Investigating Best Practice
Doctoral Fieldwork Experiences With and Without Indigenous Communities in Settler-colonial Societies
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.14288/acme.v18i6.1751Keywords:
First peoples, decolonizing research, natural resources, environmental governance, more-than-humanAbstract
Through the sharing of personal commentaries about our doctoral fieldwork experiences, this paper contributes to decolonial literatures about academic knowledge generation in settler-colonial societies. The commentaries each illustrate shifting understandings of our roles in perpetuating the colonial knowledge-violence and material power of the academy, and our personal ethics to do something useful in response. Such experiences are often unreported or under reported for diverse reasons. Seeking to address injustice, and to move away from extractive research relationships, we highlight four matters: consent and risk; the resource gap in research collaborations; the consequences of not collaborating with Indigenous people; and, the importance of examining knowledge frames. As constrained and compromised as it is, we argue the doctoral experience is an important opportunity for decolonising the academy. Whilst we appreciate that this paper does not address the material circumstances that perpetuate colonial privilege, we go beyond descriptive reflection to offer prescriptions for change.
References
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Vincent, Eve and Timothy Neale. 2017. Mining, Indigenous, Alterity: or Mining Indigneous Alterity. Cultural Studies 31, 417-439.
Weir, Jessica K. 2009. Murray River Country: An Ecological Dialogue with Traditional Owners. Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press.
Arsenault, Rachel, Sibyl Diver, Deborah McGregor, Aaron Witham and Carrie Bourassa. 2018. Shifting the Framework of Canadian Water Governance through Indigenous Research Methods: Acknowledging the Past with an Eye on the Future. Water 10, 49.
Bawaka Country, Sarah Wright, Sandie Suchet-Pearson, Kate Lloyd, Laklak Burarrwanga, Ritjilili Ganambarr, Merrkiyawuy Ganambarr-Stubbs, Banbapuy Ganambarr, Djawundil Maymuru and Jill Sweeney. 2015. Co-becoming Bawaka. Progress in Human Geography 40, 455-475.
Byrd, Jodi. 2011. The Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Cerwonka, Allaine and Liisa Malkki. 2007. Improvising Theory: process and temporality in ethnographic fieldwork. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Chief, Karletta, Alison Meadow and Kyle Whyte. 2016. Engaging southwestern tribes in sustainable water resources topics and management. Water 8, 350.
Coombes, Brad, Jay T Johnson and Richard Howitt. 2014. Indigenous Geographies III: Methodological Innovation and the Unsettling of Participatory Research. Progress in Human Geography 38, 845–854.
Corntassel, Jeff. 2003. An Activist Posing as an Academic, Project MUSE 27, 160-171.
Coulthard, Glen. 2014. Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Deloria, Philip. 1998. Playing Indian. New Haven: Yale University Press.
de Leeuw and Hunt. 2018. Unsettling decolonizing geographies. Geography Compass 12, 1-14, e12376.
Diver, Sibyl. 2016. Community Voices: The Making and Meaning of the Xaxli'p Community Forest. A Report to the Xaxli’p Community Forest.
Diver, Sibyl. 2017. Negotiating Indigenous knowledge at the science-policy interface: Insights from the Xáxli’p Community Forest. Environmental Science & Policy 73, 1-11.
Fanon, Frantz. 2008. Black Skin, White Masks. New York: Grove Press.
FNIGC (First Nations Indigenous Governance Centre). 2014. ‘Ownership, Control, Access and Possession (OCAP): The Path to First Nations Information Governance’, FNIGC.
Gupta, Claire and Alice Bridget Kelly. 2014. The social relations of fieldwork: Giving back in a research setting. Journal of Research Practice, 10, Article E2.
Hemming, Steve, Daryl Rigney and Shaun Berg. 2010. Researching on Ngarrindjeri Ruwe/Ruwar: Methodologies for positive transformation. Australian Aboriginal Studies 2, 92-106.
Higgins, Margot. 2018. From a National Monument to a National Disgrace. Ethics, Policy & Environment 21, 9-12.
Hurston, Zora Neale. 2008. The Complete Stories. New York: Harper Perennial.
James, Paul. 2015. They have never been modern? Then What is the Problem with those Persians? Arena Journal 43/44, 31-54.
Kerr, Jeanne. 2014. Western epistemic dominance and colonial structures: Considerations for thought and practice in programs of teacher education. Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 32, 83-104.
Land, Clare and Eve Vincent. 2005. Thinking for Ourselves. New Matilda 29 June 2005.
Latour, Bruno. 1993. We Have Never Been Modern. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Lomawaima, K Tsianina. 2000. Tribal sovereigns: Reframing research in American Indian education. Harvard Educational Review 70, 1–23.
Louis, Renee Paulani. 2007. Can You Hear Us Now? Voices from the Margin: Using Indigenous Methodologies in Geographic Research. Geographical Research 452, 130-139.
Mitchell, Timothy. 2000. The stage of modernity. In, Timothy Mitchell (ed.), Questions of modernity. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 1–34.
