Indigenous Research Methodologies: X-Marks in the Age of Community Accountability and Protection

Abstract

In an ongoing exchange about the potency and promise of Indigenous Research Methodologies (IRMs) for academic knowledge production, I respond in this article to Windchief and Cummins. I do so by considering a challenging example of Indigenous knowledge production, clarifying additional misunderstandings between us, and complicating persistent oppositions and essentialisms that are neither intellectually defensible nor characteristic of contemporary Indigenous life and experience. Instead, I propose that IRMs are productively conceived as x-marks (or historical American Indian treaty signatures), which encapsulate the paradoxes, contradictions, and predicaments of modern American Indian life in ways that resist clean oppositions and confound rigid binaries. In this respect, the x-mark signifies that which lies between two readily identifiable options, something new and potentially promising despite the indeterminacy and ambivalence it elicits, if only we will face and embrace such ambiguity.