Catriona Elder and Jonathon Potskin
The process and experience of doing research in the context of Indigeneity1 is by default interdisciplinary. Research focused on Indigenous peoples and cultures is a capacious and emerging area; that said, it is perhaps, instrumentally, described as Indigenous Studies or Indigenous research. As with other interdisciplinary fields, Indigenous Studies or Indigenous research comes with a prescription to rethink the questions asked, the theories chosen and the methods deployed in more traditional fields. What is particular about doing Indigenous research relates to the choice of Indigenous methodologies and/or epistemologies. Aspects of this choice relate to researchers as Indigenous persons, though the issues also relate to non-Indigenous researchers as well. As a co-authored chapter, written by an Indigenous person and a non-Indigenous person, the voices emerging across this narrative will tease out some of the ongoing tensions between the taking up of Indigenous epistemologies in Indigenous Studies, and the reproduction of colonial practices in an interdisciplinary space.
The notion of Indigeneity or being Indigenous is different from its allied concepts of race and ethnicity (Elder 2007). Though all three can be understood in terms of powerful constructs that order understandings of communities and individuals in relation to bodies, cultures and difference, Indigeneity has attached to it the additional issue of land and belonging (Behrendt 2012). As with race and ethnicity, Indigeneity is shaped by a long Western history of inequality, colonialism and oppression (Langton 1993). However, Indigenous peoples are understood, and understand themselves, in terms of their inalienable connection with, and belonging to a particular geographic space (Brennan, Davis, Edgeworth and Terrill 2015). In Australia, this space is known as ‘Country’ (Roe 1983). Larissa Behrendt (2012) notes Indigenous people are of the land, they are formed through it and by it. Similarly, it is their custodianship of this land that enables it to continue to be productive (2012). There is a responsibility built into the relationship between Indigenous people and their land.
Indigenous worlds and Indigenous knowledges are ordered in terms of a different epistemology and ontology compared to many other Western disciplines. In Australia, Indigenous epistemologies are understood in terms of The Dreaming (see Morrisey 2015). Some of the more recent work undertaken in Indigenous Studies maps these epistemologies and translates them into frameworks for academic research (Martin 2007). A key shared characteristic of Indigenous epistemologies is that they are interpersonal by nature. In the Canadian context, Margaret Kovach explains that a ‘Nêhiyaw epistemology is relational . .. so while I speak of knowledges (e.g., values, language), it should be assumed that they are nested, created, and re-created within the context of relationships with other living beings’ (Kovach 2009: 47).
Much of the existing work on interdisciplinarity focuses on the institutional context in which research takes place. In this framework, the crucial question is often about the relationship of that which is interdisciplinary to the disciplines (Burawoy 2013). When assessing Indigenous Studies in relationship to traditional disciplines, as with gendered and raced approaches to scholarship, Indigeneity has enabled or sometimes forced a rethinking of key modes of Western knowledge (Rigney 1999). Paul Sillitoe (2007: 152) refers to these types of interdisciplinary challenges as a ‘reordering of knowledge’ and makes clear that they can be understood as ‘threatening’ to established disciplines. As Joe Parker and Ranu Samantrai (2010: 11) have noted ‘interdisciplinarity can open up a plurality of ethics so that ethical knowledge practices may in the words of Andre Glucksmann “make appear the dissymmetries, the disequilibriums, the aporias, the impossibilities, which are precisely the objects of all commitment”’. Indigenous Studies and research does precisely this.
Indigenous research can be understood as the research that is conducted by Indigenous peoples worldwide, and is research that is ‘for us, by us’, that is, it is for Indigenous people and by Indigenous people. Shawn Wilson (2008) argues that ‘[t]he development of an Indigenous research paradigm is of great importance to Indigenous people because it allows the development of Indigenous theory and methods of practice’. Wilson’s approach is useful when applied to disciplines. For example, he notes in relation to the discipline of psychology, that the emergence of Indigenous psychology enables Indigenous peoples to be the ones that decide what is ‘normal’ and ‘abnormal’, or even if this distinction needs to exist. This said, the development and/or recognition of a general Indigenous epistemology (as opposed to specific disciplinary interventions) can do much to shape and encourage interdisciplinarity.
Almost all modes of Indigenous Studies or research have a common form of experience whereby Indigenous people experience connection to place and through relationships. Place is often formed through two different experiences: the first is our place of origin, the second, our place within society. The role of relationships in Indigenous Studies and research suggests that we, Indigenous peoples, are connected to, and also within, our family, community, land and culture. This framework constitutes a distinct epistemology.
