Decolonizing Research: Indigenous Storywork as Methodology

by Linda Tuhiwai Smith (Foreword), Jenny Lee-Morgan (Editor), Jason de Santolo (Editor)

From Oceania to North America, indigenous peoples have created storytelling traditions of incredible depth and diversity. The term “indigenous storywork” has come to encompass the sheer breadth of ways in which indigenous storytelling serves as a historical record, as a form of teaching and learning, and as an expression of indigenous culture and identity. But such traditions have too often been relegated to the realm of myth and legend, recorded as fragmented distortions, or erased altogether.

Decolonizing Research brings together indigenous researchers and activists from Canada, Australia, and New Zealand to assert the unique value of indigenous storywork as a focus of research, and to develop methodologies that rectify the colonial attitudes inherent in much past and current scholarship. By bringing together their own indigenous perspectives, and by treating indigenous storywork on its own terms, the contributors illuminate valuable new avenues for research, and show how such reworked scholarship can contribute to the movement for indigenous rights and self-determination.

Genres: Indigenous, Nonfiction, Research, Philosophy, Education, Academia, Anthropology

288 pages, Paperback

First published June 15, 2019

About the author

Professor Smith is Pro Vice-Chancellor Maori with responsibilities for Maori development at the University of Waikato as well as Dean of the School of Maori and Pacific Development and a professor of Education and Maori Development.

Professor Smith has an academic background in education and research and has a long career as an inter-disciplinary scholar. She is well known for her publications, public speaking and research leadership.

Her 1998 book Decolonising Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples has become a seminal text in indigenous studies. Her other publications canvass a wide range of academic disciplines.

She has worked with a number of Maori scholars most notably her husband Professor Graham Hingangaroa Smith. Professor Smith has served on a number of New Zealand's national bodies.

She has been President of NZARE the New Zealand Association for Research in Education, a member of the Tertiary Education Advisory Commission, a member of the Health Research Council and Chair of the Maori Health Committee, Chair of the Social Sciences Panel of the Marsden Council and member of the Constitutional Review Panel.

She has also been active in establishing Maori educational initiatives from early childhood to higher education, was an inaugural co-Director of the Maori Research Centre of Excellence, Nga Pae o Te Maramatanga, and is currently the Director of the Te Kotahi Research Institute at the University of Waikato.

Linda is a daughter, a sister and cousin, a mother and aunt and a grandmother in an extended family.

Reviews

[Malcolm · Rating 5 out of 5]

Among the most researched communities anywhere, we will find Indigenous peoples – the colonised and the marginalised. Yet amid all that research there is little that grants us insight to or presents the voices of those peoples on their terms. For those of us whose scholarly and other work takes us into those worlds, this is a real challenge. Although we have had Indigenous scholars and scholarship for decades it is only in the last few years that the view from their worlds have begun to be recognised as legitimate, and then only partially: it remains highly contested.

One of the texts that helped bring about this shift, Decolonizing methodologies by Linda Tuhiwai Smith, makes a powerful case for the need to re-centre Indigenous ways of knowing, but also to work in ways and places that give voice to Indigenous peoples who ‘tell their own stories from their own perspectives’. This collection of essays and cases sets out to do just that drawing on one specific approach, storywork, with several cases each from the territories we now call Canada, Australia and Aotearoa/New Zealand.

A the heart of the collection is an approach to research with Indigenous communities known as storywork, developed by Jo-Ann Archibald Q’um Q’um Xiiem, a researcher from Stó:lō and St’at’imc First Nations in British Columbia. This approach recognises story as having multiple aspects – as knowledge, as pedagogy and others – that all help shape meaning making. Whereas stories may be common in many settings, Archibald’s case is that there are particular intellectual and pedagogic functions for story in the Indigenous settings she has worked in. Storywork, the methodology she develops drawing on story, has seven key principles: it turns on respect, responsibility, reverence, reciprocity (and so far many of us would say that there is little in these that is not part of good, ethical academic practice), interrelatedness, holism and synergy. Those latter three principles are much less obvious in more conventional scholarship. One of the contributors, Sarah Florence Davidson goes on to link these principles to Shawn Wilson’s notion of relational accountability in a move that helps contextualise storywork.

