Indigenous Ethics Research Articles

Indigenous African ethics and land distribution

This article focuses on land allocation through invoking African values. It seeks to provide a contrast to other rectifications of skewed colonial land distributions from African values, and it also offers an alternative to the land distributive justice that has tended to be premised on Western entitlement or rights-oriented thought. The article proposes conceptualising land distribution specifically based on indigenous African ethics of Unhu/ubuntu, a quintessential southern African ethic of being humane and living communally. The humaneness and communitarian life are centred on values such as relationality, cooperation, common good and equal distribution of communal goods. Through articulating each value, and indicating its usefulness in land distribution, the article hopes to provide an African account of distributive justice in respect of land redistribution.

Ethics curriculum in Indigenous Pacific: a Solomon Islands study

A central feature of Indigenous Solomon Islands socialization of family, clan and tribal members is character-shaping. What this looks like, however, has not been researched. This study provides a first look at what is taught as ethics education in Indigenous Solomon Islands. Using data from a wider qualitative study of an Indigenous tribe of Mala’ita Island in the Solomon Islands archipelago, the study is authored and gifted by a Mala’ita Indigenous ethics educator to other Indigenous Pacific and other global educators and researchers. The study findings include: a clearer understanding of Indigenous Mala’ita ethics education including its integrated curriculum, its emphasis on character-shaping and its particular age-gender variations and pedagogies. The study offers pragmatic, conceptual, pedagogical, contextual and research insights for institutional and societal ethics education in Solomon Islands and other Pacific Islands modern states and to others interested in understanding ethics in context.

Beyond the Belmont Principles: A Community-Based Approach to Developing an Indigenous Ethics Model and Curriculum for Training Health Researchers Working with American Indian and Alaska Native Communities.

Individuals responsible for carrying out research within their diverse communities experience a critical need for research ethics training materials that align with community values. To improve the capacity to meet local human subject protections, we created theresearch Ethics Training for Health in Indigenous Communities (rETHICS), a training curriculum aligned within American Indian and Alaska Native (AI/AN) context, culture, and community-level ethical values and principles. Beginning with the Belmont Report and the Common Rule that defines research with human subjects (46 CFR 45), the authors convened three different expert panels (N=37) to identify Indigenous research values and principles common across tribal communities. The resulting culturally grounded curriculum was then tested with 48 AI/AN individuals, 39 who also had recorded debriefing interviews. Using a thematic analysis, we coded the qualitative feedback from the expert panel discussions and the participant debriefings to assess content validity. Participants identified five foundational constructs needed to ensure cultural-grounding of the AI/AN-specific research training curriculum. These included ensuring that the module was: (a) framed within an AI/AN historical context; (b) reflected Indigenous moral values; (c) specifically linked AI/AN cultural considerations to ethical procedures; (d) contributed to a growing Indigenous ethics; and (e) provided Indigenous-based ethics tools for decision making. Using community-based consultation and feedback from participants led to a culturally grounded training curriculum that teaches research ethical principles and procedures for conducting research with AI/ANs. The curriculum is available for free and the community-based process used can be adapted for other cultural groups.

“Who’s going to look after the river?”: Water and the Ethics of Care in Thomas King’s The Back of the Turtle

This paper analyses the trope of water in Thomas King’s latest novel The Back of the Turtle from an ethics-of-care perspective that puts in conversation Indigenous ethics, feminist care ethics and environmental ethics. I suggest that King’s focus on water offers a harsh—even if often humorous—critique of the anthropocentric, neoliberal extractivist mentality while proposing a transcultural ethics of care. Consequently, my analysis of the novel draws on the dialogue taking place in the realm of the Environmental Humanities in Canada and beyond about the centrality of water (See Cecilia Chen, Janine MacLeod and Astrida Neimais’ Thinking with Water; Dorothy Christian and Rita Wong’s Downstream: Reimagining Water; Astrida Neimanis’ Bodies of Water: Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology; Stacy Alaimo’s Exposed: Environmental Politics and Pleasures in Posthuman Times), as well as on Indigenous epistemologies that eschew anthropocentrism in favour of attentive caring for the interconnected needs of humans and non-humans within interdependent ecologies, and feminist environmental care ethics that emphasize the importance of empowering communities to care for themselves and the ecologies that sustain them.

