The following text forms the first chapter of my research program, and is the initial guide to my dissertation work:
Towards Food Democracy: questioning commodification and the commons in the Robinson Huron Treaty Territory
Canadian governments and citizens occupy land as a nation amongst nations, with complex treaties governing territory sharing (Manuel and Derrickson 2015). Despite treaty relationships between the Crown and some Indigenous peoples, the Crown’s historic and contemporary dismissals of Indigenous socio-political institutions and world views impedes emergence of new Canadian norms required to support nation-to-nation cooperation -- a central premise of treaty-making as understood by Indigenous treaty rights holders (Venne 2017). Indigenous peoples invest cultural, social, spiritual, and heritage values in forests. Canada’s governments approach forests as resources to be commodified. This commodification leads to practices that undermine Indigenous food sovereignty (LeBlanc 2014).
1.1 Research Context
Through this research program, I question the impacts commodification has on the “Crown” meeting treaty obligations to protect Anishnaabek food traditions, lifestyles, and culture in the Robinson Huron Treaty Territory. Clear-cutting management in particular impacts Anishnaabek food systems in a number of ways -- among the most urgent for the Traditional Ecological Knowledge Elders Group being aerial herbicide use (Balandier et al. 2005; Pine 2018).
The literature on food democracy in Canada makes it abundantly clear the political engagement within Canada’s food movements regarding land issues and Indigenous rights required to fully address Indigenous food security is either absent or, at best, underdeveloped (Cidro et al. 2015; Desmarais and Whitman 2014; Matties 2016; Ray et al. 2019; Rotz 2017; Whetung 2019). Food democracy in my view requires us to move beyond fostering sustaining production principles at the farm level, building regional distribution at the foodshed level to focus on the political economy of food systems (Clapp 2017; Escobar 1998).
The diverse and distinct Nations whose economies and governance systems that predate the occupation of N. America teach us that economics of dominance and control are unsustaining, whereas economies built on gifting, sharing, reciprocity, co-operation and mutual aid are sustaining. In light of the increasingly visible failure of “free markets” to buffer social shocks and economic shocks simultaneously, research exploring Anishnaabe regenerative economics may have a new audience.
An Indigenist approach addresses erasure of Anishnaabe research paradigms from the evidence base, and re-orient conversations about forests in the Robinson Huron Treaty Territory within the values system of Anishnaabek Nations rather than the values system of the Crown (Goodchild 2020; McGregor 2018; Alexiuk 2013; Martin and Mirraboopa 2003; Simpson 2004; Wilson 2007).
The three bodies of literature at the centre of this inquiry – food democracy, Indigenous environmental governance, and sustainable forest management – build on insights from socio-ecological systems complexity and resilience research. Socio-ecological systems or SES are bio-geo-physical units and the related social institutions and agents within them (McCarthy et al. 2011). Ostrom’s early work in SES (Ostrom 1999) complemented her work in developing commons theory—which is foundational in the food commons literature (Vivero Pol et al. 2019). New frameworks, like adaptive capacity (Armitage 2005), seek to support communities to build resilience as they deal with impacts of ‘development’, where resilience is capacity of a SES to absorb stresses and maintain function. Resilience is neither good nor bad, but rather about staying power (Walker and Salt 2006). The forest ecology literature is rich with SES theory. Even within the commodity-driven approach to forestry, SES begun to impact the way “conventional” forestry is being practiced. Other SES concepts such as resilience, panarchy, and adaptive management are being explored in mainstream practice (LeBlanc 2014; Armitage et al. 2011; Plummer et al. 2012). SES also inform the developing conceptualizations of food as a commons and food democracy in Canada (DeShutter 2018; Pettenati et al. 2019; Prost et al. 2018; Schlosberg 2004; Martorell et al. 2019).
