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Decolonizing Methodologies:
Research and Indigenous Peoples, 2nd edition
by Linda Tuhiwai Smith (1999/2012)
Introduction
Linda Tuhiwai Smith writes the book from two intersecting perspectives: as a scholar/researcher and as an
indigenous and colonized Maori woman; she deliberately privileges the latter. From the outset, Tuhiwai
Smith challenges conventional epistemology/ontology and Western research methods, suggesting that
research has traditionally favored imperialistic ways of knowing. She asserts that the word research “is
probably one of the dirtiest words in the indigenous world’s vocabulary” (p. 1).
The Introduction lays bare Tuhiwai Smith’s motivations for writing the book, which can be divided into two
primary parts. The first part of the book deconstructs Western scholarship, sharing indigenous histories and
stories of research and being researched. The second part wrestles with ways indigenous communities
might interrupt the political and social systems and attitudes that perpetuate poor conditions for their own
people. Tuhiwai Smith suggests that indigenous peoples have acquiesced to imperial definitions too long,
but she hopes to re-define marginalized people and places as “spaces of resistance and hope” (4). The
second part of the book also examines approaches researchers might use that are more “respectful, ethical,
sympathetic, and useful” (p. 9).
Part One
Chapter 1: Imperialism, History, Writing and Theory
The modern indigenous experience is framed by imperialism. Literary scholars had already been articulating
well the effects of colonialism on language, culture, landscape, and story, but when Tuhiwai Smith
composed the first edition of Decolonizing Methodologies in 1999, she felt imperialism, though disrupted in
literature, was continuing to hurt indigenous peoples elsewhere. The talk of the colonizers among the
colonized, she writes, infiltrated every aspect of colonized cultures, from politics to humor, but
imperialism’s influence persisted even among its critics. Chapter 1 contextualizes four common (but often
invisible) ways the ideas of indigenous peoples are expressed: imperialism, history, writing, and theory.
Tuhiwai Smith chose these four concepts because they tend to be the most problematic for indigenous
peoples and they underpin the practices of researchers working with indigenous cultures. She aims to bring
the underlying assumptions and motivations of researchers to the fore.
Imperialism
Christopher Columbus isn’t the first or only figure, but he is the most prominent to represent an imperial
“legacy of suffering and destruction” (p. 21). In imperial literature, explorers and conquerors are celebrated
as heroes. Indigenous peoples, however, record a different experience. The explorer James Cook, for
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example, is known among indigenous Pacific Islanders for bringing disease, capitalism, Christianity,
predatory individualism and colonizing settlers into the South Pacific and into a culture better off without
the military, imperial administrators, and missionaries Cook’s “discovery” brought to the islands. Privileging
and valorizing explorers dismisses the dehumanizing effects of conquest.
Imperialism is used in at least four ways: as economic expansion; as subjecation of ‘other’; as an idea or
spirit with various forms of realization; and as a discursive field of knowledge (p.22).
History
Critiquing their status as Other, indigenous peoples have in recent decades aimed to rewrite and reright
their position in history, understanding the have been excluded, under-represented, and/or
misrepresented in various historical accounts. In self-determined and restorative efforts, indigenous
peoples are telling and recording their own versions of their stories with their own ways of naming and
knowing. Postmodernism has helped give credence among non-indigenous researchers to contested
histories, a long-held tradition among indigenous peoples. Still, indigenous histories are held hostage or
suspect in a Western system that values a particular way of history-making and history-telling, so that
indigenous histories are demoted to “oral traditions rather than histories” (p. 34).
Writing
While Tuhiwai Smith acknowledges that many of the ways of knowing—reading, writing, talking, observing,
experimenting—are as valued among indigenous peoples as academics, at least one Maori writer, Patricia
Grace, submits that ‘Books are Dangerous’ because they don’t reinforce indigenous peoples’ values, they
suggest indigenous people don’t exist when they only tell of non-indigenous peoples; they may include
accounts of indigenous peoples that are untrue; and they may be negative or insensitive to indigenous
peoples and values. Tuhiwai Smith supports Grace’s claims saying that her experience is that she doesn’t
recognize her people in the accounts of them in academic writing.
