Indigenous Scholars Research Articles

“I needed to have this relief”: engaging with critical and indigenous methodologies as developing scholars

Developing critical and Indigenous scholars is an important imperative as universities and colleges consider how to address ongoing marginalization within higher education. To do this, we need more curriculum dedicated to supporting scholars undertaking this endeavor. In this introduction, I provide an overview of such a curricular move and highlight articles created by developing scholars who made meaning of their development through a range of research experiences.

Land and storytelling: Indigenous pathways towards healing, spiritual regeneration, and resurgence

This article aims to contribute to discourses of healing, Indigenous resurgence and spiritual regeneration within the context of the Indian Residential School Truth and Reconciliation Commission that took place in Canada between 2008 and 2015. First, it considers to what extent the TRC’s restorative justice process can relate to Indigenous ways of conceptualising healing. Secondly, it reflects on the Commission’s exclusive focus on the Indian Residential School system and its legacies, which, according to many Indigenous scholars, overlooks a much broader and more complex history of colonisation, political domination, and land dispossession still ongoing. I underline that, from an Indigenous perspective, land plays a fundamental role to achieve healing, spiritual regeneration, and resurgence. In the last section, I move the discussion to the literary dimension as I explore Richard Wagamese’s 2012 novel Indian Horse. In particular, I argue that fiction, especially that fiction produced during the years of the Commission’s work, can be a crucial site for challenging the TRC’s restorative process and for bringing out the significance of storytelling and of an Indigenous deep sense of connection to the land as a source of learning, spiritual reclaiming, and healing.

Mujeres tejedoras del conocimiento: Mam Maya women curating past and present to weave the future in Guatemala

In this paper, I explore the political potentialities the ­women’s collective in the Mam Maya town of Toj Coman Guatemala open when they bring the historical moment of the Spanish invasion into their present work. I ask, which moments in space and time do women in Toj Coman collectively curate to envision a different future for their community? Drawing on collective members’ conversations about textile arts, their construction of a public water tank, and the Spanish invasion, I argue that how these histories are collected and shared unsettles dominant narratives and creates different openings, potentialities, and futures. I draw on insights from 4 months of arts-based collaborative research with the collective between 2018 and 2019 and theorizations of desire, colonial patriarchy, cuerpo-territorio, and refusal by Indigenous and decolonial scholars. I use the word ‘curation’ to signal the creative and selective ways that women draw on their experience and expertise to carefully both show and deny specific representations, knowledges, and memories across contexts.

Framing, Suppression, and Colonial Policing Redux in Canada: News Representations of the 2019 Wet’suwet’en Blockade

In early 2019, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) intervened at the Gidimt’en Access Checkpoint in northern British Columbia (BC) and arrested 14 land defenders, garnering global media attention. To explore the ways that settler common sense ( Rifkin 2013 ) is assembled and perpetuated in Canada, this paper examines how Wet’suwet’en mobilization is framed in news media coverage. Situating our work in relation to settler colonial studies and informed by the writings of Indigenous scholars, we use critical discourse analysis to assess mainstream news media framings of the Wet’suwet’en struggle. Drawing from literature on social movement suppression, we discern three main themes in these texts that work to validate the RCMP’s excessive use of force against land defenders and delegitimize the Wet’suwet’en’s claim to sovereignty. While this framing set the stage for sustained corporate incursions, police surveillance, and occupation across unceded Wet’suwet’en territory, we suggest negative framing as well as activist use of social media to visualize state repression may have created the conditions for what Hess and Martin (2006) call backfire.

Fighting against the Colonial Snake in the Academic World of America

Abstract: Dakota writer Elizabeth Cook-Lynn's memoir In Defense of Loose Translations: An Indian Life in an Academic World is an excellent source for those who are fairly new to Native/Indigenous studies and are enthusiastic to understand the basic concerns of Indigenous scholarship. American historiography demonstrates "a process of collective memory erasure" that denies the presence of the Native Nations. In her memoir, Cook-Lynn vehemently criticizes the colonial supremacy of American literary traditions that misrepresent Indigenous history, politics, and cultures as forms of ethnic cleansing, denials, and refusals of Indigenous claims to lands and territories.

