As is always the case with edited volumes, the many contributors to Indigenous Research bring many perspectives. A shared ideology across all of them is the primacy of relationships and the framing of all knowledge with reference to one’s own story. As these authors have introduced themselves in their chapters, I will too: My name is Sarah Gordon. I am a settler scholar who grew up in Canada and the US, descended from Ashkenazi Jews who fled pogroms to immigrate to Chicago in the nineteenth century, and of English, Scottish, and French settlers who colonized Haudenosaunee and Anishinaabe lands long before they acquired the names “Quebec” and “southern Ontario.” My most significant research up to this point has been done for, and in partnership with, the Deline Got’ine Government and its antecedent, the Deline First Nation, in Denendeh (Northwest Territories, Canada). I read and review Indigenous Research from the perspective of a settler scholar driven by the demands of reconciliation. As you, the readers, will see, the very act of writing this review forces me to engage metatextually with many of the issues the book raises. When I describe the value of Indigenous Research, I emphasize its value to non-Indigenous scholars, because I am a non-Indigenous scholar. I feel ill-equipped, by virtue of positionality, to comment directly on its relevance to Indigenous scholars, except to say that I imagine many would appreciate its assertive approach to reappropriating academic space on colonized land, and that I will work to implement its principles in my own work with Indigenous students.
Much of this book is not written in my scholarly idiom. Trickster appears more than once, herding authors—and with them, readers—back toward ideas and areas of relevance when the arguments began to veer into rationalist ideologies that matter more to scholarly frameworks than to the topic at hand. The structure is frequently narrative rather than conventionally argumentative, not in that the content is told as a story but in that the sequence of ideas follows a pattern that is temporal or character-centered rather than following etiological structures common in academic essays. Personal communication is cited with great frequency throughout, which speaks to the volume’s emphasis on the primacy of relationships: knowledge that emerges from interpersonal connections bears the same weight as peer-reviewed publications because the very act of communication involves its own kind of peer review. This makes the book sometimes challenging to read, but also refreshing; it argues for the academy to create space for theorizing, authenticating, and presenting knowledge outside of its ingrained traditions. It invites non-Indigenous academics to view intellectual possibilities not previously made available to them.
In the notes I sketched out before beginning to write this review, I described this text as a methodology book because its most explicit commentary targets the question of how to do research well. But when I typed out the title of the book at the top of my document, I revisited that description: the title describes the foci of the book, itemizing them after the colon, and “methodology” was not listed among them. Indigenous Research is a methodology book insofar as it tackles the “how” of research, but it does so in a way that stresses the entanglement of the “how” with the “when,” the “where,” and most importantly, the “what,” “why,” and “who.” The contributors to this text emphasize the colonial violence of common research practices that position settler scholars operating in the Western paradigm as creators of knowledge, while Indigenous knowledge-bearers are treated as repositories of information and data.
The book is divided into five parts, each containing three or four chapters. The first part, The Research Is the Process: Research Journeys Inside and Out, focuses on the negotiation of Indigenous identity relative to colonial research norms, and on how various Indigenous scholars have created space for an assertion of Indigenous ways of knowing in their research frameworks. The second, Making Space for Indigenous Research, includes essays that discuss the challenges of making space for Indigenous knowledge and experience in the fundamentally colonial institution that is the academy. Part III, Communities We Research With, provides guidelines for framing community-oriented, participatory research, followed by case studies that illustrate the challenges of these approaches but also the power of their outcomes. The fourth part, Our Tools for Research, include applications of theory rooted in Indigenous ways of knowing. And the final part, Destinations: Where Research Can Take Us, includes a mélange of contributions that imagine the potential offered by an expansion and reimagining of research paradigms to include Indigenous knowledge and perspective; its ethos is best summarized by the double-entendre in the title of the penultimate chapter, “Healing Research.”
The contributors include a greater diversity of perspectives than most scholarly texts do. Many are university faculty-members with doctorates, and many are experts working in public health or community services, but some are master’s students. Most authors are Indigenous, but some have non-Indigenous co-authors. One of the book’s most compelling contributions was written by Karen Hall and Erin Cusack, a master’s candidate and recent graduate, reflecting on being an Indigenous and non-Indigenous student, respectively, in the same Indigenous methodologies class at Dalhousie University. Chapter 11 presents as an end in itself an email exchange on the continuing impacts of Treaty 3, the 1874 treaty between Anishinaabe Elders and the English Crown that allowed English settlers on Anishinaabe land. The first, last, and the scattered chapters in between, entangle scholarly commentary with storytelling frameworks that invoke the poetic to frame the theoretical. The subject matter is translatable to other contexts, though readers not familiar with Canadian colonial history and research funding institutions may find themselves looking up terms like “Numbered Treaties,” “Truth and Reconciliation Commission,” and “tri-council,” terms that are unique to this country and come up often.
Indigenous Research continues conversations in the vein of work by Linda Tuhiwai Smith (1999), Leanne Betasamosake Simpson (2013), and Margaret Kovach (2005), expanding on their ideas without simply repeating them. Folklorists will be interested in the ways the material and concepts we think of as subject-matter—narrative, community, ceremony, story—are here situated as primary frameworks. In reading, I frequently found myself reminded of Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett’s reminder that folklore as a cultural category was created by folklorists (1996); in this book, McGregor, Restoule, Johnston, and their contributing authors push back against the category we created, using traditional knowledge as a framework for the inspection of research.
Works Cited
Gimblett, Barbara Kirshenblatt. 1996. “Topic Drift: Negotiating the Gap Between the Field and our Name.” Journal of Folklore Research 33: 245-254.
Kovach, Margaret. 2005. “Emerging from the Margins: Indigenous Methodologies.” In Research as resistance: Critical, Indigenous, and Anti-Oppressive Approaches, edited by Leslie Allan Brown and Susan Strega, 19-36. Toronto: Canadian Scholars Press.
Simpson, Leanne Betasamosake. 2011. Dancing on Our Turtle’s Back: Stories of Nishinaabeg Re-Creation, Resurgence, and a New Emergence. Winnipeg: Arbeiter Ring Publishing.
Smith, Linda Tuhiwai. 1999. Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous People. New York: Zed Books.
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[Review length: 1165 words • Review posted on November 5, 2020]