Destabilizing the Settler Academy: The Decolonial Effects of Indigenous Methodologies

Abstract

he academy forms within settler societies as an apparatus of colo- nization. Indigenous researchers critically engage its colonial power by practicing Indigenous methodologies: an act that also implicates non-Indigenous people in challenging settler academy. Indigenous meth- odologies do not merely model Indigenous research. By exposing normative knowledge production as being not only non-Indigenous but colonial, they denaturalize power within settler societies and ground knowledge production in decolonization. An activist impetus thus informs Indigenous methodologies, yet typically fails invoke their full implications. Whereas activ- ism in a settler society may invest social justice in state rule, decolonization anticipates that rule's end. Decolonization is activist, but activism need not be decolonizing. Indigenous methodologies arise within larger pursuit of Indigenous decolonization, a project that Indigenous critics theorize variously as ontological, psychic, governmental, and relational. 1 Indigenous methodolo- gies present what Dylan Rodriguez (referencing Joao Costas Vargas) calls an urgency imperative, which answers the academy's long historical complicities in racial/colonial genocide by endeavoring to denaturalize and ultimately dismantle conditions in which these systems of massive violence are repro- duced. Such theories seek fundamentally transform institutional and epistemic conditions of life and thought for Indigenous and non-Indigenous people on lands where all live relationally, in ways that settler societies and their governance cannot contain. Indigenous scholars of Indigenous methodologies address one another from within epistemic frame of settler academy by invoking distinct bodies of Indigenous knowledge. For example, in Decolonizing Methodologies, Linda Tuhiwai Smith contrasts imperial research about Indigenous people and their lands—an enterprise that Indigenous peoples have challenged across time and space—with Kaupapa Maori in Aotearoa New Zealand as a body of knowledge