1.1.1 Gaps in knowledge:
- Political ecology of food systems in Canada largely ignores land rights and title
- Calculation of benefits to ag sector from historical and contemporary genocide
- Land dispossession and food insecurity linkages require further articulation
- Centering Nishnaabewin Theory/ Anishnaabe Gikendaasowin in the evidence base and thus decision-making
I engage Indigenist researchers and publications to examine tensions between commodification and commons approaches to land management. Anishnaabe gikendaasowin (knowledge) has long recognized concepts socio-ecological systems researchers are only in the past few decades articulating (McGregor 2018; Simpson 2004; Manning 2017). My research program seeks to further develop the Tri-Governance framework (Vivero Pol 2017) for collaboration in Nation to Nation contexts without dislocating Anishnaabe gikendaasowin (knowledge). Further context for this research is the contribution the final products can make towards an emerging theory of food democracy, where food citizenship is praxis through which diverse, democratic, regenerative, sustaining food systems are not threatened (Vivero Pol et al., 2019; Raworth 2017). Shifting towards food as a commons based on customary and contemporary experiences could 1) address obligations Canada has under the treaties that are currently unmet (Diabo, 2018; Manuel and Derrickson 2015; Venne 2017); 2) increase socio-ecological resilience for all living in these territories in the face of catastrophic climate breakdown (Raworth 2017); and 3) build forest health for future generations to benefit.
1.1.2 Tri-Centric Governance Model: Settler Colonial Context
Canada’s food movements’ call for poly-centric governance frameworks echoes the call for such frameworks to usher in an era of food-as-commons (De Schutter et al. 2018). These shifts in food governance away from commodification may have parallels in Anishnaabek environmental governance, however euro-centric conceptualizations like property regimes and externalization of an inanimate “nature” (Escobar 1998; Andree et al, 2019) make a collaboration or collective approach to food commons in Canada challenging.
The tri-centric governance model proposed for food commons (Vivero Pol 2013) requires adaptation to the Canadian context where in addition to a triangulated commons — government — private enterprise relationship, the Nation to Nation relationships built on treaties are prioritized and respected in a governance model aimed at climate and food justice.
A tangible shift in western science-based research is the introduction of Ecosystems-based Management or EBS -- a response to the rapid deforestation of the global south that began in earnest in the latter half of the 20th Century. A move towards ecosystems-based management has been championed by scientists and policy makers who seek to recognize forest values beyond timber commodities (Miller 2008; Lertzman and Vredenburg 2005; Corntassel 2008).
environmental goods and services (EG&S) are an essential provision of forests across the globe, thanks to interdisciplinary research efforts and governance reports including the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, the UNDP Equator Initiative and other efforts (Berkes and Davidson-Hunt 2006:35). Climate change figures prominently in EBM discussions of forestry within Ontario’s SFM policy framework and regulations, which acknowledge that the way Ontario’s Crown forests are managed influences both atmospheric carbon, and the carbon stored in trees and harvested wood products (OMNRF 2017; ECO 2014).
Parallels with global food systems are everywhere in this research. For many decades, yield maximization and replacement of diverse forests with plantations was an unquestioned approach. Adoption of western conceptualizations of an ecosystem begin to address some of the complexities of nested self-organizing Holarchic open systems, or SOHOS, which linear taxonomies overlook.
While Diabo and other Indigenist thinkers and practitioners reject western conceptualizations of management, other Indigenous scholars, like Miller (2008), would embrace SES-infused, IKS-leaning approaches that accepts the re-orientation in the western tradition towards ecosystems-based management as complimentary approaches.
1.1.3 Adaptive Co-Management: An Indigenist Analysis
Adaptive Co-Management has been one theory of change that has moved from theory to practice as an alternative strategy to exploitative resource extraction that has dominated Indigenous-Canada relations for centuries. Adaptive co-management takes the learning of adaptive capacity frameworks and the linking vertically and horizontally of co-management to give us adaptive co-management (Plummer et al. 2012). Development of adaptive capacity frameworks led to the implementation of the historic Ontario Sustainable Forest Management Act in 1994, engendering a shift from a prescriptive to a process orientation, and emphasizing partnership over management (Williamson and Isaac 2015, Armitage et al. 2009; Berkes and Davidson-Hunt 2006).