Writing Theory
“Research adds to, is generated from, creates or broadens our theoretical understandings. Indigenous
peoples have been, in many ways, oppressed by theory” because traditional research theories have
unsympathetically oppressed or distorted the indigenous experience (p. 39). However, Tuhiwai Smith finds
hope in anthropological theories that aim to understand and validate all experience within a culture,
including, for example, farmers and sick people. She sides with Kathie Irwin who believes that theoretical
tools for understanding indigenous peoples needs to be developed by the people who understand what it
means to be an indigenous person. Indigenous people must appropriate power over themselves, and “Real
power lies with those who design the tools—it always has” (p. 40).
Chapter 2: Research through Imperial Eyes
Western research privileges empirical and positivist ways of knowing, reducing understanding to
measurable units. From an indigenous perspective, academic research (read: white, outsider) is more than
positivist, often exploitative, and insensitive to different cultural orientations and values. Academic
research is embedded in “highly specialized forms of language” and “structures of power” (p. 44).
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Tuhiwai Smith argues that Western research “draws from an ‘archive’ of knowledge and systems” that go
beyond Western science into a system now called “the West,” which Stuart Hall says classifies societies into
categories; condenses complex images of Other through representation; makes comparisons through a
normative or standard model; and ranks societies through evaluation criteria. In this way, societies and
cultures can be easily coded.
Tuhiwai Smith demonstrates ways that Western language and understanding of language problematizes
translations and interpretations of indigenous language, particularly in understanding gendered and racial
issues. Furthermore, Western concepts of time and space are significantly different from indigenous
concepts, which are often lost in translation (not just linguistic renaming, but also the material, social,
political, and practical [mis]interpretations).
Chapter 3: Colonizing Knowledges
Imperialism isn’t simply a matter of invading peoples and places, conquest also involves raiding. Much like
colonizers might extract raw materials for their own benefit, colonizers also loot, appropriate, and
distribute knowledge for their own benefit. The Enlightenment (aka modernity) facilitated the search for
new knowledges and organized systemic means for “representing” and “researching” (cataloging)
indigenous experience, commodifying knowledge (p. 62) and giving the colonizers what Edward Said calls
“positional superiority” (p. 61).
Indigenous peoples and the places they inhabited were simply thought to be un-discovered by explorers,
as though to be ‘known,’ a thing had to be known by the Western elite and intellectually reasoned or
scientifically classified into being. Indigenous experience, then, was nothing more than fragmented artifacts
that were reported (read: objectified and authored) according to Western terms and systems. After all,
objects of science do not have voices and therefore can neither contribute to nor contest the scientists’
understanding. Thus, any discovery observed and catalogued becomes the intellectual property of the
researcher, belonging then to the “cultural archive and body of knowledge of the West” (p. 64). Writing of
ethnography, James Clifford noted that experience observed is temporal, even susceptible to decay or loss,
but experience recorded, arranged, and archived endures (p. 64), a concept that privileges the Western
archive over lived experience. We house ‘collections’ of indigenous artifacts (whether stolen, given, or
found) in museums, galleries, and libraries, often giving credit to the collector and usually without
sensitivity or attribution to the ‘collected.’
Tuhiwai Smith discusses other ways knowledge is colonized, especially in academic disciplines where
compartmentalization and boundaries prevail despite the inter-connectedness of disciplines. The
intellectual colonized are a special group she deals with, examining the ways they operate within and
between cultural boundaries.
Chapter 4: Research Adventures on Indigenous Lands
Western travelers were often called adventurers according to their own use, but indigenous peoples
observed that travelers were less interested in adventure and more interested in fulfilling some particular
mission (usually religious, scientific, or economic). However, the retelling seemed quite adventurous,
exciting, daring, and even gallant as if to inform as well as entertain Western audience, supporting, along
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the way, the notion that white experience is privileged experience (Tuhiwai Smith points to the
romanticized story of Pocahontas to illustrate this point).
Over time, informal systems for collecting information became more formal and institutionalized as a way
of giving the systems—and those designing and operating them—authority and influence. And, the more
authority and influence travelers and researchers had, the more they used their data to perpetuate
colonizing systems. For example, religious missionaries reporting home about the horrendous evils they
saw, the more funds they could collect to do God’s work. Worse, the language of good and evil became so
embedded in systems (religious, military, economic, literary, etc.) that we take for granted now the
influence of early adventurers. Tuhiwai Smith acknowledges the varied and sometimes complicated
relationship adventurers had with indigenous peoples, sometimes revered and sometimes reviled by their
home countries. Some researchers “had a deep sympathy towards the Maori people as an ideal while being
hostile towards those Maori who fell short of this construct” (p. 86).
