Aditi - Decolonizing Methodologies by Linda Tuhiwai Smith

Smith’s book, raises the key point of examining the colonial and imperialist underpinnings of ‘research’, that remain inherently exploitative and damaging to the many indigenous peoples that have been researched within its frameworks. She specifically engages with the possibilities of changing the nature of research to mobilize it in ways that are useful for bringing about social justice for indigenous peoples.

The key issue raised by Smith, that I want to discuss is her argument regarding the intrinsically imperialist nature of history and theory, and the consequences of theorizing or writing about indigenous peoples using a Western academic language, and canon. She raises points with respect to this that undermine the centrality of writing to Western research methodologies and theories. Firstly, she speaks of the kinds of fragmentation of identity, history, culture and values produced by the writing of history (a characteristically Western discipline) in a manner that erases indigenous lives, before their encounter with the West. In arguing that “Fragmentation is not a phenomenon of postmodernism... For indigenous peoples fragmentation has been the consequence of imperialism. (Smith 2012, 71)”, she challenges the continued hijacking of indigenous discourses of social justice by theory produced in Western centres of academia. Secondly, she examines the notion of ‘authenticity’ used by non-indigenous researchers in producing accounts of indigenous peoples. This notion of who is an ‘authentic indigenous person’ takes away control from indigenous peoples over their own systems of knowledge, the changing nature of their social and cultural relations, and their ability to determine their own identities (Smith 2012, 140). In the contemporary world, its most visible manifestation is in the various legal contests over intellectual and cultural property rights, reflecting the continued commodification of indigenous’ culture without consent by corporations, medical and scientific researchers. This is also extended to the academic sphere, in the continued publishing of monographs on indigenous practices, in terms of new focuses like ‘informality’, ‘alternative lifestyles’, ‘multiculturalism’ etc. that frame indigenous peoples as subjects in opposition to the West.

In relating this to my own work with women who work in the informal economy in India, I struggle with the difficulty of writing about experiences that I have not inhabited, in a language defined by Western theory. I find it useful to think of this through the lens of putting back together of indigenous narratives in recovery from the fragmentation produced by colonial, and western urban theory of formal and informal economics. I think bringing into focus the ways in which fragmentation has been produced in colonized nations, is key to showing the different trajectories that research would take when developed from within indigenous life stories as opposed to using Western theories of postmodernism. The latter would continue to locate the moment of fragmentation at a time when the West begins to experience fragmentation as opposed to the long history of disaggregation and political disenfranchisement experienced by indigenous peoples.

Discussion Questions:

1. How does the category of ‘indigenous peoples’ operate or change with respect to indigenous elite trained in a Western academia, researching indigenous groups within ‘postcolonial’ societies? My concern lies with how such a ‘lumping together’ of indigenous groups (as mentioned by Emilie) might obscure tensions between indigenous researchers trained in Western academia and their communities?

2. As a researcher in an indigenous society, how does one position oneself while writing in a language defined by a Western science shaped by colonialism and imperialism? What languages might offer less exploitative, or more socially just ways of writing?