Indigenous Research Methodologies: Challenges and Opportunities for Broader Recognition and Acceptance

Abstract

The Western scientific worldview is assumed to be universally applicable, including to research involving peoples with different worldviews. Even in the social sciences, which should be more aware of and open to diverse ontologies, epistemologies, and axiologies, Western science is privileged and reproduced and other ways of knowing are dismissed, denigrated, or otherwise treated as inferior. In particular, the use of culturally inappropriate data collection, analysis, and reporting processes has contributed to an increasingly contentious relationship with Indigenous peoples. Indigenous student and faculty researchers understandably experience both internal and external conflict when trying to perform Indigenous research in a way that respects Indigenous cultural expectations while also satisfying the requirements of Western gatekeepers. Indigenous research methodologies reflect the Indigenous worldview and provide an important alternative to the dominant positivist/ postpositivist paradigm of Western science to produce research that is by, with, and for Indigenous peoples. Indigenous methodologies approach community and cultural protocols, values, and needs as an integral part of research, and they emphasize common principles of respect, reciprocity, relevance, and responsibility. We believe broader recognition and acceptance of Indigenous methodologies would benefit all stakeholders, and, in furtherance of that goal, we identify structural, ideological, process-related, and results-related challenges and opportunities that should be considered as Indigenous methodologies are developed and employed.