Storytelling as a decolonial research methodology

• In Event: Highlighted session: Indigenous knowledge and pedagogy

Proposal

Storytelling as a decolonial research methodology

Summary:

This paper synthesizes research from Indigenous studies, Education and Peace and Conflict studies to build understanding of storytelling as a research methodology. As opposed to seeing storytelling as a topic for research or a method for researching, a storytelling methodology speaks to a particularly storied way to know about the world. Key aspects of this methodology are constructions of identity, time, and space within parameters of relationality, reciprocity, and context. Insights about the centrality and unique characteristics of storytelling drawn from Indigenous scholarship (Archibald, 2008; Kovach, 2009) are used to tie together methodological insights from narrative inquiry (Clandinin & Connelly, 2000; Clandinin et al., 2006) with research on the humanizing capacity of storytelling (Senehi, 2000, 2009). After describing a storytelling methodology, this paper will consider its utility for use as a means of decolonizing assumptions about resistance in scholarship conducted in settler-colonial settings like those found in Canadian schools.

Relevance to Indigenous Knowledges and the Academy SIG:

The academy has historically viewed Indigenous lives and ways of knowing as artifacts of anthropology. The academic tradition is so steeped in this dehumanizing approach that to find space within it “colonized peoples have been compelled to define what it means to be human”(Tuhiwai Smith, 2012, p. 28). The colonial academic tradition has dissected life into taxonomies of meaning inspired by “tunnel history” (Blaut, 1993) that imagines a miraculous diffusion of civilization from the European centre across the world and has left little space for alternative ways of knowing, thinking or doing to counter its logic. Indigenous critiques, meanwhile, have pointed to alternatives to the ruinous effects of colonial academic discourse. In their place, decolonial approaches are necessary because “the power of theories and ideas to bring about change and transformation in social life”(Dei & Asgharzadeh, 2001, p. 298) can be harnessed for emancipatory ends. One space where alternatives can be offered is in the field of research methodology and one specific alternative is a methodology based in storytelling.

National and Geo-Political context:

Settler-colonial states are embroiled in tensions created by the cycle of occupation and efforts to deny the occupation of Indigenous land (Hugill, 2017). One crisis point in this cycle are schools. As spaces of social reproduction and resistance, they are spaces wherein stories of the state jostle with stories of communities and the stories of individuals (Osborne, 2008; Zembylas & Ferreira, 2009). In a Canadian context, schools offer space for redefining identities and redirecting action but that space is severely limited by the politics of settler-colonial myth making (Anderson, 2017; Donald, 2011). A storytelling methodology presents a way of identifying the variety of forces at play in the process of identity formation because seeing that process through the lens of story brings out the nuance inherent to human interaction. This methodology stresses context to avoid the hierarchical and binary categories common to traditional academic inquiry. It is therefore particularly useful for highlighting the experience of Indigenous and marginalized youth whose impressive agency has too often been painted in dismal hues (Tuck & Yang, 2014). A storytelling methodology imagines social life as the constant interplay of stories told and lived by participants with the stories told about them by larger structures. As a result it describes the spaces available for resistance and the creativity employed by young people whose life stories find no safe accommodation in the larger story of schooling (Tuck & Yang, 2011).

Significance and Implications:

The idea of storytelling as a methodology and specifically as a decolonial methodology draws on a rich body of Indigenous scholarship which identifies the storytelling as an Indigenous way of teaching, learning, and knowing (Dei, 2000; Kovach, 2009; Tuhiwai Smith, 2012; Wilson, 2008). Kovach (2009) notes that while storytelling is used outside of Indigenous research, the centrality of contextual knowledge and principles of relationality are unique features of the Indigenous understanding of the form (Kovach, 2009, p. 96). This work links Kovach’s (2009) framework for storytelling as a methodology to other scholarship on research methodology. Within Indigenous scholarship this work connects the insights offered by Wilson (2008) about the co-existence of levels of storytelling which vary from the personal to the sacred and the means by which each level can be contextually identified. Additionally, this piece seizes on the Archibald’s (2008) insights about how storytelling means through the simultaneous synthesis of telling, listening, context, and content.

Building connections from Indigenous scholarship to connected fields of inquiry, the storytelling methodology proposed here draws on Narrative Inquiry and Peace and Conflict Studies. Narrative Inquiry has focused on the search people make for unifying personal narratives within the field of competing narratives that exist within the landscape of schooling (Huber, Caine, Huber, & Steeves, 2013). That dynamic, along with Narrative Inquiry’s recognition of the interconnected relationship between researchers, participants, and interpretation are key aspects in this framework. Finally, Peace and Conflict studies contributes two key ideas. The first is the centrality of identity formation at individual, social, and national levels to human self understanding (Cook-Huffman, 2009; Korostelina, 2009). The second is Senehi’s (2002) research on storytelling as an empathic communicative form that configures space, time, and values.

Storytelling offers a methodological approach to decolonizing research about education. Respecting relational ethics and focusing on the interconnected reality of the world, it offers a pathway to producing understanding freed from persistent colonial assumptions. For Indigenous peoples facing the genocidal intentions of colonialism, stories were and continue to be a means of survival and are linked to identity so intimately that Cole (2006) shares, “we are our stories, they are not separate” (p. 117). The storytelling methodology described in this paper attempts to do justice to that reality and seeks to surface knowledge freed of colonial approaches that deny it.

Author

• Marc Kuly, University of Winnipeg