Indigenist scholarship suggests that, as with Treaty processes, adaptive co-management processes – while arguably better than the status quo -- are shaped by the terms of the Crown or industry and take place within the dominant neoliberal market economy. In Adaptive co-management arrangements, the power never rests with Indigenous partners, and these processes too often treat Indigenous knowledge as an input substitute – commodifies knowledge keepers (McGregor 2008; Corntassel 2014). The assumed and exercised authority to own or sell, manage or define resources within indigenous territories is held by a select few powerful stakeholders, usually represented by government and industry. Indigenous peoples collaborating under such conditions do not hold power equally. As such, bringing Indigenous knowledge systems into these governance treats Elders and others’ knowledge as an input substitute within the dominant framing, data units that can be simply adapted into non-Indigenous knowledge systems:
“Western paradigms are the central structure of virtually every forest management decision-making process, and thus Anishnaabe people find themselves constrained to land use discussions governed by Western paradigms in which meaning is either at best lost, or at worst is used to disadvantage those who shared their information. The entire enterprise of co-management is assimilative.” (McGregor 2008:303)
McGregor describes this commodification of Elders as the assumption that aspects of Elders’ knowledge can be mined and directly incorporated in Western knowledge systems (McGregor 2010:119). Often, Indigenous nations are entering into agreements because the federal government and provincial counterparts refuse to acknowledge UNDRIP’s requirement for a truly Free, Prior and Informed Consent or FPIC, as was addressed in my second scoping paper. Co-management within the context of commercial forestry that purports to take in IKS is in my view of the literature becomes a matter of ticking a check box. These processes are not insignificant, and remain necessary, however they fail to address the underlying sustainability issues and tokenize the knowledge systems upon which Indigenous economies were built, causing further harm and erasure.
The governance systems arising from settler colonialism relies on western science-based materialist evidence to establish knowledge, inform policy, and argue legalities. In my view, validation of western science-based knowledge as the dominant paradigm at the modern University is directly connected to the colonial system of governance that gives rise to the institution itself. In such an environment, an Anishnaabe paradigm is likely to live under the ‘scientific gaze’. Knowledge generated and research conducted about forest health within an Anishnaabe paradigm is subjugated to western scientific knowledge rather than taken as independently valid and on its own terms with an evidence base legitimately determined through its own logics and processes – and thus important knowledge fails to become part of the dominant culture’s scholarly evidence base.
1.1.4 Food democracy, Indigenous environmental governance, and sustainable forestry
Forest and food policies are made in isolation of each other, obscuring food security impacts caused by a) overall deforestation; b) transitions of forest types from food forests to industrial forests; and c) land dispossession (Matties 2016; Blay-Palmer et al. 2014; Rotz 2017). Further complications for policy solutions arise as Canada’s food movements engage in calls to action that may reinforce colonial relationships (Rotz 2017; Morrison & Brynne 2016; Matties 2016). And at the centre of this situation rest political norms in Canada that disregard Treaty interpretations from Anishnaabek perspectives (Borrows 2019).
In order to overcome these policy silos, Canada’s food movements have been championing ‘joined-up food policy’ as an integrated approach (Levkoe and Sheedy 2019). Joining up policy alone will not achieve the socio-ecologically just food systems outcomes such approaches seek to create if decision-making power over resource management remains within colonial structures where commodity valuation drives the economic system.
Achieving Indigenous food sovereignty requires expanding conceptualizations of land, decolonizing spaces in the food movement, and supporting self-determination (Rollo 2019; Kuokkanen 2011; Morrison & Brynne 2016). Land claims policies prioritize large-scale resource development over sovereign rights recognized by UNDRIP “to the lands, territories and resources which they have traditionally owned, occupied or otherwise used or acquired” (Hassanein 2008). Rather than remedy ongoing injustices, modern land claims agreements and treaties re-embed colonialism as the regulating structure for Indigenous-State relations (Kuokannen 2011:287). My research fills a gap in which the conversation within land use and resource extraction as an imposition on food economies as protected in the RHTT, and addresses the colonial concept of “food” as having to do with agriculture rather than forestry.
The level of political engagement in Canada regarding land issues and Indigenous rights required to fully address Indigenous food security, while increasing in the last few years, remains underdeveloped in the broader food movements within Canada (Rotz 2017; Brant 2021; Morrison and Brynne 2016). Political economy scholars encourage food movements to move citizens’ agendas beyond fostering sustaining production principles at the farm level and building regional distribution at the foodshed level (Clapp 2017; Escobar 1998). These theories find praxis on a systemic, global governance level through La Via Campesina’s 1996 World Food Summit declaration on food sovereignty, and the People’s Food Sovereignty Statement (Wiebe, Desmarais, and Wittman 2010:3). Indigenous food sovereignty discussions force the broader food movements within Canada and the research on food commons in particular to engage Indigenous rights conversations – from calls for land back to reclamation of control over territories through the implementation of UNDRIP.
