Being a Good Visitor: Relational Research and Responsibilities to Land

• In Event: Reflections on Positionality: A Call Toward Reimagining Roles, Responsibilities, and Relationships in Research

Abstract

Researchers often define their studies by what was learned, how it was learned, and when it was learned, with less attention generally given to the where (Tuck and McKenzie, 2015). Taking this into account, this paper inquires into the possibilities that might emerge if researchers take seriously our positioning with respect to land, and our ensuant responsibilities as such, as part and parcel of our methodological practice. This carries the objective of emplacing our scholarship in ways that are accountable to the complex ecologies - past, present, and future - in which we live and work (Author, 2024). Building with the contributions of Indigenous scholarship, I argue for centering relationships with land in research not necessarily as always the focus of inquiry, but as fundamental to the process of inquiry. Land, here, is used as imperfect shorthand to refer to the mutually-constitutive relationships between humans, animals, plants, rocks, air, and sky, relationships that are both material and simultaneously more than that, with spiritual, emotional, and intellectual dimensions. As a system whose fundamental logics are concerned with the elimination of Indigenous peoples and the conversion of land into property, settler colonialism continues to structure land relations into the present day, including at the universities in which we as researchers are situated (Grande, 2018). While widely regarded as bastions of liberalism and modernity, peering beneath the veil reveals deep entangelements between the university and histories of land theft, erasure, and genocide. How then, might we engage our positioning as members of the academy, as people always doing research on Indigenous homelands, and for those of us who live as visitors on lands stolen from other peoples? In striving to answer this question, I highlight an ongoing co-design project in Tovaangar, more widely known as the Los Angeles basin, where Indigenous youth, families, and their teachers are working with biodiversity scientists in order to map and restore habitat on twelve acres of land recently rematriated to the Gabrielino-Shoshone Nation. From this context, I share a vignette highlighting how I, as a Palestinian researcher, navigate my own positionality in the context of this work, and consider my responsibilities as a recent arrivant on Tongva lands. The vignette centers on reciprocal, embodied encounters during a series of land tending days in which I shared Palestinian seeds and also harvested khobeizeh, a mallow that grows as a weed in Tovaangar but is commonly prepared in Palestinian cuisine. In sharing these relational encounters, I demonstrate the ways in which positionality shows up in the practice of conducting research and suggest that researchers ought to be answerable not just to the human research participants with whom we partner, but to the histories and futures of the lands where we live and work. I argue that being a good visitor entails becoming a full participant in these broader ecologies, and that in becoming a full participant in these ecologies, we as researchers might deepen our ethical commitments to the lands in which we and our scholarship are situated (Stewart-Ambo and Yang, 2023).

Author

• Christopher Jadallah, University of California - Los Angeles