One of the issues that becomes apparent when thinking through Indigenous epistemologies is that many of the divisions set up in Western knowledge systems – especially those pertaining to the connection between the natural world and humans – do not have any traction. Some of the logics that drive new studies in Posthumanism are already part of Indigenous knowledges. For example, as the earlier quote from Margaret Kovach notes, Indigenous knowledges are relational. Bagele Chilisa (2012) makes a similar point and argues that in Indigenous epistemologies there is an emphasis on the I/We relationship as opposed to the Western I/You relationship with its emphasis on the individual. Drawing on the work of Nomalungelo Ivy Goduka, Chilisa recounts that among the Bantu people of southern Africa, the principle that captures the philosophy of Ubuntu, is expressed in the concept of being. This is, ‘nthu nthu ne banwe’ (Ikalanga/Shona version). An English translation that comes close to expressing this principle is ‘I am we: I am because we are: we are because I am’ or ‘a person is because of others’ (Chilisa 2009: 413).
Aileen Moreton-Robinson has explained that for the past few centuries, shaped by colonialism, scholarly research to do with Indigenous peoples and cultures has emerged from an ‘epistemic fixation with our [Indigenous] cultural difference’ (2016: xv). This approach with its obsession with racial difference has shaped both the questions and answers, as well as the processes and the outcomes that are possible in Indigenous focused research. Karen Martin notes that this type of scholarship produces ‘salvage research’ (2007: 27). Further, the result of this mode of research has been an enormous body of knowledge that tends to centre Indigenous peoples as ‘objects of study’ (Moreton-Robinson 2016: xv). Salvage research emerged from the disciplines of anthropology, archaeology, linguistics and history. In many cases the outcomes were complicit with colonialist notions of the vulnerability of Indigenous cultures in the face of Western modernity and a need to protect or scoop up what was left (McGregor 1997).
More recently these same ‘Western’ disciplines have often been important in the setting up of interdisciplinary teams of researchers whose aim is to find answers to what are seen as problems for nations in relation to Indigenous peoples. In Australia, from about the 1930s, this has been referred to as ‘The Aboriginal Problem’. This drive to problem solve is often described as drawing on, or creating, a type of instrumental interdisciplinarity (Kann 1979) where the state, through the work of the academy, and allied institutions, seeks to solve problems that frustrate the nation. This type of instrumental interdisciplinarity can also be understood in terms of notions of accountability (Strathern 2004). In this case interdisciplinarity is deployed as a practical coming together of the life sciences, and the social sciences or humanities, to make science seem to be more responsive to public ideas of its usefulness (Strathern and Rockhill 2013).
In the cases of Australia and Canada the reason for these instrumental or accountability approaches, deployed as they are to solve racial problems, is that they might contribute to the emergence of knowledge that goes some way to undoing the results of postcolonial injury (Kowal 2015: Chapter 1). The aim is to bring together scholars and practitioners from a range of fields to solve problems understood as being large scale and causing systemic life course disadvantages for Indigenous peoples in relation to non-Indigenous peoples. In Australia, the colloquial expression to describe the difference between these social indicators is ‘the gap’. And so the aim in terms of accountability and instrumental interdisciplinarity is to ‘close the gap’, particularly in health indicators (Australian Human Rights Commission 2017).
In this sense, interdisciplinarity is often strongly tied to social justice. Kann (1979) was a scholar who quite early on noted the place for a mode of critical, rather than instrumental, interdisciplinarity. More recently Jacobs and Frickel (2009) have commented that the driving force of some interdisciplinary fields is akin to a social movement. They suggest the energy comes from ‘collective action . .. in the face of resistance from others’ (2009: 57). Some of the early and very powerful Indigenous Studies and research had this critical edge. This research involved a postcolonial critique of the Western knowledge regimes that underpinned salvage research.
As powerful as this resistance- or social justice-focused scholarship was, it meant that from the 1980s onwards much of the next generation of Indigenous Studies scholarship and research was framed as a response to, or a critique of non-Indigenous research processes rather than being able to focus on the development of innovative and productive research about Indigeneity. Again, to cite Moreton-Robinson (2016), the original Indigenous Studies research tends to refuse the ‘density’ of Indigenous experiences and instead the critical response tended to focus on the problems of a ‘Western’ method.
