A Storied Response to Two Reviews of Indigenous Methodologies: Characteristics, Conversations, and Contexts

Abstract

Last spring, an email request landed in my inbox. The area editor for Religious Studies Review, Dr. Lisa Stenmark, wrote that she was editing a Special issue of Religious Studies Review highlighting several Indigenous and decolonial methodologies texts. She was inviting a variety of individuals, including theologians, ethicists, social scientists, and natural scientists, to review the selected texts. My publication, Indigenous Methodologies: Characteristics, Conversations, and Contexts, Second Edition (2021) was among them. I was invited to provide a response. I accepted the invitation. Early in 2023, I received two reviews of my book, one by

Working with Indigenous science(s) frameworks and methods: Challenging the ontological hegemony of ‘western’ science and the axiological biases of its practitioners

“…These frameworks and methods represent a small proportion of the Indigenous science(s) repertoire (e.g. Chilisa, 2011;Kovach, 2010), although both frameworks are shared orientations in Indigenous science(s). Despite this paper's attempt to describe them, there is no codification intention.…”

Building a community‐centered archive for Cherokee language description, documentation, and reclamation

“…Decolonial methodologies (Kovach, 2009;Smith, 2012) have proven especially helpful in collective translation and in promoting community-based work that couples language documentation and reclamation work (Báez et al, 2016;Rosenblum & Berez-Kroeker, 2018). We draw on community-based methods to develop a corpus of collaboratively translated documents.…”

“…We adapted standard practices in human-computer interaction research while following Tlostanova's (2017) philosophy of decolonial design. To blend user-centered design protocols with more typical decolonial methodologies (Kovach, 2009;Smith, 2012) and gather actionable feedback, we followed a partial script of open-ended questions across a broad set of topics. We used the following guidelines to maintain productive collaboration with Cherokee community members throughout the design process:…”

Decolonization and qualitative epistemology: Toward reconciliation in the academy

“…Like how women speak in ways limited and shaped by men’s superior position (DeVault and Gross, 2012), Indigenous knowledge has been subsumed into a binary of colonizer/colonized wherein histories and identities are distorted (Smith, 2012 [1999]: 172), Indigenous peoples are Othered as agentless listeners to their own stories, and their persons systematically excluded from academic institutions (Corntassel, 2012; Kovach, 2010: 159; Wolfe, 1997). Historically, Western research (within a colonial framework) has collected, represented, and categorized all (social, cultural, linguistic, and natural) systems of indigenous communities to objectify and exploit Indigenous persons by Western researchers (ibid: 41; see Battiste, 2008; Connell, 2014, Ch.…”

“…Beginning from a loosely bound literature on colonization with diffuse roots in psychoanalysis, sociology, social work, education, and philosophy, the subject of (de)colonization has witnessed an upsurge in attention over the past two decades. The place of Indigenous peoples in research and teaching and the conceptualization of these practices themselves as they are institutionalized in the academy have figured into the hearts of many influential agendas across the social sciences and humanities (Chilisa, 2011; Kovach, 2010; Smith, 2012 [1999]: xii; Tuck, 2009a, b; Wolfe, 1997).…”