TheDaak review

Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and  Indigenous Peoples (2nd Edition), by Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Zed Books, Rs. 7,436,  256 Pages, 13.81, 2.03, 21.59 cm 

by Chhotelal Kumar

Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s Decolonising Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples laid the groundwork for starting and expanding the conversation on Indigenous research methods. The book was developed as an alternate or a counter voice to the Western or Eurocentric nature of research and knowledge systems from an insider’s perspective (i.e., from within the indigenous community). It is significant to affirm here that Professor Smith is herself a Maori Indigenous person. The book has twelve chapters which are further divided into two sections  (thematically rather than technically as told by the Author herself in the book), with the first part, up to chapter six, being more directed towards an academic world (particularly to the non indigenous). Native readers have especially been drawn to the book’s second half, using it as a springboard for conducting their own research, engaging in productive debates with others and in Indigenous knowledge production.

Decolonising Methodologies is a significant literature in the continuity of post-colonial tradition from the non-West. But at the same time, it separates itself with its core focus on research. The book shares its debts and commonality with works of prominent postcolonial scholars like Frantz Fanon, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Edward Said, and others. It discusses central post-colonial concepts such as Imperialism, Modernity, etc., and their effect on the colonised. The book separates itself by using such concepts as the foundation and extending it in the frame of research and knowledge production. She questions the positivist gaze of the Western knowledge system and their quest and claim of objective knowledge (detached from the subject).

Decolonising Methodologies is not a technical research book (focus more on the process) per se but as 

“a book which situates research in much larger historical, political and cultural context and then examines its critical nature within those dynamics”

p. 6

The book attempts to reformulate the hegemonic idea of Eurocentric research and aims to develop research for Indigenous people. It reveals how deeply ingrained colonial legacies of Western knowledge are and how they continue to have an impact on academic institutions, influencing them to exclude indigenous peoples and their ambitions.

In Decolonising Methodologies, Smith makes the case that decolonisation is more about one’s perspective and relationships toward research than it is about the instruments themselves, whether or not that term is used. Smith is able to bridge the gap between the worlds of research and indigenous people by recasting and reclaiming these discussions as research by Indigenous people. She uses chapters one to six to simplify the complex connections among imperialism, writing, history, theory, and the larger projects of modernity. Tracing how native peoples have been integrated within these systems and relations of power. For her, this makes the research inherently political in nature.

The book has multiple gazes to offer to make sense of ‘Eurocentric Scientific research.’ 

First, it situates and contextualises research in a large frame of its colonial and imperialist origin. Second, from its colonial legacies, it traces the formation of scientific knowledge about others. Third, the claim of scientific knowledge and the involvement of Indigenous people in such knowledge formation, and lastly, the creation of their own ‘research’ by Indigenous people is discussed. For Smith, research is integrally rooted in European imperialism and colonialism, where it reflects and reawakens the historical memories of enslavement and oppression. She argues research is one of the dirtiest words in the indigenous community’s  vocabulary (p.1). 

One can infer from the book’s title that this study is a deconstruction of imperialist and colonial research. It is a process of detangling  the many threads and layers of the story, text, and knowledge, which is intuitively felt among the Indigenous people about their inherent servitude. In the first chapter, “Imperialism, History, Writing and Theory”, Smith contextualises how the idea of Indigenous peoples is framed within Western research. (p.20)  With the influence of Enlightenment (the start of an age of imperialism and positivism), where knowledge creation is considered objective and neutral, Smith highlights its dehumanising gaze on Indigenous people. Scientific research considers the Indigenous life world as some form of ‘object’ that exists there, depriving them of humanness and their agency. 

Further, in chapter two, “Research Through Imperial Eyes”, Smith unravels the unease of ‘scientific research’ with an alternate conception of any knowledge system. Its monistic and rationalised gaze forces any other alternative knowledge system from  existing beside its frame. The intelligibility of any life can be legitimately and accurately claimed only through that model of scientific research. It asserts its ‘positional superiority’ through the sole legitimate creator of scientific knowledge. 

In colonial understanding, the Indigenous life world is often treated as a primitive and simplistic way of being. Their world is understood to be naive and heavily nature dependent. It was predicted that they would not survive the onslaught of colonial modernity. Such stereotypical pseudo-scientific understanding has roots in positivist thought, which claims to know objectively about the Indigenous world. According to Smith, Indigenous people are appalled by such claims of knowledge systems, which believes in their ability to discern them completely (p.41). Simultaneous chapters of the book expresses another uncomfortable theme (Modernity) of the colonial project, that of measuring and quantification, which qualifies the Indigenous life and peoples by several characteristics defined by colonisers. Some would argue this was the practice  during the imperial period, and it is a thing of the past, while today’s world is sympathetic and sensitive to the nuances of the Indigenous life world. But here, the book reminds us of the persisting colonial continuity in the Western research and knowledge system, which still carries and  reminds the Indigenous people of their marginalisation and oppression, and the need for a process of decolonisation. 

Colonisation and its structures of power still exist in multiple forms in today’s world. One of the themes investigated in the later part of the book is how research became institutionalised in the colonies, not just via academic disciplines but also through scientific institutions and intellectual networks. The transplantation of research institutions, especially universities, from European imperial centres allowed indigenous scientific interests to be organised and integrated into the colonial system. This collective memory of imperialism has been perpetuated through the many methods in which knowledge about indigenous peoples has been collected, categorised, and then projected back to the West and, through the eyes of the West, back to those who have been colonised. It not just deprives the colonised but also negates the possibility of having their own agency in knowledge production. Indigenous peoples worldwide have their own knowledge tradition and life world to share that not only call into question the presumed nature of principles and the behaviours manufactured by the imperial knowledge systems but also serve to convey a different story. From certain indigenous viewpoints, scientific knowledge collecting was as haphazard, impromptu, and harmful as that done by amateurs. From these vantage points, there was no distinction between scientific inquiry and other inquiries by acquisitive outsiders. 

To counter the hegemonic Eurocentric knowledge System, Smith argued for creating Indigenous research led by the Indigenous people, based on sharing the spiritual, creative and political resources. She argues, 

“To able to share, to have something worth sharing, gives dignity to the giver. Accepting a gift and reciprocating gives dignity to a receiver. To create something new through that process of sharing is to recreate the oil, reconnect relationships and recreate our humanness”

p. 110

A field of Indigenous research privileges indigenous concerns, Indigenous practices and Indigenous participation. The Indigenous methodology goes beyond the insider and outsider binary of research methodology (p.138). The positivist approach to the research method takes research to be an outsider activity, observing from the outside and understanding the phenomenon. They consider population as a mere object  of study that exists out there. Among others, this has been a major point of criticism in  the feminist research methodology, which calls for the insider approach to research. Indigenous research relies more on Insider methodology (it empowers the population by placing them at the equal level of knowledge production), it pushes for it to be  an equal participant or recipient in the consequences of research and has a sense of accountability. 

With this setting of the research agenda, Indigenous people have now shifted from being viewed as research objects to becoming their own researchers. Professor Smith say,  

“When Indigenous people become the researchers and not merely the researched, the activity of research is transformed. Questions are framed differently, priorities are ranked differently, problems are defined differently, and people participate on different terms”

p. 196