However, the application of Indigenous methodologies and epistemologies, such as those developed by scholars such as Wilson, Kovach and Potskin, in the interdisciplinary space of Indigenous Studies and research has produced knowledge that re-values Indigenous ways of understanding the world. This, now, sustained exploration and adoption of Indigenous methodologies has enabled Indigenous Studies and research to be ‘a site of knowledge production’ (Moreton-Robinson 2016: xvii). It has shifted Indigenous cultures from being an always lacking, object of research to something richer and more complex (Barry, Born and Weszkalnys 2008: 37).
The process of the development and application of Indigenous epistemologies methods has been uneven. Andrew Barry and his co-authors argue this shift represented a type of ontological interdisciplinarity (2008: 29): ‘interdisciplinarity springs from a self-conscious dialogue with, criticism of or opposition to the intellectual, ethical or political limits of established discipline or the status of academic research in general’. Over time, these originally oppositional sets of ideas and practices come to have some ‘value’ and/or ‘validity’ in corners of the academy.
Tracing or mapping the ‘topology of value’ accorded to Indigenous research, in non-Indigenous studies, can demonstrate the ways in which Indigenous knowledge systems have been stretched and (de)formed in different circumstances (for example, disciplinary field, institutional location or professional status). Further, what counts as ‘validity’ or ‘value’ within Indigenous epistemologies and methodologies varies in different institutional, personal, cultural and political circumstances. For example, in the legal field the logic of Indigenous knowledge – as demonstrated through Dreaming stories – about land have been at different times vital to policy and research and at other times dismissed. In one significant domain, legal decisions that have recognized Indigenous land title have depended on Indigenous knowledge, while at other times similar knowledge has been classified as without sufficient value and instead Western knowledges have taken precedence (O’Brien and Elder 2014). For example, the Quandamoopah scholar Karen Martin (2007) remembers the process of providing Indigenous knowledge in an interdisciplinary environment – made up of historians, anthropologists, lawyers and scientists who were compiling knowledge on land ownership. She wrote: ‘I became increasingly aware of how my knowledge and experience were measured against pre-determined categories of culture to which it was determined that I could provide no new or convincing examples’ (2007: 30). In another case pertaining to land, Helen Verran (2002) explores the ways in which Indigenous knowledge about fire and land management shifted from being ‘consistently dismiss[ed]’ to a situation where scientists were funded to ‘learn from members of an Aboriginal community’ (Verran 2002: 731–732).
However, it needs to be remembered that the driving logic of Indigenous knowledge is not to achieve institutional validity. Again, we cite Karen Martin who states that the rejection of her Indigenous knowledge in a particular interdisciplinary space did not unravel her ‘unwavering belief in my Ancestral relatedness to Quandamoopah and my sovereignty’ (2007: 31). Other Indigenous Australian and Canadian research has demonstrated the ways in which ‘validity’ and ‘value’ are not designed to fit external worldviews, but instead reflect the internal or inherent value of Indigenous knowledge systems. For example, Shaun Wilson’s work has developed the idea of ‘research is ceremony’ (2008). Explaining that preparing for and undertaking a research project is similar to preparing and undertaking a ceremony, Wilson makes it even clearer that involvement in Indigenous research, and this should be any research, is guided by protocols and responsibilities. In addition to Wilson’s idea of ceremony, a group of Maori scholars introduced the notion of Kaupapa Maori (Pihama, Cram and Walker 2002), Karen Martin advanced the image of ‘storywork’ (2008), and I (Jonathon Potskin) developed the understanding of the Medicine Wheel. All of these epistemological logics firmly locate Indigenous research not only in terms of the aftermath of hundreds of years of colonial oppression and the affects this has had on our personal and communal living, but also within frameworks shaped by creative Indigenous knowledges that further sustain and reinvigorate Indigenous worlds.
What connects us as Indigenous peoples today is our shared multigenerational colonial experiences. But beyond this we can use newer concepts to trace the recovery and the revaluing of the strong connections we have to our homelands through our languages and cultures. Indigenous methodologies sustain the links between community and the academy enabling a productive flow of ideas between these different locations. These are interdisciplinary practices that sustain the cultural and social purchase of Indigenous worldviews in relation to the ‘lived subject positions [of Indigenous peoples] within modernity’ (Moreton-Robinson 2016: xv). These practices enable us to do more than just re-enact what non-Indigenous people want us to be. However, for non-Indigenous scholars these practices and approach can also provide a metaphor or a frame for thinking about interdisciplinarity more broadly.