Yet Research that integrates Indigenous perspectives on Indigenous food sovereignty is emergent and as such has yet to fully develop an analysis of vested interests within Canada pushing back on conceptualization of food sovereignty and cooptation of concepts with which food movements are still struggling to articulate and embrace (Blay-Palmer et al. 2014). Desmarais and Wittman (2014) offers an important document marking a shift in the food systems research, relocating the food democracy conversation in Canada within a First Nations-farmer-foodie nexus.
The research space for Indigenous voices within Canada’s food movement has focused largely, though certainly not exclusively, on the crucial work addressing crises that are immediate: food security, diabetes and other food systems illnesses, and clean water to name a few (LeBlanc 2014; Brant 2021). Greater efforts must be made to connect Canada’s food systems researchers with the research on Indigenous land dispossession and lands (Rotz 2017; Whyte 2021). My PhD program will produce research contributing to the literature connecting land dispossession and imposition of the Indian Act and Indigenous food sovereignty that will speak to both forestry and food systems researchers, bridging this research that ought to be more regularly in conversation.
The incompatibilities between food democracy, Indigenous environmental governance, and sustainable forest management can be in part attributed to the disconnect between time frames in Western science-based paradigms, and the ecological and intergenerational paradigms in Indigenist thinking (Joseph 2021; Whyte 2021). Disruption of Anishnaabek management cycles for over 170 years of the Robinson Huron Treaty and to a large extent in the nearly 200 year period of colonial upheaval that preceded, have impacted forest health and stand make-up across the territory. These forests have not benefitted from regenerative practices, such as using fire to create disturbance and thus regeneration, as these were banned by Canadian governments as wasteful and dangerous (McGregor 2014). Without an Indigenist analysis, the time frame of western science-based research and the baselines are informed by Settler contexts of months and years, rather than decades and centuries.
1.2 Research Goals
My research program has three goals. My research program contributes towards an emerging theory of food democracy, where food citizenship is praxis through which diverse, democratic, regenerative, sustaining food systems are not threatened (Wilkins, 2005; Raworth 2017). My research program also contributes to the field of ecological economics that protects and elevates Anishnaabe Gikendaasowin and by extension, Indigenous knowledge systems, as thought leadership for the ecological economics era (Goodchild 2020; McGregor 2018; Borrows 2019). Lastly, all manuscripts and work done during this SSHRC Doctoral Fellowship will have a community component. In what ways does this research and the time Anishnaabemowin speakers give me benefit and forward the communities' needs? These goals will be articulated within each paper as a SOCC or significant original contribution to community.
My scholarly goal is to contribute towards an emerging theory of food democracy, where food citizenship is praxis through which diverse, democratic, regenerative, sustaining food systems are not threatened (Wilkins, 2005; Raworth 2017; Rotz 2017; DeSchutter 2018). Specifically, my contribution re-frames concepts of Canada’s food systems beyond agriculture to include broad territories and waters that have for hundreds and in most cases for thousands of years sustained the First Nations, Metis, and Inuit for whom inherent title and rights are recognized over these lands (LeBlanc 2014; Simpson 2004). Currently, the TEK Elders Group seek to end the practice of arial spraying in the territory, and to establish their leadership on environmental governance in the territory recognizing the epistemological plurality demanded of Nation to Nation relationships.
1.2.1 Contribution to Knowledge
I make an original contribution to knowledge by adapting the tri-governance model found in the food commons literature (Vivero Pol 2017) and the doughnut economics (Raworth 2017) framework to the Robinson Huron Treaty context, in order to analyze recent changes to the 1994 Sustainable Forestry Act in light of Treaty rights holders’ food sovereignty guarantees enshrined in the Treaty. The merging of these frameworks with the Robinson Huron Treaty as it is understood by Indigenist scholars and Traditional knowledge keepers challenges the epistemological singularity that currently informs Canada’s extractivist approach to land management that currently compromises the health and well-being of the Anishnnaabek Nation.
This work offers a significant and original contribution to the literature by re-contextualizing and modifying a novel conceptualization of a Tri-Centric Governance framework utilized in contemporary food commons scholarship (Vivero Pol, 2017). This new conceptualization of Vivero Pol’s framework will reflect the critical analysis of Treaty agreements, Crown actions, and Anishnaabek food systems outcomes offered by Indigenous scholars. Implementing theories of decolonizing methodologies further contributes to knowledge by opening possibilities for governance structures that break free from the epistemic framing of commercial forest planning (a monocultural perspective aligning with commodification).
