UNTITLED

SEPTEMBER 2024 by ROS EDWARDS

It’s not yet time to bake a cake or to make a pie or to make a stew.  It’s a time first to think about knowledge and where knowledge comes from. (Linda Tuhwai Smith)

Over the past two decades years I – a UK social researcher – have had the privilege of knowing and working in partnerships with Māori and other Indigenous scholars.  I love the resources we co-produced on the Indigenous and Non-Indigenous research partnerships project – our footprints in the sand to help non-Indigenous researchers think about how they can approach working with Indigenous researchers and communities.  And now I play a small part in The Tipuna Project (TTP), hooking into mainstream networks, agendas, opportunities and outputs when helpful.  

This collaboration has been a ‘something else’ experience for me, where TTP invites me into another existence – a world where the past is in front of you; where bodies, land and water are listened to; where ancestors can be included as respected co-researchers in collective community participatory action research; and where methodology involves separate but fluid spheres that move with historical violence and intergenerational trauma to keep people safe.  I keep a reflexive diary of my exchanges and involvement in TTP and can see a recurrent bewilderment in my entries: ‘I hang on the edge, uncertain …’ (14.4.23), interlocked with an eagerness to understand a world view that I can reach out and touch, but not fully grasp – a collective consciousness that’s larger than and beyond my individual self.  

Maybe these collaborations and involvements are why I get asked to review articles on Indigenous methods that have been submitted to traditional methodology journals, as if I’m able to pronounce upon them.  As if I can judge from the perspective of a (non-specific) Indigenous way of seeing and understanding the world.  I have no expertise here.  But sometimes I feel able to accept the review invitation because the article submissions are unhooked from the Indigenous world view that I can touch but not grasp, and rather hook themselves into a/my mainstream zone of methodology and methods.  

Researchers (often non-Indigenous researching Indigenous communities) write about deploying yarning circles, storywork, beading and so on.  There are discussions of weaving, stitching or braiding together Euro-Western and Indigenous methodologies, such as constructivist theory or systems theory or symbolic interactionism, as if each approach in the mixing occupies an equal place in the mainstream methodological knowledge frame.  These pieces are thinking about adding in to the dominant paradigm rather than grounding elsewhere.  Linda Tuhwai Smith’s cookery analogy about mixing ingredients together (above) comes to mind here.  

It’s not yet time as she says, because first ‘we’ (Euro-Western-centred researchers) need to take account of the foundational issue of challenging our assumptions about what and how we can know, what’s important to know, what’s reality in the world, what’s knowledge, what and who can speak and convey knowledge – decolonisation of ourselves and the academy.  

For some decolonising academic knowledges means ‘adding in’, diversifying through proactive recentring of the knowledge of the colonised, giving marginalised and Indigenous world views an equal claim to constituting genuine knowledge.  For others though, decolonisation means a profound challenge, committed to moving away from Euro-Western framings of knowledge and its production.  There are also concerns that decolonising in universities is – as Sisters of Resistance have put it – ‘the new black’.  A diluting incorporation.  Are Indigenous methods the new methodological black?

There’s been a surge of attention to Indigenous methods in the UK, a colonising nation state, and more widely – the UKRI AHRC programme that funds TTP might be viewed through this lens.  This begs the question, why the interest?  Do Euro-Western-located researchers obtain funding to investigate Indigenous communities, and does adopting Indigenous methods seems to offer cultural sensitivity?  Is it because Indigenous approaches are contextualised, non-extractive ways about finding out about the world, that highlight the constellation of oppressions and injustices stemming from colonialism, and identify struggles and resistances to them?  Is the adoption of Indigenous methods regarded as a pathway to political resistance to the neoliberal paradigm that’s taken hold in the Euro-Western paradigm, where social research is regarded as a market-driven activity serving the interests of systematic accountability and political governance?

The ‘stir in Indigenous methods’, ‘cultural sensitivity’ and the ‘Indigenous methods as resistance’ versions feel rather instrumental and appropriative to me – what has been termed epistemic capture – especially if we ask the question of whose interests these serve?  Often there’s little discussion of the processes and manifestations of power dynamics from the perspectives of Indigenous scholars and communities, about relationships to and with all things.  There’s scarce consideration that what constitutes a relationship depends on where you’re standing; of the need to build up relationships of trust and accountability over time rather than swoop in and expect welcome, collaboration and impact; and to address and think through the presence of historical violence and intergenerational trauma in the here and now.

The Tipuna Project challenges these absences and exclusions.  It brings a positive way forward that prioritises and is led by Indigenous ways of knowing and being in exploring the process of decolonising participatory action research to work towards intergenerational healing, with potential benefits for settler societies more widely, and for non-Indigenous researchers with a commitment to participatory research and social justice.

For non-Indigenous researchers such as me, TTP can act as inspiration and exemplar.  While we aren’t ourselves able to draw upon the deep well of a particular Indigenous world view, context and feeling, TTP encourages us to open up to another world view and envisage entanglements of corporality, time and space.  Through accounts of the challenges of TTP practice we can understand the importance of working within spheres of existence: for safety in participatory research involving Indigenous communities, and for engaging settler peoples in intergenerational healing that encompasses accountability.  We’re then facilitated to position ourselves as part of coalitions to disrupt hierarchies of knowing and being.  And we can actively celebrate innovative decolonising participatory action research practice within our mainstream methodological spheres of influence.