Indigenous research

 I'd like to take this opportunity to extend one of Shauneen Pete's exercises - which I outlined in the post "How did you learn about Indigenous people?" - and apply it to my professional life.  I'll extend the original question a bit, and ask myself: How did you learn about Indigenous research?   

I certainly *did not* learn about Indigenous research during my graduate education.  I don't remember encountering even a mention of Indigenous research during my Masters program (2003 - 2005), and our exposure to Indigenous inquiry during my PhD (2009 - 2013) was cursory at best.  I do recall reading an article or two by Linda Tuhiwai Smith, a Maori scholar, that focused on Indigenous methodologies, but there was little offered within my doctoral program to situate this alongside the status quo conversations about research paradigms or traditions of inquiry.  

I struggle to recall how I perceived of Indigenous research.  I suppose I imagined research being conducted in Indigenous communities, perhaps collaborative in nature, but following the same kind of conventions as those featured in colonial approaches to inquiry.  I don't want to sell myself short--I was always interested in extending the domain of qualitative research in participative, arts-based, and narrative ways.  However I certainly did not imagine an Indigenous ontology (or way of thinking about the world) as permeating Indigenous research.  I did not consider any research methods to be uniquely Indigenous.  

Fast forward to my first academic job, working as a faculty member at the University of Calgary.  I had been invited in as a collaborator on a research project that focused on learning more about a newly-implemented Indigenous education masters program.  The program was land-based and co-led by university faculty and community elders; students were both Indigenous and non-Indigenous educators.  The experience in the program was characterized in equal measure by self-reflective learning, developing good relationship (with peers, community, and land), and interrogating the coloniality of educational practice.   It was a deeply transformational space for all involved.   

I perceived the research project as being evaluative in nature, while I think the research leads (my Indigenous colleagues) viewed it as exploratory.  The part of the project I had been invited in to facilitate was a world cafe - a focus-group type of collaborative conversation designed to unpack students' experiences within the program.  I had used world cafe as a research method extensively in the past, and I had spent quite a bit of time building out the protocols for this project in addition to logistics planning.  A few days before the world cafe was scheduled to proceed, the project lead called me.  She wasn't sure the students in the course would feel comfortable authentically disclosing their experiences to me.  She asked me to step back from this part of the project and to allow the course teaching assistant to take the lead for the world cafe, as the TA had been involved in the class throughout and had developed close relationships with the students.  The project lead asked that I not be present in the room for the cafe in order to fully level perceived power differentials.  

I was simultaneously devastated and angry.  I had invested all that work!  I was an expert!  Someone else might not lead the cafe properly!  There wouldn't be appropriate "arms length" from the research!  The data collected might not answer the research questions!  In retrospect, my colonial mindset to this research was painfully obvious, and I am sure I responded with a measure of reactiveness and disrespect.  I had never conceptualized research as happening in relationship; I had learned to strive for (impossible) objectivity and believed that anything less couldn't be good research.  I had not considered what an alternative approach to my colonial practices might look like, and how it might be richer and more meaningful to all involved.  

I maintain the deepest gratitude to my colleagues on this project for bearing with me, with admirable patience, kindness, and grace.  I learned a lot about my own whiteness, privilege, and power during this time, and my colleagues offered me the opportunity to do this safely despite the fact that I was certainly behaving like a jerk.  I left asking the questions: How might I have been better prepared to embrace alternatives to colonial research? How can I share this experience with other settler researchers?  How can I adopt a mindset of humility and learning rather than "expertise"?