Indigenous Research Methods

Indigenous research methods (IRM) have only emerged within the Western academy in the early twenty-first century. Drawing initially, though not exclusively, on Participatory Action Research (PAR), Freirian critical pedagogy and non-positivist forms of qualitative research methodology for its impetus, IRM has broadened its scope in recent years to include insights and principles borrowed from feminist, post-colonial and anti-racist research. In this respect, IRM is also a hybrid, a blend of existing research methodologies and methods that has been increasingly anchored within epistemologies, experiences, languages, cultures and spiritual traditions that are specifically indigenous (e.g. First Nations, Inuit and Metis in Canada; Māori in New Zealand; Aborigines in Australia,etc.). It is therefore important to realize that IRM is not, as some authors would have it, a methodology and methods for studying populations that are native or indigenous to a particular region but rather a heterogeneous set of methodologies and methods in the service of indigenous peoples aimed at comprehending, explicating and analyzing the contemporary world from their standpoint within it. Indigenous research methodologies and methods, therefore, invert the accepted or received social organization of the research process by allowing indigenous epistemologies and world views to define how and in what ways social research should be conducted according to protocols established by Aboriginal communities.

As IRM is a new and emerging methodology, it is also a contested conceptual and theoretical terrain. One effect of this is that IRM is used interchangeably, and often loosely, with terms such as decolonizing methodologies to denote any one of a range of disparate research approaches that focus on Aboriginal communities, issues and themes. This conceptual slippage is also applicable to the terms indigenous, Aboriginal, First Nations and so on, where there is no agreed-upon terminology. As such, therefore, there is no definitive or ideal model of IRM. Rather, there are versions of IRM across a broad spectrum of the research process. In this sense, IRM is probably best conceptualized as a continuum that encapsulates a wide range of research methodologies and methods that are concerned with indigenous epistemologies, ontology, voice and identity. This entry should, therefore, be read with these caveats in mind. This entry on IRM is organized into three sections: (1) history, themes and issues; (2) methodological considerations and (3) contemporary trajectories and critique.