Tuhiwai Smith discusses the influence the explorers Abel Tasman (first to record observations of Maori;
claimed they were bloodthirsty savages) and James Cook (funded by Royal Society to conduct scientific
research). Cook’s crew conducted research, recorded by Joseph Banks, which imposed and reinforced a
sense among her people of ‘the imperial gaze” (p. 83). While Westerners valued Banks’ vast knowledge, he
could only record his findings of what he didn’t know by comparing it to things he did know. Tuhiwai Smith
problematizes the very definition of knowledge, prompting the reader to consider how one describes what
is unfamiliar except by using the language of the familiar.
Tuhiwai Smith records the complicated relationship Elsdon Best had with the Maori, especially the Tuhoe,
whom he studied meticulously. Best was a New-Zealand-born colonial official (working as a land surveyor)
whose primary research was conducted in the late 1880s and early 1900s. She discusses his research
practices, which were valued by Westeners and sensitive to indigenous groups. Much of his research is
published and his detailed notes are archived, and, as Tuhiwai Smith notes, Westerners valued the
knowledge because they could attribute it to Best, as though the researcher’s knowledge trumps the
knowledge/experience of the researched. On the other hand, Best himself was generous about admitting
his mistakes, open to discussions, and protective of the subjects of his research. In return, the Maori (for
the most part) were patient with his intense questioning.
Tuhiwai Smith discusses the rhetorical nature of the indigenous ‘problem,’ which often resulted in
colonizers relocating indigenous peoples to reserves or sweeping efforts to acculturate indigenous peoples
to colonial ways.
Chapter 5: Notes from Down Under
Tuhiwai Smith acknowledges that many would say European imperialism is in the past, having learned
lessons from our mistakes, the world is a better place; however, she also acknowledges that human rights
abuses still abound and centers of power still oppress. That isn’t to say that oppression is never met with
resistances—many indigenous people are trying to reclaim power over themselves and their lands—but the
term post-colonialism belies the current condition for the colonized and falsely suggests colonialism has
ended or disappeared. Decolonization will be—must be—a deliberate, enduring process of divesting
colonial power.
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Tuhiwai Smith describes the present conditions of her iwi (tribe), a Maori community inundated with
Western influences, especially religious churches and missionaries, American entertainment and apparel,
and multinational customs and corporations. “The geography of empire has been redrawn” (p. 101). While
we have changed the terms—e.g., replaced imperialism with globalization—the effect on culture is much
the same: communities and individuals, languages, customs, traditions, identities, and local economies—
become fragmented and lost.
But indigenous peoples have changed too; they are mobilizing alliances and strategically reclaiming their
rightful position to speak for themselves about themselves, often with new language that resists colonial
terminology. In this, Tuhiwai finds hope, but she is still troubled by those who fall prey to “the games and
machinations of a world they only partly understand” (p. 102).
Tuhiwai Smith cites several indigenous projects that demonstrate imperialism—whatever we call it—still
exists, and local knowledge is more at risk than ever before as governments, industries, science, and
medicine make invisible alternative options until the one they present seems the only one to exist. These
indigenous ‘indigenous projects’ include taking and patenting cell-lines, farming umbilical cord blood,
commodifying indigenous spirituality, constructing virtual culture as authentic culture, Americanized food
consumption, food dependency, safety dependency in a world of global terrorism, and more (see pp. 103107).
For Maori, the period of time when night transitions to day is an important time when the rituals are
performed to ensure a peaceful day; Tuhiwai describes the 500 years since Columbus as the night, and this
period of time we live in now as the important transitioning phase. The rituals performed now will
determine how settled or unsettled the future is.
Part Two
Chapters 1-4 explained why indigenous peoples distrust research and researchers. Chapter 5 demonstrated
a shift from colonizing to decolonizing (rather than post-colonizing) practices among indigenous peoples.
The following chapters focus on developments in research that have been conceived and carried out by
indigenous researchers working among indigenous communities, research that privileges indigenous
concerns, practices, and participation.
Chapter 6: The Indigenous Peoples’ Project: Setting a New Agenda
The indigenous peoples’ project recognizes the primary focus of indigenous peoples for the last 500 years
has been survival, both physical and cultural. But recent movements have prompted/promoted efforts to
decolonize. This chapter discusses two aspects of this project: the social movement of the 1960s and the
new agenda that includes indigenous research concerns.
The Maori social movement of the 1960s and ‘70s was primarily led by the younger generation resisting and
challenging the dominant hegemony, which began underground and gained attention across “multiple sites
of education, health, development, government policy and of the non-indigenous society generally” (p.