Chikashshaat Asilhlhat Holissochi (Chickasaws Are Asking and Writing): Enacting Indigenous Protocols in Academic Research and Writing

As Chikashsha (Chickasaw) scholars and Chikashshanompa' shaali' (Chickasaw language learners/carriers), we utilize a dialogic and autoethnographic approach to explore the continuance between ancestral and community protocols for research. An account of the Chickasaw Nation's language revitalization efforts is followed by a discussion of how Indigenous scholars engage in the writing of Indigenous research, with an emphasis on writing about language and culture revitalization. Focusing on our experiences writing our master's theses and doctoral dissertations, we discuss how we enacted Chikashsha asilhlha (asking in a Chickasaw way) and Chikashsha holissochi (writing in a Chikashsha way). Arguing that Indigenous research methodologies should account for all stages of the research process, including writing for dissemination, we contribute to a growing body of scholarship that centers Indigenous protocols for sharing knowledge and has important implications for researchers who work at the nexus of academic institutions and communities.

Weaving Indigenous and Western Science Knowledges Through a Land-Based Field Course at Bkejwanong Territory (Laurentian Great Lakes)

In response to a growing interest in building Indigenous-led educational experiences, we codeveloped a land-based field course that wove Indigenous ways of knowing together with Western ecological concepts. The spirit of the course was the one rooted in varied ways of knowing nature, on the land, the water, and the culture—to see the Great Lakes from an Anishinaabe perspective. Situated in the heart of the Laurentian Great Lakes Basin at Bkejwanong Territory (Walpole Island First Nation), in the Traditional Territory of the Three Fires Confederacy of First Nations (Ojibwe, Odawa, and Potawatomi) on Turtle Island (North America), this inaugural undergraduate university course was led by an Indigenous instructor with contributions from non-Indigenous science faculty from the university and local community knowledge keepers. Here, we describe our journey in cocreating land-based teaching modules with Indigenous scholars and scholars at the University of Windsor, Ontario, Canada. We focused on experiences that exposed students to traditional ways of knowing nature, and reflections were used as the main teaching pedagogy. The course offered daily perspectives and activities across land and water and examined dimensions of biodiversity as sacred beings and medicine. Outcomes and indicators of success were driven by the individual’s reflection and evaluation on their own growth, as expressed through a final project aimed at bridging knowledges, supporting community initiatives or both. This case is designed to offer an example that has potential for application to many other contexts where community-faculty partnerships and land-based learning opportunities are available.

Black to the Future: Making the Case for Indigenist Health Humanities.

This paper outlines the development of Indigenist Health Humanities as a new and innovative field of research building an intellectual collective capable of bridging the knowledge gap that hinders current efforts to close the gap in Indigenous health inequality. Bringing together health and the humanities through the particularity of Indigenous scholarship, a deeper understanding of the human experience of health will be developed alongside a greater understanding of the enablers to building a transdisciplinary collective of Indigenist researchers. The potential benefits include a more sustainable, relational, and ethical approach to advancing new knowledge, and health outcomes, for Indigenous people in its fullest sense.

Quando “outros” corpos e “outras” epistemologias adentram espaços da modernidade: Apontamentos a partir de uma pesquisa entre Brasil e Senegal

From the dialogue - or crossroads - between issues that were elicited from the research developed between Brazil and Senegal, and, mainly, notes coming from black and indigenous scholars, here, it is intended to discuss the following question: what happens to the spaces constituted by and for the logic of modernity when disputed and taken by people and groups that, in hegemonic perspectives, always “traditionally” occupied peripheral and marginalized places? Thus, I propose thinking from the concept of non-modern-bodies to reflect about counter-hegemonic practices present in the daily life of the Senegalese population and how these practices are entrenched in epistemic cosmovisions and principles that did not fit in the civilization process of modernity. Escaping any homogenization or comparative analysis that aims to encompass African, Afrodiasporic and indigenous peoples, it was intended to point out the transformative effects of these spaces considered modern, western, colonialist and white supremacists, when symbolic and territorially disputed by “other'' epistemic bodies, crossed by historical and political counter-hegemonic journeys. These bodies show themselves to be resistant in their existential, historical and political permanence, despite the epistemic practices that aim the preservation of certain hierarchization and inequalities, strongly present in humanitarian actions - central theme of the above-mentioned research - and in more “traditional” anthropological researches. The Senegalese context also appears here to foster reflections that extrapolate it, getting close to other geopolitical and ethnic-racial realities, making it possible to point to the necessary confrontations that lead to the visibility of the production of knowledge and cosmovisions that point to other possible paths.