In developing this research profile, I have no intention that my work will produce or contribute original knowledge to traditional or Indigenous knowledge (TK or IK). Instead, it seeks to understand the theoretical and methodological foundations of Anishnaabe epistemological and theoretical approaches to satisfy two inquiries connected to the research agenda. First, I am inquiring about the various Anishnaabek interpretations of the 1850 Robinson Huron Treaty. My research largely concerns the lands surrounding the northern Great Lakes Region, with particular attention to the Robinson-Huron Treaty Territories. Second, I am concerned with the Anishnaabe paradigm expressing the relationship between themselves and the Beings with whom they share territory. This inquiry will position my primary research in partnership with the TEK Elders Group to produce useful research in support of sustaining forests in the region.
1.2.2 Reflexive Statement – Researcher Positionality
For the purposes of the research project ,“Towards food democracy: questioning commodification and commoning in the Robinson Huron Treaty Territory”, boundaries across three bodies of knowledge are formed to prevent tangential inquiry that doesn’t directly contribute towards the current research project. An examination of three bodies of literature – food democracy, sustainable forest management, and Indigenous environmental governance – informed my views and perspectives in regards to question formation for this PhD research program. My positionality centers Indigenous scholarship and epistemologies in each research stream. My focus has been on the Indigenous resurgence literature in each of the themed areas, in which a nuanced differentiation between commercial and regenerative practices do not run neatly along Indigenous – settler Canadian lines.
My analysis will derive from political ecology frameworks for coding and assessing the data across themes and sub-themes, and my orienting theories of change also derive from political ecology (Escobar, 1999; Clapp, 2017; Shiva, 2010).
1.2.3 Decolonization theory: reflexivity
LeBlanc (2014) suggests decolonization is a process of reflexivity, a notion popularized in sociology by Bourdieu. For Knafo, reflexivity is stating an ethical commitment to self-awareness, an effort to come to terms with the difficulty that we have to grasp the historical and social location of knowledge (Knafo 2016:14). Such an approach can be problematic when this ceases to be an epistemological exercise and becomes an ontological one.
Reflexive practice requires the practitioner to be able to distinguish the subject of inquiry— which is the self— in an authentic way (LeBlanc 2014). Reflexivity arose from the post-positivist debate that sought to address the new shared awareness that in international relations, there is no “neutral” from which to gaze upon research. For Knafo (2016), reflexivity was more akin to stating an ethical commitment to self-awareness than developing a concrete reflexive methodology. Knafo challenges Bourdieu, the sociologist who is credited with conceiving of reflexivity as a practice in International Relations, suggesting our biases are not rooted within positions they occupy inherently.
The effort to overcome social conditioning and identify bias is directly connected to conceptualization of the nature of knowledge, as an effort to come to terms with the difficulty that we have to grasp the historical and social location of knowledge (Knafo 2016:14). Where reflexivity fails for Knafo is when it ceases to be an epistemological exercise and becomes an ontological one.
Extracting Indigenous Knowledge Systems from their political contexts denies Indigenous land dispossession and genocide upon which Canada legitimates itself (Tuck and Yang 2012; Whyte 2021; McGregor 2021). Because Anishnaabe knowledge systems do not separate ethics and cosmology from “science”, such knowledge in western science-based paradigms may be received with skepticism or mischaracterized as lacking robustness (Borrows 2019; Smith 2012). Western science-based research often excludes ethical conversations – the right relationships with all Creation conversations – from the evidence base. There is an unspoken primacy of human needs or agendas within western science-based paradigms, such that my experience studying industrial food systems suggests considerations of non-human life are often an add on feature to research when considered at all.
For a polity like Canada that claims to be concerned with liberal democratic values and the rule of law, decolonization of institutions ought to be a top priority. To decolonize research requires recognition of “research as a site of struggle between the ways of knowing and self interest of the settler West, and the ways of resisting by the Other” (Smith 2012). While developing this research profile I have internalized the warnings of various aboriginal scholars to avoid romanticizing a pan-Indegineity, or representing epistemologies or theories as pan-Indigenous. Such treatments undermine Indigenous resurgence (Simpson 2017), avoid difficult topics and contestations within Aboriginal communities, and re-inforces uni-dimensional readings of Indigenous narrative traditions as uniquely authentic, integral, or wholesome.
