{"id":465,"date":"2021-02-12T18:40:45","date_gmt":"2021-02-12T18:40:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/opentextbc.ca\/indigenizationresearchers\/chapter\/research-with-rather-than-research-on-indigenous-peoples\/"},"modified":"2024-09-13T22:09:00","modified_gmt":"2024-09-13T22:09:00","slug":"research-with-rather-than-research-on-indigenous-peoples","status":"publish","type":"chapter","link":"https:\/\/opentextbc.ca\/indigenizationresearchers\/chapter\/research-with-rather-than-research-on-indigenous-peoples\/","title":{"raw":"Research with<\/em> Rather than Research on<\/em> Indigenous Peoples","rendered":"Research with<\/em> Rather than Research on<\/em> Indigenous Peoples"},"content":{"raw":"
\r\n\r\nIndigenous knowledge holders, wisdom keepers, Elders and scholars come to the academy with a worldview that has been 10,000 years in the making, and continues to grow and evolve.<\/q>\r\n\r\n\u2013 Michael Bopp, Lee Brown, Jonathan Robb, 2017, p. 6\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\nIndigenous cultures, knowledge systems, and worldviews grew out of relationships with the land, from observation of cycles and patterns on the land, in the skies, and on the water to learning the behaviour of animals and recognizing how humans interact and build experiences. Observation and experimentation enabled a set of principles and practices that manifest as stories, laws, protocols, and approved practices, which provide a way to coexist in holistic and sustainable ways. As Gregory Cajete, a Tewa scholar, stated at a 2015 Banff Centre event, \u201cThe focus of native science \u2026 [is] finding ways to resonate with the natural world and the natural order.\u201d These processes exist today in spite of contact and colonial legacies.\r\n\r\nAs a country, we have much to learn from Indigenous Peoples. However, the colonial mindset has viewed Indigenous Peoples as \u201cthe other,\u201d as almost-humans with knowledge and physical resources to be extracted and used to build a new world. This mindset allowed settler researchers to research Indigenous Peoples without recognition of responsibility, conditions imposed on Indigenous Peoples by colonization. The marginalization of Canada\u2019s Indigenous population was systematic and deliberate, resulting in catastrophic health conditions for people living on reserves across Canada (Daschuk, 2013). Poor health conditions, systemic assimilation, and general racism gave rise to new policies to remove Indigenous children from reserves for their education in residential schools. The poor health conditions on reserves coupled with poor educational experiences in the residential school system led to \u201cnew \u2018unnatural\u2019 pathologies, such as AIDS, diabetes, and suicide emerging under physical and social constraints experienced by Aboriginal communities today\u201d (Daschuk, 2013, p. 186). Deficit-based research into these pathologies often involved unethical research practices on Indigenous peoples\u2019 bodies, their cultures, and their knowledge. These research practices allowed such atrocities as:\r\n