Mitchell, Timothy. 2000. Introduction. In, Timothy Mitchell (ed), Questions of Modernity. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, pp. xi-xxvii.
Moreton-Robinson, Aileen. 2015. The White Possessive: Property, Power, and Indigenous Sovereignty, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Morgan Monica, Strelein Lisa and Jessica K Weir. 2004. Indigenous Rights to Water in the Murray Darling Basin: In support of the Indigenous final report to the Living Murray Initiative. Research Discussion Paper 14, Native Title Research Unit, Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies, Canberra, 1-63.
Nadasdy, Paul. 2003. Hunters and Bureaucrats: Power, Knowledge and Aboriginal-State Relations in the Southwest Yukon. Vancouver: UBC Press.
Nakata, Martin N, Victoria Nakata, Sarah Keech and Reuben Bolt. 2012. Decolonial goals and pedagogies for Indigenous Studies. Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 1, 120-140.
Nicholls, Ruth M. 2009. Research and indigenous participation: critical reflexive methods. International Journal of Social Research Methodology 122, 117-126.
Pasternak, Shiri. 2017. Grounded Authority: the Algonquins of Barriere Lake Against the State. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Plumwood, Val. 1993. Feminism and the Mastery of Nature. New York: Routledge.
Plumwood, Val. 2002. Decolonising relationships with nature. PAN: Philosophy Activism Nature 2, 7-30.
Rigney, Daryle, Simone Bignall and Stephen Hemming. 2015. Negotiating Indigenous Modernity: Kungun Ngarrindjeri Yunnan - Listen to Ngarrindjeri speak. AlterNATIVE 11, 334-349.
Rose, Deborah Bird. 2004. Reports from a Wild Country: ethics for decolonisation. Sydney: University of New South Wales Press.
Rose, Deborah Bird. 2014. Decolonising the Discourse of Environmental Knowledge in Settler Societies. In Timothy Neale, Catherine McKinnon and Eve Vincent (eds), History, Power, Text: Cultural Studies and Indigenous Studies. Sydney: UTS ePress, pp. 206-228.
Rose, Denis, Damein Bell and David A Crook. 2016. Restoring habitat and cultural practice in Australia’s oldest and largest traditional aquaculture system. Reviews in Fish Biology and Fisheries 263, 589-600.
Rowse, Tim. 2008, Indigenous Culture: The Politics of Vulnerability and Survival. In Bennett Tony and John Frow (eds), The SAGE Handbook of Cultural Analysis. London: SAGE Publications, pp. 406-426.
SCDAH (South Carolina Dept. of Archives and History). 1974. Indian Hill Site. March 22. Accessed November 12, 2017. www.nationalregister.sc.gov/beaufort/nrbeaufort.htm.
Scholte, Bob. 1972. Toward a reflexive and critical anthropology. In Reinventing Anthropology. Dell Hymes (eds), New York: Pantheon Books, pp. 430-457.
Simpson, Audra. 2014. Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life Across the Borders of Settler States. Duke University Press.
Smith, Linda Tuhiwai. 2001. Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. London & New York: Zed Books.
Sturm, Circe. 2011. Becoming Indian: The struggle over Cherokee identity in the twenty-first century. Sante Fe: School for Advanced Research Press.
Swanton, John R. 1984. The Indian tribes of North America. Washington: Smithsonian Institute Press.
TallBear, Kim. 2013, ‘Genomic articulations of indigeneity’, Social Studies of Science 43, 509-33.
TallBear, Kim. 2014. Indigenous Scientists Constitute Knowledge across Cultures of Expertise and Tradition: An Indigenous Standpoint Research Project. In J. Gärdebo, M.-B. Öhman, & H. Maryuama (eds), RE: MINDINGS: Co-Constituting Indigenous/Academic/Artistic Knowledges. Uppsala: Uppsala University, pp. 173-191.
TallBear, Kim. 2015, Dossier: Theorizing Queer Inhumanisms: An Indigenous Reflection on Working Beyond the Human/Not Human. GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 21, 230-235.
Tuck, Eve and K. Wayne Yang. 2014. R-Words: Refusing Research. In D. Paris and M. T. Winn (Eds.) Humanizing Research: Decolonizing Qualitative Inquiry with youth and Communities. Thousand Oakes, CA: Sage Publications.
Tuck, Eve and K. Wayne Yang. 2012. Decolonization is not a metaphor. Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 1, 1-40.
Vincent, Eve and Timothy Neale. 2017. Mining, Indigenous, Alterity: or Mining Indigneous Alterity. Cultural Studies 31, 417-439.
Weir, Jessica K. 2009. Murray River Country: An Ecological Dialogue with Traditional Owners. Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press.
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Published
2019-12-16
How to Cite
Weir, J. K., Woelfle-Erskine, C., Fuller, S., Diver, S., & Higgins, M. (2019). Investigating Best Practice: Doctoral Fieldwork Experiences With and Without Indigenous Communities in Settler-colonial Societies. ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies, 18(6), 1300–1320. https://doi.org/10.14288/acme.v18i6.1751
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