble. This is research. The processes they use can also be called methodologies. The specific tools they use to gain information can also be called methods. Everything they are trying to do is informed by a theory, regardless of whether they can talk about that theory explicitly.” ⤴️
“ways of working with indigenous peoples on a variety of projects in an ongoing and mutually beneficial way.” ⤴️
“a concern to develop indigenous peoples as researchers. There is so little material that addresses the issues indigenous researchers face. The book is written primarily to help ourselves.” ⤴️
“Methodology in its simplest definition generally refers to the theory of method, or the approach or technique being taken, or the reasoning for selecting a set of methods.” ⤴️
“concerned not so much with the actual technique of selecting a method but much more with the context in which research problems are conceptualized and designed, and with the implications of research for its participants and their communities.” ⤴️
“not considered agents themselves, as capable of or interested in research, or as having expert knowledge about themselves and their conditions.” ⤴️
“I understood research as a set of ideas, practices and privileges that were embedded in imperial expansionism and colonization and institutionalized in academic disciplines, schools, curricula, universities and power. A” ⤴️
“the unethical, individualistic practice of research” ⤴️
“refer to his people as ‘the most researched in the world’ – which I interpret as the perception of research as something that is done to people by outsiders and from which there is no apparent positive outcome.” ⤴️
“many of our communities have become active in research and more indigenous researchers and institutions bridge the intersection between research and community” ⤴️
“many approaches to research remain insulated against the challenges of either indigenous research or stronger ethical protocols, and continue to see indigenous peoples, their values and practices as political hindrances that get in the way of good research.” ⤴️