Destabilizing the Settler Academy: The Decolonial Effects of Indigenous Methodologies

[...]in Decolonizing Methodologies, Linda Tuhiwai Smith contrasts imperial research about Indigenous people and their lands-an enterprise that Indigenous peoples have challenged across time and space-with Kaupapa Maori in Aotearoa New Zealand as a body of knowledge that interlinks Maori across their differences and that exceeds the capacity of the academy to contain it.2 Similarly, Margaret Kovach, Shawn Wilson, and Lina Sunseri model how Oneida, Anishinaabe, and other Indigenous researchers work within and remake Indigenous traditions of knowledge and relationship, without presuming their commonality but rather by inviting their interconnection. 3 JeffCorntassel grounds such work in the practice of "insurgent education," in which "discomforting moments of Indigenous truth-telling that challenge the colonial status quo... inspire activism and reclamation of Indigenous histories and homelands. "4 For Corntassel and Taiaiake Alfred, such work feeds Indigenous "resurgence," in which knowledge and action invoke distinctive modes of Indigenous governance.5 In these modes, Indigenous methodologies trouble their own "recognition" by settlers-for, as Glen Coulthard argues, "recognition" authorizes settlers to define and manage indigeneity as a difference that can make no difference to settler rule.6 Indigenous methodologies in fact disturb the metaphysics of colonial rule, not only in the academy, and model a way of life that draws Indigenous and non-Indigenous people in interrelationship to work for decolonization.