Ethics, Indigenous Ethics, and the Contemporary Challenge: Attempt at a Report on Ethics for the Filipino Today

Ethics, Indigenous Ethics, and the Contemporary Challenge: Attempt at a Report on Ethics for the Filipino Today

The interpreter as researcher: ethical heritage interpretation in Indigenous contexts

ABSTRACTThis paper integrates Indigenous research and heritage interpretation scholarship by addressing how interpretation should be underpinned by research congruent with Indigenous expectations for research ethics and methods. Program research and delivery is a profound exercise of power, for interpreters mold public opinion. In a settler-colonial or Indigenous context, critically analyzing sources for one’s interpretative programs and media is particularly imperative, as Western researchers have historically been on colonialism’s front lines. The interpretation of Indigenous themes is fraught with difficulties, but existing interpretation literature myopically focuses on program delivery and evaluation methods. More attention must be paid by interpreters to the problems of relying on Western, positivist research in Indigenous contexts. This paper considers Indigenous research methods and ethics, provides an overview of the connection between Western knowledge and colonialism, and demonstrates the problems this poses for interpreters working with Indigenous content. I offer concrete suggestions for staff to improve their engagement with Indigenous peoples. Ultimately, I argue, interpreters must become more critical of themselves and their sources to successfully address Indigeneity.

Folk Filmmaking: A Participatory Method for Engaging Indigenous Ethics and Improving Understanding

On an assignment to produce videos promoting Cross River gorilla conservation to indigenous communities in Nigeria and Cameroon, I invited community members to join me. I followed decolonising and feminist methodologies to develop a form of participatory video production, 'Folk Filmmaking', in which participants present their own accounts of wildlife, conservation, and environmental values by performing stories. Through the films, participants shared their knowledge as morality tales, providing contextual nuance to moral challenges, clarity on local concerns, and opportunities for better understanding of local conflicts with conservation. Most films use gorillas as a plot device but orient the moral issues not to the ape's plight but to communal struggles with challenges such as marginalisation, modernity, and corruption. The films do not say how best to conserve the last 300 Cross River gorillas but they help articulate indigenous values and show the challenges conservation must overcome. This paper shares an account of lessons learned during the project through continual, critical reflection on my process. It describes my methodology and the films produced then offers an analysis and evaluation of the project. It concludes with notes on the potential and pitfalls of participatory video in contexts of cross-cultural conflict over conservation.

Shaming the silences: Indigenous Graduate Attributes and the privileging of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander voices

ABSTRACT An increasing number of Australian universities are committing to Indigenous Graduate Attributes across a wide range of academic disciplines. This paper critiques not only the slow up-take of Indigenous Graduate Attributes in the last 10 years, but also how such attributes may realistically contribute to university students graduating with increased ‘awareness’, ‘knowledges’ and ‘abilities’ to work with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and communities. It is reasoned that any commitment to Indigenous Graduate Attributes must be carefully and critically monitored for the silencing effects of colonial narratives that also are prevalent throughout Australian Indigenous Studies (which is arguably the foundation of realising Indigenous Graduate Attributes). Drawing from a diversity of Indigenous standpoint theories, critical studies and research methodologies, the paper offers a critical evaluative framework through which both Indigenous Graduate Attributes and the content within the teaching and learning of Australian Indigenous Studies may be evaluated. This includes an acute awareness of imposed colonial narratives, a critical awareness of one’s own positioning, engagement with Indigenous voices, knowledge of Indigenous Research Methodologies, and more meaningful levels of Indigenous engagement through Indigenous ethics and protocols.

SPECULATIVE GROWTH OF CONSERVATION NARRATIVES

As culture appears in governmental policy when its disappearance starts, heritage becomes a concern when its local meaning vanishes. Moreover, globalization usually reveals the ignorance on the cultural legacy accelerated by its instrumentalised branding. Moreover, this vision of economic trade fails to resolve these issues of intangible heritage. Above all, since there is no future without past, like the sustainability of environment, and that cities and territories of the Silk Road territories are defined by a good cohesion of these entities, the current critical issues are the establishment of good balances between the global world and the local heritage. Thus, the transverse degeneration of these geographical roots, territorial strategies, social management, and economic exchanges of the various globalizations seems exceptionally fragile in the 21st century. To the point that these counterexamples are now refused by responsible citizen movements considering such models of urban expansions that capitalistic corruption reigns over as the figures of ontological aberrations. To illustrate these phenomena in the Asian region, the following study takes three cases directly investigated on site: Japan as the symbol and symptom of the introduction of exogenous philosophy and practice which have altered its nature / culture relations of the 19th century to the point to entirely return to its indigenous environmental ethics; now stabilized, exports and reproduces the same errors in the heart of countries undergoing the similar drifts as rural Australasia. The state Island of Singapore, rich of a multi-ethnic community evolving in a neoliberal socialism, combines the ontologies that move each society to develop its territory from culturally appropriate practices to the pressures of a standardized educational system. This paradoxically leads its experts towards a universality of cultural landscapes posing the problem of urban and landscape alienation to unique market aims. The rowdy reinvention of the traditions devoted to the western hegemonic submission has profoundly damaged the cultural identity of South Koreas urban, natural, and social environment. Example of exogenous diktats on fragile autochthonous practices by a corporate malpractice, South Korea raises the question of political governance and ecosophical resistances always ignored in globalization aims. From these three cases of territorial governance, we will consider what can be the sustainable growth and preservation policies within the vast Silk Road spaces.