1 The term Indigeneity is used to describe the state of being Indigenous. Indigenous peoples are understood as pre-colonial communities residing in contemporary nation-states. Drawing on the United Nation’s definitions these communities are often marginalized and/or subject to racism. In this chapter the term Indigenous is used as a generic term to describe a broad range of peoples. Similar terms could have been chosen (e.g. Aboriginal or First Nation). Indigenous people, of course, also have their own terms for themselves.
Australian Human Rights Commission (2017). Close the Gap: Progress and Priorities Report 2017. Retrieved 16 March 2018 from: www.humanrights.gov.au/our-work/aboriginal-and-torres-strait-islander-social-justice/publications/close-gap-progress-0
Barry, A., Born, G. and Weszkalnys, G. (2008). Logics of interdisciplinarity. Economy and Society, 37(1): 20–49.
Behrendt, L. (2012). Indigenous Australia for Dummies. Milton, Queensland: Wiley.
Brennan, S., Davis, M., Edgeworth, B. and Terrill, L. (Eds.) (2015). Native Title from Mabo to Akiba: A Vehicle for Change and Empowerment. Sydney: Federation Press.
Burawoy, M. (2013). Sociology and interdisciplinarity the promise and the perils. Philippine Sociological Review, 61: 7–20.
Chilisa, B. (2009). Indigenous African-centred ethics: contesting and complementing dominant models. In D. Mertens and P. E. Ginsberg (Eds.) The Handbook of Social Research Ethics (pp. 407–425). London: Sage.
Chilisa, B. (2012). Indigenous Research Methodologies. London: Sage.
Elder, C. (2007). Being Australian. Sydney: Allen and Unwin.
Jacobs, J. A. and Frickel, S. (2009). Interdisciplinarity: a critical assessment. Annual Review of Sociology, 35: 43–65.
Kann, M. (1979). The political culture of interdisciplinary explanation. Humanities in Society, 2(3): 185–300.
Kovach, M. (2009). Indigenous Methodologies: Characteristics, Conversation and Contexts. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Kowal, E. (2015). Trapped in the Gap: Doing Good in Indigenous Australia. New York: Berghahn Books.
Langton, M. (1993). ‘Well, I heard it on the radio and I saw it on the television’: an essay for the Australian Film Commission on the politics and aesthetics of filmmaking by and about Aboriginal people and things. Sydney: Australian Film Commission.
Martin, K. (2008). Please Knock Before You Enter: Aboriginal Regulation of Outsiders and the Implications for Researchers. Teneriffe, Queensland: Post Pressed.
McGregor, R. (1997). Imagined Destinies: Aboriginal Australians and the Doomed Race Theory. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press.
Moreton-Robinson, A. (2016). The White Possessive: Property, Power and Indigenous Sovereignty. Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press.
Morrissey, P. (2015). Bill Neidjie’s Story About Feeling: notes on its themes and philosophy. Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature, 15(2): 1–11.
O’Brien, R. and Elder, C. (2014). New ways for exploring who knows what in a native title case: a sociological approach. Australian Aboriginal Studies, 3: 30–42.
Parker, J. and Samantrai, R. (2010). Interdisciplinarity and Social Justice: An Introduction. Albany: State University of New York Press.
Pihama, L., Cram, F. and Walker, S. (2002). Creating methodological space: a literature review of Kaupapa Maori research. Canadian Journal of Native Education, 26(1): 30–43.
Rigney, L.-I. (1999). Internationalization of an Indigenous anticolonial cultural critique of research methodologies: a guide to Indigenist research methodology and its principles. Wicazo Sa Review, 14(2): 109–121.
Roe, P. (1983). Gularabulu. Fremantle: Fremantle Arts Centre Press.
Sillitoe, P. (2007). Anthropologists only need apply: challenges of applied anthropology. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 13: 147–165.
Strathern, M. (2004). Commons and Borderlands: Working Papers on Interdisciplinarity, Accountability and the Flow of Knowledge. London: Sean Kingston Publishers.
Strathern, M. and Rockhill, E. K. (2013). Unexpected consequences and unanticipated outcome. In A. Barry and G. Born (Eds.) Interdisciplinarity: Reconfigurations of the Social and Natural Sciences (pp. 119–140). Florence: Taylor & Francis.
Verran, H. (2002). A postcolonial moment in Science Studies: alternative firing regimes of environmental scientists and Aboriginal landowners. Social Studies of Science, 32(5): 729–762.
Wilson, S. (2008). Research Is Ceremony: Indigenous Research Methods. Nova Scotia: Fernwood Publishing.