Indigenous Knowledge Systems and Ethical Research: Indigenous Well-Being, Land Relationality, and Ethics as Transitional Knowledge System

• In Event: Reimagining Collaborative Research Ethics: Epistemic Authority, African Wisdom, Indigenous Knowledge Systems, and Gray Zones

Abstract

The complexity of addressing, formulating, conducting and reviewing ethical frameworks in contexts of research for and with Native Americans is an enormous challenge that brings forth many important and defensible theoretical positions (Archibald 2008, Grande 2004, Bishop 1998, Cajete 2000, Denzin and Lincoln 2008, Lomawaima 2000, 2008, Haig Brown 2001, Halse and Honey 2010, Smith 1999, 2010, Wilson 2007, 2008). Considerations of tribal governments, the extent to which particular Native American or other Indigenous philosophical traditions are described, and by whom and in what context, are important and necessary (Turner 2006). Though Indigenist and decolonial scholarship has provided many clarifications with regard to interrogating the social, economic, racialized and gendered aspects of colonial relations of domination, fine grained analysis of these philosophical formulations of ethics are important (Maldonado Torres 2007). Indeed, ethical relations for research are continually renegotiated within relations of coloniality, thus enacting a complex and simultaneous doing, undoing and renewing of philosophically grounded knowledge systems. Put simply, there is a continual transition in the practices and terms of research for a relation we seek to name ethical. To be philosophically guided by these transitions in the domain of the ethical takes a cautionary stance toward any formulation of or claim to a normative, universal ethics even as one strives for ethical research in the here and now of day-to-day contexts.

This paper provides a discussion of ethics and epistemology emerging from the literatures on Indigenous Knowledge Systems (IKS) (Bang et al 2014, Lipka et al, 1998, Lipka et al 2011, Lipka et al 2012, Longboat 2008, Myer 2008, A. Wilson 2004). In this approach, scholars not only provide the foundations for an Indigenous intervention in the continental philosophical tradition of ethics informing educational researchers, but in doing so work for a more comprehensive, holistic orientation to a conception of well-being. Scholars in IKS can be read as responding to the question, what knowledge conceived as ethics is needed for Indigenous well-being? Drawing as they do on specific narrative traditions of healing, broadly understood, and land practices of non-domination, IKS scholars outline this “ethics” at a distance from an academic project to clarify research protocols. In this way, ethics as an enactment of well-being is an ongoing relational project informed by particular lands.

My paper highlights these two themes from the IKS literatures – land and well-being – to indicate the intimacy between Indigenous epistemologies and ethics as land based. In doing so, I will be taking the related themes of trauma – in the recurring contexts of asymmetrical social and cultural contexts of research in Indigenous education – and enacted Indigenous practices for land relationality, to detail the epistemic conditions needed to deploy the concept of ethics as well-being. Attending to the subtle interplays of empirical (Indigenous) experiences and reported affective states will assist in furthering the philosophical analysis of the transitional epistemologies sufficient to apply the particular system of knowledge I cautiously refer to as Indigenous ethics in educational research.

Author

• Troy Richardson, Cornell University