The collection is broken into nationally framed sections – Canada, Aotearoa New Zealand & Australia – within which authors draw on various research projects, scholarship and other projects to tease out common and divergent characteristics of storywork. To a large extent these characteristics are shaped by specific Indigenous practices and ways of ordering the world, but are also influenced by the writers’ disciplinary and practice experiences. For instance, Carwyn Jones draws on stories in his Māori world to explore ways that storywork and its principles can illustrate and inform analyses of Māori law, Hayley Marama Cavino unpacks the potential for making sense of historical archives (in her case regarding court testimony) whereas Evelyn Araulen Corr considers the dialogues around and between storywork principles and literary criticism to unpack the limits and possibilities for Aboriginal literature in Australia.

The first section deals with cases from Canada, allowing the principles to be developed in their ‘home’ context (although that phraseology risks homogenising the widely diverse) in that we see the principles in practice in contexts as diverse as film making and maths teaching. The focus then shifts to Aotearoa New Zealand, where the Indigenous code and modes of meaning are being explored through Māori modes of knowing and story in the form of pūrākau and where there debates about the Indigenous knowledge in research and scholarship is increasingly strong. The final section, focused on Australia, incudes some of the kinds of essays we see in the first two sections, but also includes some very specific cases of Indigenous based knowledge systems being developed to shape practice, both within university settings and in wider applied and engaged research contexts. Much as I enjoyed and engaged with many of the pieces in diverse and subtle ways, I was more comfortable with the Māori and Canadian cases – I suspect because I know those worlds better than the Indigenous Australian worlds; the point is, expect to be taken well out of your comfort zone and to have to revisit, re-read and rethink at various stages.

Much as this is invigorating as an exploration of Indigenous ways of giving voice and meaning making, I also found myself thinking about story in other non-Indigenous settings and the extent to which these ideas, principles and practices could or do resonate with other community-based research projects I know or am involved with. That is, in my thinking so far (and I’m sure there will be more) the cases made here show the potential and possibilities for Indigenous research practices to give voice to people silenced even as they are over-researched, but they also suggest ways that those Indigenous methods can help make better and more just research in non-Indigenous communities and projects.

It’s a great collection, it’s a powerful contribution to our understandings of work with First Nations, and it’s a significant contribution to the research methodologies literature more generally. It may be a specialist text, but within academia and other research communities it deserves to be widely read, considered and worked with.

[inside an airport · Rating 5 out of 5]

Jo-Ann Archibald edited this book pretty much about her previous book and the concept she coined in academia "Indigenous Storywork: Educating the Heart, Mind, Body, and Spirit". Her methodology revolves around 4rs; Respect, Responsibility, Reverence, Reciprocity. After reading this book, I feel super encouraged to read The Fourth World: An Indian Reality. Writers in the book are using the indigenous methodology and using their lens to talk about indigenous "storywork" which is another version of the indigenous theory. In the book, the example of Kaupapa (Maori theory) has been mentioned many times. Geographically, the book focuses on “sharing methodological applications of indigenous storywork in Turtle Island Canada, Aotearoa New Zealand, and Australia."

"Decolonizing methodologies insist that a critical part of our work as researchers is to identify, expose and rectify the normalization of the objective, invisible, and natural “Imperial Gaze”. (p.153)

Read the full review at:
insideanairport
***

[Rachel · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Something that has become apparent to me is that for Indigenous people, research is a ceremony.” (Shawn Wilson, 2008)

This is one of many takeaways from Decolonizing Research. Using storywork as an Indigenous theoretical, methodological, and pedagogical framework comprises seven principles: respect, responsibility, reverence, reciprocity, holism, interrelatedness, and synergy. The essays shared by Archibald, et. al., explore the use of storywork as methodology across disciplines, each focused on the application of this framework, the ethics, and the collaborative process to get to authentic stories and representation of Indigenous communities.

I’ll be returning to this again and again.