What Does Being a Settler Ally in Research Mean? A Graduate Students Experience Learning From and Working Within Indigenous Research Paradigms

Abstract

Research with Indigenous peoples is fraught with complexity and misunderstandings. The complexity of negotiating historical and current issues as well as the misunderstandings about what the issues really mean for individuals and communities can cause non-Indigenous researchers to shy away from working with Indigenous groups. In conducting research for my doctoral dissertation, I was a novice researcher faced with negotiating two very different sets of social contracts: the Western Canadian university's and my Indigenous participants'. Through narrative inquiry of my experience, this article explores issues of ethics, institutional expectations, and community relationships. Guided by Kirkness and Barnhardt's "Four R's" framework of respect, relevance, reciprocity, and responsibility, I aimed to meet the needs of both the groups, but it was not without challenges. What do you do when needs collide? This article shares my process of negotiating the research, the decisions made, and how I came to understand my role in the process as a Settler Ally. It closes with some implications for other researchers who are considering their own roles as Settler Allies.

Lessons Learned through Research Partnership and Capacity Enhancement in Inuit Nunangat

“…These challenges highlight the need for flexibility and sensitivity when conducting community-based research in Inuit Nunangat. Challenges that arise when Indigenous peoples and non-Indigenous researchers work together have been well-documented (see review in Snow, 2018). Developing collaborative research approaches between communities across Inuit Nunangat and non-Inuit researchers is integral to ensuring projects are conducted in a culturally respectful manner and contribute towards the goals of Inuit selfdetermination in research (Ferrazzi et al, 2018;ITK, 2018a).…”

Reflections on a failed participatory workshop in Northern Chile: Negotiating boycotts, benefits, and the UN declaration on the rights of indigenous people

“…However, as activist scholars such as Betasamosake Simpson and Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui recognise, this intellectual approach does not in itself ensure the avoidance of “extractivismo epistémico” ( Grosfoguel, 2016 ), and decolonial theoretical approaches also risk (re)producing language and conceptual infrastructures that themselves contribute to decontextualising and depoliticising social struggles, and that are not rooted in political solidarity with the people from whom they extract knowledge ( Rivera Cusicanqui, 2010 ). Furthermore, even when research is entirely developed in other places, and in other languages, academia demands that ideas and findings should be situated in relation to dominant (overwhelmingly western) perspectives and scholars ( Snow, 2018 ).…”

“…Despite their experience as interlocutors working across indigenous and non-indigenous spaces, the woman lawyer drew on quite essentialist constructions of indigeneity, to exert agency over the types of interaction that are permissible, and to symbolically frame us as ‘outsiders’, undoing the access we thought we had secured and undermining our legitimacy as researchers. This highlights the ways in which indigenous identities may be deployed strategically to grant or deny access to particular spaces, emphasising the agency of indigenous actors, organisations and interlocutors, and disrupting established academic and NGO practices and assumptions around where and how we negotiate and structure research relationships (see also Snow, 2018 ).…”

“… Snow's (2018) work on being a Settler Ally is especially useful here in enabling us to reflect on our positionalities, and how we might enact these differently in negotiating future research – recognising that, when working with indigenous participants, ongoing critical reflection is ‘vital to renegotiating and repairing our inevitable shortcomings and errors’ ( Snow, 2018 , 9). In the moment of experiencing our potential participants' refusal to collaborate, we felt judged to be on a par with the extractive companies whose behaviour we sought to critique, an unsettling experience that has stayed with us beyond the research ‘moment’ – an ‘affective residue’ ( Harrowell et al, 2018 ) – as our reflections above attest to.…”

De-Settlering Ourselves

“…While as settlers it can be important to reconfigure Western concepts and ideas to undo colonial patterns of thought without leaning too heavily on Indigenous literature and scholarship, settler ethics are also about how we attend to Indigenous and other marginalized voices. Kathy Snow (2018) explained that researching Indigenous contexts as a settler ally requires clarity of intention, motivation, processes, and roles. Snow also emphasized the importance of being able to sit with discomfort yet continue to commit time, energy, and resources to sustain allyship in the face of resistance.…”