Decolonising Ethics: Considerations of Power, Politics and Privilege in Aotearoa/New Zealand

Indigenous peoples across the world have a shared experience of colonisation; a process that has resulted in war, disease and the decimation of their lands, homes and peoples. In New Zealand, the effects of colonisation are still evident with Māori (the indigenous people of New Zealand) experiencing poorer outcomes compared with non-Māori citizens across a range of social, health and well-being indicators. This paper is a case study of work being done in New Zealand, which may have resonance with work in South Africa, and other countries with a history of colonisation. It begins with a brief history of the impacts of colonisation on Māori before considering the concept of decolonisation. The author outlines the work her organisation does as an independent, tribally owned, Māori health research centre to advance a decolonisation agenda. Reflecting on their emancipatory and democratising ambitions as researchers provides the opening for a discussion about indigenous ethics. The paper presents a number of Māori ethical principles that guide their work, arguing that were such principles applied in the development and implementation of social policy and legislation, the effect would be a fairer, more equitable policy that better meets the needs of Māori as citizens. Recent legislation enacted to improve New Zealand’s care and protection system for children is discussed to illustrate the need for greater consideration of Māori values when developing legislation that directly impacts Māori. The paper concludes with a challenge to policymakers, practitioners, academics, and researchers alike to actively contribute to an agenda of liberation, emancipation and decolonisation for indigenous peoples.

Emplacing Christ: An Indigenous Australian Ethics of Placemaking Across Borders

ABSTRACTTravelling from my old heimat, Germany, I joined in September 2015 a group of Anangu Pitjantjatjara Bible translators on a two-week long pilgrimage to the Holy Land. This journey offered further probing into Anangu attachments to place that, until then, I had only known through ethnographic research in their desert homelands in northern South Australia. In the present article, I explore how and why the Anangu Christians forged links with biblically inscribed places to which they had no ancestral ties. What they did bring is a deep-seated sense of emotional connection with Jesus abiding in heaven, and here the pilgrimage was a chance to anchor this relationship in his land – to emplace Christ. Notable in this process of shifting the presence of Jesus from heaven to earth was the pilgrims’ moral concern to keep separate the emplaced stories of their ancestral lands on one hand, and the grounded narratives of the Christian Scriptures on the other. In Jonathan Mair and Nicholas Evans’ terms, their approach was one of ‘incommensuration’, a strategy to avoid moral conflict by refusing to make comparisons between religious traditions. My article may thus be read as an ethnographic contribution towards the understanding of an Australian Indigenous ethics of placemaking across borders.

Men's Intimate Partner Violence against Sami Women: A Swedish Blind Spot

The aim of this article is to map the Swedish context regarding men’s intimate partner violence against Sami women and (1) discuss what knowledge and perspectives that dominates that context, and (2) reflect upon possible starting points for meeting the need for knowledge. The outline shows that men’s intimate partner violence against Sami women is a blind spot in Sweden. Important aspects, such as human rights and colonialism, are neglected in the policy discourse. At the most, the policy discourse includes abused Sami women in the problematic category “particular vulnerable groups”. The author argues for a need to problematize if and how responsibility is taken for addressing and responding to the violence and suggests a postcolonial and intersectional approach that centers around how the imbalance of power and control runs through abused women’s experiences. Finally, the author highlights how such an approach also is a matter of indigenous research ethics.

Indigenous Ethics and Bionomic Concepts in the New Latin American Constitutions and their Contribution to the Environmental Debate

In Latin America, the public sphere has historically conceded a narrow participation range to the indigenous people. Following democratization that changed the continent starting in the 1980s, some Andean countries began to adopt constitutional reforms that enabled the indigenous communities to participate in national decision making. They even went to the point of putting the traditional justice applied by minority groups and the national modern constitutions on the same level. This is particularly the case with Ecuador and Bolivia. In 2008, Ecuador became the first nation to codify and include in its constitution the Rights of Nature. The Ecuadorian ecosystem, thus, became a person of rights, possessing inalienable rights to exist and flourish. Citizens were as well given authority to petition on behalf of the ecosystem. In Bolivia, the New State Politic Constitution, approved in 2009, bestows upon the indigenous groups the right of applying their own justice. This process expresses the accommodation of two juristic zones: that from the Enlightenment positivistic tradition and the autochthonous one. This new legal architecture included regional popular ethical principles that widened the debate about the natural environment and the way the state deals with it. It is the case of concepts like Pachamama (a holistic notion of world) and sumak kawsay (equivalent to that of wellbeing, or even the Good Life). Their revival has diversified the internal juridical landscape by adding an Amerindian perspectivism. This paper will investigate the range of the application of indigenous Ethics and bionomic concepts in multicultural societies, specifically in the case of Latin American countries that have included such elements in their constitutions. It will discuss whether that sort of parallel axiological system could represent a valuable contribution to the global environmental debate.

