Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples (review)

This is a book which attempts to do something more than deconstructing Western scholarship simply by our own retelling, or by sharing indigenous horror stories about research. In a decolonizing framework, deconstruction is part of a much larger intent. . . . It has not been written as a technical book about research for people who talk the language of research, but as a book which situates research in a much larger historical, political and cultural context and then examines its critical nature within those dynamics.

Smith, Introduction to Decolonizing Methodologies

Linda Tuhiwai Smith is associate professor and director of the International Research Institute for Maori and Indigenous Education at the University of Auckland. This book is an extremely important addition to recent debates over the ethics of research in Indigenous communities. Moreover, its implications reach far beyond this debate to offer readers an eye-opening critique of Western hegemony over the processes that define, shape, and name the world. Smith has intended this book to serve as a guide mainly for Indigenous researchers in that it addresses the fact that generally the academic environment and the literature on research practices are alien and irrelevant to the particularities of the experiences of Indigenous researchers. However, the book is also a must-read for anyone conducting research with Native peoples in that it provides a framework for understanding the formation of knowledge—a key purpose of research—which will lead non-Indigenous researchers towards more ethically responsible, efficient, and appropriate research.

The book is divided into two main sections. The first sets out the groundwork for the underlying philosophy of the book, explaining and connecting the concepts and processes of imperialism, colonialism, history, writing and theory. The second part provides the building blocks for setting and articulating Indigenous research agendas. Overall, six key concerns may be identified as the interconnecting threads that tie together Smith's several overlapping webs (or narratives) of human global interaction, with which research has been, and is, intimately linked. These are the following imperatives: 1) to situate and conceptualize research within its wider genealogy of Western imperialist and colonialist processes; 2) to contextualize the formation of knowledge in relation to power dynamics; 3) to connect the power dynamics of the interfacing processes of political, economic, cultural, and social change (and bureaucratic and corporate entrenchment); 4) to critically deconstruct the notion of decolonization; 5) to understand not only the survival necessity, but the power processes involved in Indigenous renaming, reclaiming, and redefining of concepts of research; and 6) to devise and articulate research agendas from Indigenous perspectives.

In tracing the genealogy of imperial and colonial processes, Smith connects the relationships between the production of knowledge and the hegemonic authority of three elements: history, writing, and theory. This triad forms the basis of knowledge as it is legitimated in academic processes, which in turn, defines the contours of research. Smith provides a very accessible account of the power dynamics interfacing between the conventionally defined arenas of political, economic, cultural, and social changes, while cautioning the reader about the ways in which these very categories are themselves Eurocentrically charged. The story sheds a great deal of light on the layered meanings behind why Indigenous people are suspicious of and reject social science research. She demonstrates that to Indigenous peoples, these power dynamics are understood almost intuitively, based in their shared historical experience. However, Smith is careful to ground her claims in the specificity of her own Maori experience, acknowledging the variety of ways in which power may be constituted locally by Indigenous peoples. Herein lies one of the strengths in this work. Smith does not simply contrast or polarize Western and Indigenous concepts of power; she illustrates how these are inextricably linked, and therefore makes a significant contribution to critically situating local research and researchers in relation to global processes. For this reason, Smith's work is...