Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples, and: Peace, Power and Righteousness: An Indigenous Manifesto (review)

Decolonization

As first-year graduate students at Arizona State University, we as a group explored the concept of decolonization in a graduate seminar entitled "Decolonizing Indigenous History," taught by Dr. Angela Cavender Wilson. Through this class, we had the opportunity to read Linda Tuhiwai Smith's Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples and Taiaiake Alfred's Peace, Power, Righteousness: An Indigenous Manifesto. These books have had a profound and fundamental effect on the way we will proceed with our research throughout graduate school, as well as our research and teaching methods.

Before we could begin to grapple intellectually with this theory, our class had to come up with definitions of both colonization and decolonization. Through our discussions, we realized that our prior education provided us with a remarkably benign definition of colonization, defining this as an era that had long since past and bears no real weight on our current realities. Franz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth discusses the methods that colonized peoples must use to fight their colonizers and overthrow the colonial system. When we applied this discussion to our situation in the United States, we realized that the majority of the people currently living in this country are colonizers who, whether consciously or unconsciously, exploit Indigenous land and culture. Most of us had no illusions about the United States' role as an imperialistic nation, but many believed these actions occurred abroad, not domestically. Only two of us in the class study Native American history, and the rest of us were aware that history had treated our country's Indigenous populations unfairly but did not recognize their status as a colonized people. We did not comprehend the extent to which colonizers had oppressed Indigenous peoples here in North America.

Taiaiake Alfred argues that we must understand the various levels of colonization in order to establish the necessity of decolonization.¹ From our readings in this seminar, we now define colonization as the process of forcing one's own culture on another by means of subjugation and exploitation. Armed with this understanding of colonization, we subscribe to Haunani-Kay Trask's definition of decolonization being, "a collective resistance to colonialism including cultural assertions, efforts towards self-determination, and armed struggle."² Yet applying decolonization in our careers as academics is much more specific, therefore we will employ Smith's definition, which structures our purpose and methods of research. She states that decolonizing research "is about centering our [Indigenous] concerns and world views, and then coming to know and understand theory and research from our own perspectives and for our own purposes."³ This new understanding of colonization and these definitions of decolonization will dramatically affect our careers as academics, both in our research topics and methodologies as well as our teaching styles and standards.

Research

As mentioned above, two of us are working specifically within Native American history. Two others will be examining ethnic history and theory, and two others are public historians. Our new and evolving understanding of decolonization will affect our research in these fields.

For all of us as graduate students, Smith's ground-breaking approach to decolonization methodologies and open discussion of research as "inextricably linked to European imperialism and colonialism" affects the shape of our research.⁴ As Smith asserts, "the need to tell our stories remains the powerful imperative of a powerful form of resistance."⁵ However, Smith cautions against the Western paradigm of research and history because it is "mostly about power. It is the story of the powerful and how they became powerful, and then how they use their power to keep them in...