Narrative Uses and Narrative Agents in Indigenous Studies Literature: Implications for Narrative Inquiry

• In Event: 41.067 - Indigenous Philosophies and Narrative Inquiry: Deepening the Connections

Abstract

This paper reviews indigenous studies literature and catalogues several ways indigenous scholars have conceptualized the use of stories in educational research and in social science scholarship more generally. This review will include an examination of the use of stories as means of integrating a sense of ethical responsibility into knowledge generating activity (Archibald, 2008; Benham, 2007), as a means of restraining the totalizing pretentions of Eurocentric knowledge (Alfred, 2005; Duncan, 2002), as a means of resistance to social and historical erasure (Qwul’sih’yah’maht, 2015; Watts, 2008 ), as a way to resist settler society practices that threaten to trap indigenous peoples in toxic and damaging subject positions (Cook-Lynn, 2008; Tuck, 2009), as a way of advocating for indigenous communities in a colonialist context (Blodget, et al, 2011), as a way of connecting us to land and place (Deloria, 1999; Neidjie, 2002; Sundberg, 2014), and as a way of connecting us more constructively to objects (Bunge, 1984; Standing Bear, 2006; Watts, 2013), plants, and animals (Cajete, 2000; Peacock & Wisuri, 2011; Wildcat, 2009). Our review will draw out the distinctions between these various conceptions of the use of stories in social science scholarship and provide a typology based on their underlying purposes and assumptions.
Of particular interest will be the way stories are often described in the indigenous studies literature as living agents or beings (Garroutte & Westcott, 2013). Framing stories as agents independent of the agency of the human storyteller raises a host of interesting questions about the ethics and ontology of narrative inquiry. The literature on stories as agents will be compared and contrasted to the literature on other forms of non-human agency in Indigenous studies literature, such as land as an agent, objects as agents, animals and plants as agents. This will be briefly connected to the emerging Western philosophical literature on agential realism (Barad, 2007; Jackson & Mazzei, 2013; McClure, 2013; St. Pierre, 2013, 2015; Taguchi, 2012, 2013).
Following the inventory of conceptions of narrative forms of knowing in the indigenous studies literature, this paper examines the implications of these conceptions for the practice of educational research. We begin by examining existing Indigenous studies scholarship using narrative modes of inquiry (e.g. Garroutte & Westcott, 2013; Watts, 2013). From there we speculate about additional possible applications (Kohn, 2013; Author, 2016) to narrative inquiry in educational research.
The paper concludes that there are unique conceptual resources in the Indigenous studies literature for thinking about the application of narrative inquiry to the pressing social issues of our time. It does not make sense to neglect these resources and the centuries of thought that have gone into their development in ongoing efforts to develop a narrative inquiry research practices. The only reason to neglect this literature is the assumption—grounded in colonialist condescension or racist dismissal—that this literature is somehow less sophisticated and therefore less useful to professional educational researchers. This paper’s review of the relevant literature will reveal, at the very least, that such an assumption is not warranted.

Authors

• Jimmy Snyder, University of Oregon

• Jerry L. Rosiek, University of Oregon

• Scott L. Pratt, University of Oregon