113). Tuhiwai Smith cites several dates and events of particular significance in the social uprising, noting
that while protests are important for change, they need to parallel the advancement of initiatives and
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cultural revitalization projects. Australian Aborigines, for example, didn’t gain landowning and voting rights
until the late 1960s, which required consistent and severe direct action. Protests for indigenous peoples’
rights were taking place across the globe: Spain, Norway, Moddle East, Africa, the Americas, India, Asia, and
the Pacific. This global movement provided a shared experience of sorts across cultures, an international
language of common concern, which gave impetus to “revitalization and reformulation of culture and
tradition; an increased participation in and articulate rejection of Western institutions; and a focus on
strategic relations and alliances with non-indigenous groups” (p. 114). Social and constitutional changes
cannot occur without indigenous alliances and non-indigenous supporters.
The themes that emerged during the social movements of the ‘60s and ‘70s “constitute an agenda for
action” (p. 120). The decolonizing agenda must pay attention to its “processes, approaches and
methodologies, […] critical elements of a strategic research agenda” (p. 120). Tuhiwai charts an example of
an indigenous research agenda using oceanic tides—a life-giving force in Maori culture—as a metaphor.
The four major tides are survival, recovery, development, and self-determination. The other terms describe
distinct approaches and goals of an indigenous peoples research project/program (see Fig. 6.1, p. 121).
While research as traditionally been disempowering for indigenous peoples, a new self-determined agenda
will make research empowering.
Borrowing from Kaupapa Maori practices, Tuhiwai Smith offers an ethical code of conduct for indigenous
research, translated: respect people; present yourself face-to-face; look, listen, speak; share and host
generously; be cautious; don’t trample over the mana of people; don’t flaunt your knowledge.
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Chapter 7: Articulating an Indigenous Research Agenda
Research is highly institutionalized, so it’s difficult to articulate a large-scale decolonizing agenda let alone
execute it. Simply put, self-determination requires indigenous peoples’ active participation.
Research among indigenous peoples is often called ‘projects’ for two reasons: first, ‘research’ is a dirty
word with a dirty history, and second, ‘research’ connotes scholarly expertise, but ‘projects’ is more
vernacular, inviting contribution of knowledge at a variety of levels, which is a core tenant of an indigenous
worldview (what Westerners call collaborative research, Maori call ‘Kaupapa Maori or Maori-centered
research).
The indigenous research agenda is advanced in two ways: 1) community action projects and local initiatives;
and 2) gaining space for indigenous research/studies in institutions. Tuhiwai shares some examples of
‘toxic’ experiences in the academy, but also shares successful indigenous research that can be modeled.
Done well, these two approaches are complementary rather than contemptuous. While counter-intuitive to
turn to institutions for decolonizing efforts, many in the academy are proven sympathetic and resourceful
allies.
Tuhiwai Smith offers several examples of successful approaches to community projects and academic
research, noting that processes should enable, heal, educate, be self-determining, and be informed by and
respect the community. “This is a significant challenge across the globe in terms of development as so many
communities are held hostage to expert research from the West and to models of development that negate
local and indigenous knowledge” (p. 131).
Tuhiwai Smith distinguishes between insider and outsider research and offers sound advice to ‘insiders’
doing research projects as a community member: build research-based support systems, define clear
research goals, define ‘lines of relating,’ define closure, know when it’s best for the project to say yes and
no, be ethical and critical, don’t assume personal experience is representative, don’t take for granted views
of the community, and situate research in the broader indigenous agenda. She offers her own experience
as a Maori mother and language revitalization advocate researching Maori mothers and children who had
formed a ‘language nest’ (see pp. 139-140).
Chapter 8: Twenty-five Indigenous Projects
The struggle for indigenous peoples to reclaim their cultures is one that requires a strategic and ambitious
research program, made of distinct projects with common goals. Chapter 7 briefly discusses 25 such
projects—or what we might call methodologies—with themes of survival, healing, restoration, selfdetermination, and social justice. The 25 projects aren’t exhaustive by any means, but together they
demonstrate the array of possibilities in and about indigenous research. The 25 projects can be isolated,
paired, or combined. Tuhiwai Smith explains the purpose and possible path(s) for each approach.