Beyond Transitional Justice: Learning from Indigenous Maya Mam Resistance in Guatemala

Abstract The international transitional justice movement – while making great strides in achieving justice and uncovering the truth of what happened during the decades-long internal armed conflict – ultimately constructs a narrow understanding of the conflict and postconflict in Guatemala. Domestic and international human rights trials and truth commission reports focus, sometimes necessarily, on stories of suffering and the costs of war, and often leave out stories of resilience and triumph. Drawing on Indigenous scholarship about concepts of desire-centered work, refusal, survivance and thrivance, I argue for the need to shift fundamental assumptions and move beyond traditional approaches to transitional justice, identifying important lessons learned. A collaborative research project with a small Maya Mam Indigenous town in western Guatemala brings to the fore voices often missing from mainstream narratives about conflict by centering the community’s grassroots development, and self-governance projects through which genocide survivors are building new, vibrant futures for themselves and their children.

Decolonizing the digital landscape: the role of technology in Indigenous language revitalization

Due to colonization and imperialism, Indigenous languages continue to be threatened and endangered. Resources to learn Indigenous languages are often severely limited, such as a lack of trained or proficient teachers. Materials which follow external standards or Western pedagogies may not meet the needs of the local community. One common goal for Indigenous language revitalization initiatives is to promote intergenerational language transmission and use in multiple social domains, such as the home. Could the use of technology assist in Indigenous language revitalization? And what would be its role? This article, emerging from ongoing research, aims to synthesize some key takeaways on the role of digital and online technologies in Indigenous language revitalization over the past three decades since the foundation of the World Wide Web in 1989. The article highlights how Indigenous communities, content creators, scholars and visionaries have contributed to an ongoing decolonization of the digital landscape.

Comparing the Literatures: Literary Studies in a Global Age

Comparing the Literatures: Literary Studies in a Global Age

Editorial: New conversations in development studies

Editorial: New conversations in development studies

\u2018Authorizing the Peril\u2019: Mythologies of (Settler) Law at the End of Time

The promised paradises of colonial capitalism and neoliberalism are set in a perpetually elusive future (Fitzpatrick 1992). This future is not a set destination, but an endless linear journey set to the thrum of ‘progress’ and ‘development’. This paper considers, in the context of recent cases relating to development in the Athabasca tar sands region, what the law of the Canadian settler state does when it is faced with interruptions and ruptures in its timescape. Drawing on Fitzpatrick’s seminal work, The Mythology of Modern Law, I argue that a conceptualisation of law’s behaviour in these contexts as functionally mythological highlights some of the elusive ways that settler law maintains a stranglehold over legal imaginaries of oil and gas developments: by distorting and flattening the pasts and presents of Indigenous societies that pre-dated (and continue to co-exist with) the settler state on ‘Canadian’ land, by mediating between the ‘origin’ of the settler state and the daily rhythms of colonial time through ‘Eternal Objects’ such as property and economic development, and by asserting a general ‘objectivity’ of law to evade any direct grappling with the stark possibilities of the ‘end of the world’ created by the climate crisis. I conclude, drawing on Indigenous scholarship and the work of de Goede and Randalls, that a meaningful response to the climate crisis requires re-enchanted attachments to life that necessitate a departure from the one-dimensional temporality of the mythologies of settler law.

Understanding the Application and Use of Indigenous Research Methodologies in the Social Sciences by Indigenous and Non-Indigenous Scholars

Indigenous research methodologies articulate how researchers and Aboriginal communities engage in research together. These methodologies are informed by Indigenous cultural and ethical frameworks specific to the Nations with whom the research is being conducted. This study explores how such research relationships were articulated in the dissemination phase of research. We carried out an Indigenous qualitative content analysis of 79 peer-reviewed articles published January 1996 to June 2018, predominantly in the fields of social sciences. Our findings show that most articles were written by Indigenous researchers or a research team composed of Indigenous and non-Indigenous researchers. Such collaborations articulated the principles of Indigenous methodology (IM) much clearer than those authored by non-Indigenous scholars or when partnerships with Indigenous communities were less evident with respect to the principles guiding the research process. The principles of IM that were manifest in these research partnerships were relevance, respect for Indigenous knowledges, responsible relationships, wholism, and Indigenous ethics. The findings of this study will help to guide future researchers who work with Indigenous peoples, especially with respect to the need for a deeper understanding of how such research relationships are sustained over time to bring about meaningful change for Indigenous peoples and their communities.

Metaphysics of Counselling History on Colonized Land

We offer a conceptual analysis of how Canadian counsellor education and counselling psychology can respond to colonial history through the teaching of its own history. Drawing on literature in counselling, education, and decolonial Indigenous scholarship, we work toward a positive and practical way to teach history that addresses power, colonization, and Indigenous intellectual traditions. Those in the fields of Canadian counselling, counsellor education, and counselling psychology are invited to expand their focus on epistemology into an appreciation of being. This focus on being leads to a broadened horizon of counselling as healing education, and a shift towards a place-centred pedagogy of history. It yields a radically different and markedly more humble and pluralistic pedagogy of the history of our field—one that is grounded within the reality of the land.