Contested value and an ethics of resources: Water, mining and indigenous people in the Atacama Desert, Chile

The question of value is fundamental to contexts of resource scarcity given that contest over use and distribution of scarce resources centres on judgments about rights, interests and access. In mining processes, the use and extraction of water in great volumes commodifies and threatens supplies of what others understand to be a substance essential to all forms of life. In the Atacama, while industrial extraction and commodification by the mining industry are the basis for indigenous people's contestations over water resources, an analysis of everyday water practice and performance (as ‘ordinary ethics’) demonstrates that an indigenous ethics of resources includes commodity values under certain conditions. This paper examines a field of competing actors engaging in extraction and use of scarce waters in order to make an argument for the importance of considering the complexities and dynamics of ethical practice and water value.

'If Those Old Women Catch You, You're Going to Cop It': Night Patrols, Indigenous Women, and Place Based Sovereignty in Outback Australia

Night Patrols (‘patrols’) are a uniquely Indigenous Australian form of community self-policing. Patrols do not fit neatly into established paradigms of ‘policing’ emanating from the Global North. They are not part of the apparatus of the state police, nor do they offer commodified private security services and, unlike mainstream police, they cannot legitimately call on a reservoir of coercive powers to ensure compliance. In this article we sketch out what we describe as the ‘contested space’ of Indigenous self-policing, as represented by patrols, through a post-colonial lens, paying particular attention to the role of Indigenous women’s agency in creating, nurturing and sustaining night patrol work within an Indigenous ethics of care and notions of well-being. Drawing on international critical post-colonial scholarship we tease out the links between patrol work and broader expressions of sovereign power embedded in Indigenous law. Our key contention is that there are learnings from the Australian experience for other post-colonies, where there are kindred debates regarding the balance between Indigenous and colonial systems of justice and policing. We highlight the experience of patrols in the Northern Territory (NT) where the policing of Indigenous space and place have become a key priority for the Australian Government after a major focus on issues of child abuse and family violence.

English

English

Fānanaua

A key reason for many leadership development programmes in Pacific Islands countries is to teach ethics to Pacific Islands leaders. However, as interventions, these programmes are exclusively reliant on Western ideas about ethics and ethics education. To counter such impositions, this paper discusses the nature of indigenous clan ethics and how ethics education is undertaken in an indigenous Solomon Islands clan. Based on an insider-research project of the Gula'alā people of the Solomon Islands, the paper reports on the differences of indigenous ethics education to how ethics is taught, as reported in the global literature and seen in leadership development programmes in Pacific Islands countries.

The vulnerable object of Indigenous research ethics

The vulnerable object of Indigenous research ethics

Indigenous Students’ Wellbeing and The Mobilisation of Ethics of Care in the Contact Zone

Schools have historically been a location of oppression for Indigenous students in Australian schools. This paper explores the processes of democratising (Giroux, 1992, p. 24) the school space by Aboriginal Community Education Officers (henceforward ACEOs) through an Indigenous ethics of care framework. The enactment of Indigenous ethics of care between ACEOs and Indigenous students will be explored, with a particular focus on the use of the Nunga room (Blanch, 2009, p. 66) as a ‘safe-house’ (Pratt, 1991). The paucity of Indigenous ethics of care theory and the role of ACEOs’ work in the Nunga room in education literature is problematic, as many nonIndigenous teachers continue to racialise Indigenous students through negative stereotypes. This is critical information for teachers and preservice teachers as it expands conceptualisations of social justice and its link to pedagogy. Home, Home, my place for safe, Comfort zone, alone In times of worry, times of need, Greed brings me here To see my family, friends and countrymen, When I need Reminding of how it was, Is, can be, drawings on the wall All done by us fellas, joy flows through me, Welcoming is True, pictures tell the stories, Posters highlights the faces and Places, yeah (it’s like a home), as safe, As safe can be (Faye Rosas Blanch, 2006)

Ecology, Ontology, and Pedagogy at Camp Coorong

Ecology, Ontology, and Pedagogy at Camp Coorong