"Relationships Are Reality": Centering Relationality to Investigate Land, Blackness, Indigeneity, and Futurity

• In Event: Accepting Responsibility and Navigating Research Tensions: A Relational Praxis

Abstract

Accepting educational responsibility amidst the COVID-19 pandemic means more than
connecting our research to the stakeholders it is intended to serve. The level of accountability
Dr. Harper has invited us into demands methodological responses that restructure the nature of
our inquiry. The principle of relationality (Wilson, 2008) is an exceedingly valuable
methodological principle for research intending to leverage the power of connection among and
between stakeholders.
Shawn Wilson (2008), an Indigenous scholar writing about methodology, explains that the concept of relationality means, “...relationships do not merely shape reality, they are reality”(p. 7, original emphasis). In action, this means that the relationships among and between the agents of the social, natural, and spiritual world form the basis of what we know and what we
hope to learn. The state of those relationships contours our assets as well as our challenges.
Wilson’s contribution is based on the earlier writings of Indigenous scholars who struggled with
how to recover research from its imperial origins and refashion it as a tool for decolonial struggle
(Kawagley, 1995; Smith, 1999).
This paper explores the potential of methodologically engaging relationality to guide
education research dedicated to collaboratively solving our most-pressing educational
problems. Specifically, this paper presents a critical analysis of the research design and
interview protocols for a qualitative study on land ideologies, which centered relationality to
understand the types of relationships with and beliefs about land held by education researchers
engaging decolonizing methodologies. Once identified, these land ideologies were applied as a
guide to conceptualize the role of schools in imagining Black and Indigenous futurity in the age
of climate crisis. The details of this case offer concrete examples of how the principle of
relationality can shape education research. Importantly, the principle of relationality comes from, and is most widely used by, Indigenous scholars (Cajete, 2000; Deloria, 1979; Tuck & Mackenzie, 2015). This paper grapples with the generative tension of engaging relationality as a
Black, non-Indigenous, researcher by analyzing convergences in Black and Indigenous
intellectual genealogies. Critical indigenous methodologies (Brayboy et al, 2012) and Black
feminist thought (Hill Collins, 1990) converge in their shared commitment to re-claiming
scholarship as a mechanism to accurately depict the world that Black and Indigenous peoples
inhabit, from the power structures that constrain us to the methods of resistance that sustain us.
Beyond depiction, these critical frameworks demand that research participate in the shared
project of addressing our most pressing challenges. In this paper, I offer my process of tracing
Black and Indigenous intellectual genealogies as a mechanism for engaging tenets of Indigenous scholarship as a non-Indigenous person with intention and accountability.

Author

• Kyle M. Halle-Erby, University of California - Los Angeles