Decolonizing research methodology requires recognizing research from Western scientific tradition that seeks to quantify has hurt Indigenous communities and such approaches are not trusted. Researchers develop methods that honour knowledge holders as peers rather than as subjects in the research in question (LeBlanc, 2014). Smith’s (1999; 2012) seminal book Decolonizing Methodologies provides a theoretical basis for establishing an Indigenous research agenda that involves four pillars— healing, decolonization, transformation, and mobilization — providing a foundation as well as the connectivity needed to engage relational processes (Alexiuk 2013). During the primary research phase, I have been in collaboration with Anishnaabe-kwe and PhD candidate Sue Chiblow (Garden River First Nation) whose guidance has informed the design of my field work.
The call within Indigenous scholarship to decolonize methodology is shaping my approach to epistemological validity. I’ve gained awareness that my tendency and delight as an academic in contrasting and comparing two approaches when applied to Indigenous knowledge (IK) re-inforces colonial relationships (LeBlanc, 2014; Simpson 2004). While Bordieu’s sociological framework of reflexivity can serve a role in decolonizing research in international relations, reflexive practice itself can be a trap (Tuck and Yang 2012; Knafo, 2016; LeBlanc, 2014). Without doing the corresponding work to expand my conceptualizations to engage Indigenous epistemological paradigms and theories as inherently legitimate without need of validation, these positionalities may obscure my own biases and reproduce the colonialist paradigms in which I operate and which privilege me relative to Indigenous scholars whose works I quote (Pictou 2019; Knafo 2016; McGregor 2010). Further, development of relationships with Indigenous scholars and amplifying their work directly is a necessary part of this work.
1.2.4 Epistemological Pluralism and Indigenist Research
Epistemological pluralism (EP), embraced by SES, offers practitioners transparent and intentional negotiation of the researcher’s values, in contrast with traditional approaches to research in which assumptions regarding collaborators’ values go unexplored and un-named (Miller et al. 2008). By including multiple ways of knowing within the research design, distinct and varied insights inform the research resulting in a richer expression of complexity that may shift in composition depending on the circumstances (Miller at al., 2008). As such, maintaining reflexivity as decolonizing methodology, and as an adaptive management process as part of the research design will be essential. Using Khagrham et al. (2010) taxonomy, the theory type I will be working with is understanding, the research strategy is comparative and the philosophy of knowledge I am employing is interpretivist.
Epistemology is how we know what is real (Wilson 2007:33). Epistemology and ontology are connected in that one’s ontological conclusions/ assumptions shape the epistemology. “What I believe to be “real” is going to impact on the way I think about that “reality”.” Wilson’s distinction here can be misconstrued into a binary approach to science and Indigenous knowledge systems. Kim Tallbear’s January 2021 lectures at University of Alberta point to the need to recognize from whose paradigmatic vantage point is such a binary present, and what shifts or changes in our understandings when we eschew the binary in exchange for an unabashedly Indigenous and -- in the case of the works I have chosen to engage -- Anhsinaabek epistemological and ontological paradigms.
Indigenous Knowledge Systems are not artefacts of history, but ongoing and living bodies of knowledge that are both regenerated and created. IKS encompasses areas of importance to society and that impact quality of life (Tharakan 2017). Indigenist theory is a separate concept from IKS. “Indigenist theory reflects a philosophical orientation in which achieving the rights of Indigenous Peoples draws upon the tradition and intellect of Indigenous Peoples to critique philosophical, social, political and economic hegemony” (Simpson 2004:367).
The importance of situating this work in an Indigenist paradigm is that such a lens produces a vastly different interpretation of the same literature as say a person situated in a Monarchist analysis, or a neoliberal economics paradigm. Indigenist analysis would not be “Indigenous knowledge” creation without further context and community engagement with that knowledge. Subsequent to Wilson, Indigenist scholars have taken a greater sense of ownership of what constitutes Indigenous knowledge, departing somewhat from Wilson’s early characterization of Indigenist paradigms. For Wilson, it is insufficient that research be “Indigenous” alone without contesting colonial paradigms and assumptions leaving behind dominant paradigms and pursuing Indigenous ones. (Wilson 2007:38).
My work will seek to accommodate the following perspectives that characterize Indigenist research: Distinct and varied modes of Indigenous methodology; Resurgence of legal traditions; Research has a justice-orientation; and Centre Anishnaabe research that is narrative, experiential, and personal, shared as an oral tradition and coded in stories, teachings, beliefs, values, and songs.