What is relationality? Indigenous knowledges, practices and responsibilities with kin

This paper delves into the concept of relationality and pairs academic literature with stories and lessons from Country. Bringing together majority Indigenous scholarship on relationality, the paper describes three main ideas: (1) How does a relational reality operate? (2) Relationality as a living practice and, (3) Relationality as responsibilities with kin. Many examples are provided to explain relationality in practical and concrete ways. As a trawlwulwuy woman, I weave the stories and lessons from Country throughout the paper, with a particular focus on research. I consider an inverse of relationality, extractivism, and identify how many dominant research practices are deeply extractive. The paper concludes with prompts for the reader on how research can be a more relational process. Overall, the paper demonstrates a relational ethos in (and out of) practice.

Where we’re going, not where we’ve been: Indigenous leadership in Canadian higher education

ABSTRACT Despite increasing calls for systemic change in the Canadian higher education sector, Indigenous leaders continue to be under-represented, under-funded, and overworked. This qualitative study investigates the purview of senior Indigenous leaders within Canadian higher education, drawing on interviews conducted with four senior Indigenous leaders at Canadian universities. The study, underpinned by emancipatory Indigenist research, draws on the literature predominantly written by Canadian Indigenous scholars. Reporting on Stage Five of a qualitative Australian project – Walan Mayiny: Indigenous Leadership in Higher Education, this paper is the first of four international aspects of the larger project. Findings suggest these Indigenous senior leaders overcome significant barriers to gain senior roles, while the weight of systemic change is carried by individual Indigenous leaders. The question addressed is how senior Indigenous leaders can unsettle systemic barriers so that universities are facing in the direction of where they need to be going, and not where they’ve been.

More Than Personal Communication

In this project report, I introduce the citation templates for Indigenous Elders and Knowledge Keepers that I created in partnership with the staff of the NorQuest Indigenous Student Centre. These citation templates have been adopted/linked to by twenty-five institutions across Canada and the United States. They represent an attempt to formalize something that Indigenous scholars have been doing for decades: fighting to find a better way to acknowledge our voices and knowledges within academia. I outline how the project was developed, highlighting the importance of stable, respectful relationships, before delving into some of the literature and personal experiences that provided the reasoning for why more culturally responsive citation is needed. Part of the background is acknowledging my own experiences as an Indigenous scholar, but I also draw on literature from both Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars to illustrate the interdisciplinary need for these templates. I provide in-depth explanations of each element in the new citation templates to explain the reasoning behind and/or importance of each element. For example, I outline why including the individual’s nation/community is important for breaking down the pan-Indigenous stereotype and helping scholars to recognize the variation of knowledge across the hundreds of unique Indigenous communities. While the main focus of this paper will be these specific citation templates, I hope that it will also empower, inspire, and provide a case study of how academia can make small changes to improve the respectful recognition of Indigenous knowledges and voices. Given the recent focus in educational institutions on being more inclusive of Indigenous ways of knowing, I think it is only right that we also look at reconsidering how we treat things like Indigenous oral knowledge in academia and whether there are systems in place that implicitly prioritize written knowledge over oral knowledge in a form of ongoing colonialism.

Four Generations For Generations: A Pow Wow Story to Transform Academic Evaluation Criteria


 Within this article, I share a story of four generations of my family and community coming together through pow wow dancing. I present the storying and re-storing of Indigenous scholarly engagement through pow wow regalia making and dance to accomplish two things: 1) to center Indigenous knowledge, kinship and community work through scholarship; and 2) to generate merit and value in the good work in which Indigenous scholars engage. Our creative and cultural selves are often excluded in terms of what receives value and merit in collective agreements. The academy wants us to teach, publish, and engage in community service. My community service is often within Indigenous kinship and community service where I engage in creativity and expressive arts. Evaluations of our tenure attribute value, credit, and merit for work produced, service generated, and research conducted steeped in a eurowestern definition of scholarly work. We theorize about the significance and importance of our culture and traditions; however, our families and communities’ practices are regarded as external and outside of the eurowestern academic contexts. This article brings together the knowledge of preparing for and dancing in a pow wow as valued and good work of Indigenous scholars within the academy. It calls attention to a need to revise systems of value and merit in a manner that benefits Indigenous scholars’ whole knowledge systems.