Community-Based and Collaborative Research

Maori scholar Linda Tuhiwai Smith describes research as the “dirtiest word in Indigenous languages” (2012). In doing so, she is referring to both the embeddedness of research in European Colonialism, as well as the specific ways research has done harm to Indigenous Peoples. Research had been used as a tool to justify colonial violence, land acquisition and political power. For examples, see Research Harms, next lesson. Research has also involved unethical procedures that harm Indigenous Peoples and that do not involve consent, such as a series of experiments in the 1940s and 1950s that involved withholding food and dental care from Indian residential school students in Canada to observe the effects of these deficits without informing students or their parents. These experiments continued even after children died (Mosby 2013, MacDonald et al. 2014). While we now have review boards, including Institutional Review Boards, that protect the rights of research participants, much research has continued to privilege the advancement of western scientific knowledge over community needs and benefits. In response, researchers have adopted approaches including Indigenous Research Methodologies (Smith 2012, Wilson 2008, Kovach 2009), Community-Based Participatory Research (CBPR) (LaVeaux and Christopher 2009, Christopher 2017), Participatory Action Research (PAR) (McTaggart 1991), co-production (Norstrom 2020), decolonial research (Lightfoot 2017), and Indigenous-led research (Austin 2019, Latulippe and Klenk 2020 ). These approaches re-distribute power in the research process towards Indigenous Peoples, scholars and nations. In doing so they aim to restructure the research process in a way that privileges the needs of communities, including Indigenous communities, and provides direct benefits to communities.

Much has been written in the literature on the best practices for community-engaged research with Indigenous Peoples (e.g., Fisher and Ball 2003, Matson et al. 2021). The phrase “nothing about us without us” provides helpful guidance on what sort of projects would require community engagement– any project about Indigenous Peoples should include those people in all stages of the research process. Commonly cited best practices include building relationships with community members early on, specifically before defining the research questions or aims, so that each stage of the process involves collaborative decision making with researchers and community partners. In other words, research questions would be co-developed with the community or identified specifically by community member collaborators. Other commonly-cited best practices include cultural humility, respect for community timelines, community benefit, attention to data ownership and data sovereignty, as well as sharing back of research results. Common barriers cited to following these practices include academic timeframes and funding cycles (Doering et al. 2022), funding agency values anathema to community values and lack of transparency in peer review (Street, Baum, & Anderson 2007;), lack of proper institutional training and education on these practices, and a persistent culture of exploitative research in academia, Including violations of Intellectual property rights (Tuhiwai Smith 1999; Gibbs 2001).