While a summary cannot get into each project, their names alone are quite telling: Claiming; Testimonies;
Story telling; Celebrating survival—survivance; Remembering; Indigenizing and indigenist processes;
Intervening; Revitalizing and regenerating; Connecting; Reading; Writing and theory making; Representing;
Gendering; Envisioning; Reframing; Restoring; Returning; Democratizing and indigenist governance;
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Networking; Naming; Protecting; Creating; Negotiating; Discovering the beauty of our knowledge; and
Sharing.
Tuhiwai Smith writes of the 25 projects (methodologies), “The naming of the projects listed in this chapter
was deliberate. I hope the message it gives to communities is that they have issues that matter, and
processes and methodologies that can work for them” (p. 163).
Chapter 9: Responding to the Imperatives of an Indigenous Agenda: A Case Study of Maori
Chapters 9 and 10 present a case study in indigenous research, bringing together the research concerns and
approaches raised in previous chapters. The case also represents the shift from Maori as victim or object of
research to Maori as researcher.
This chapter is divided into three distinct parts: 1) examination of the favorable conditions that led to
research involving Maori priorities, namely Western critiques of Western research (e.g. white feminism and
positivism) ; 2) discussion of relationship between Maori research and ways research is presented as ‘truth,’
with further discussion about alternative Maori claims of knowledge, views about ‘knowing,’ and
assumptions about research as an extension of knowledge; and 3) exploration of the value and limits of the
Western approach to ‘culturally sensitive research’ of Maori.
Non-indigenous researchers can play important roles in indigenous projects, but boundaries are important.
Indigenous peoples should be involved in key roles, with the non-indigenous research ‘experts’ serving as
mentors or assistants. Increasingly, there is demand for indigenous research to be conducted only by
indigenous peoples (earlier in the book, Tuhiwai Smtih discussed a Maori movement to have 500 Maori
earn PhDs in 5 years, an ambitious goal they achieved).
Chapter 10: Towards Developing Indigenous Methodologies: Kaupapa Maori Research
Research is implicated in the dehumanization of Maori, so what happens when Maori become researchers?
Their efforts are threefold: 1) they have had to convince Maori of the value of some research in a cultural
temptation to reject all research; 2) to convince disparate institutions for the need to include Maori
priorities and involvement in research; and 3) develop indigenous methodologies that account for without
limiting the legacies and possibilities of research (now referred to as Kaupapa Maori research or Maoricentered research). The concept of Kaupapa Maori is a far-reaching concept in Maori, of which research is
only one aspect.
Borrowing from Graham Smith, who writes about Kaupapa Maori initiatives, Tuhiwai Smith offers four
guiding principles of Kaupapa Maori research, saying it 1) is related to ‘being Maori’; 2) is connected to
Maori philosophy and principles; 3) takes for granted the validity and legitimacy of Maori, the importance
of Maori language and culture; and 4) is concerned with ‘the struggle for autonomy over our own cultural
well-being’” (p. 187).
Kaupapa Maori research shares some of the tenants of other emancipatory and identity-centered critical
approaches, but also has Maori-specific elements that are difficult to translate because some of the
concepts are unique to Maori tradition and culture. For example, whanau is a political unit, a social unit, a
family unit, an organizing principle, a collection of ideas, and a verb meaning ‘to be born’). This concept of
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whanau one of the foundational aspects of Kaupapa Maori research unique to Maori culture. The broad
view here is that all indigenous cultures have unique aspects that should come to the fore in decolonizing
methodologies.
Tuhiwai Smith sets out eleven specific priorities for a strategic plan for Maori researchers researching Maori
issues (p. 194-195). These include self-critique and reflection, discussions of ethics, and accountability to
and outcomes for Maori.
Chapter 11: Choosing the Margins: The Role of Research in Indigenous Struggles for Social Justice
The struggle for social justice in New Zealand is “simultaneously celebratory and demoralizing, hopeful and
desperate” (p. 198). This chapter follows suit, showing the good, bad, and ugly of researching the margins.
Chapter 11 is divided into two primary sections, first revisiting the concept of struggle as a tool for
decolonization, and then discussing researchers who work in struggling indigenous communities.
Struggle is often seen as a “blunt tool” that often reinforces hegemony; however, participation in struggle is
a precursor to a raised consciousness. Transformative awareness of struggle cannot merely be academic,
but must come from struggle or solidarity with one who struggles. This awareness helps people make sense
of power relations and find the intersection between the academy and the community, between theory
and mobilization.
Tuhiwai Smith outlines five conditions that frame the struggle for decolonization: 1) conscious awakening
from the slumber of hegemony; 2) reimagining the world and one’s position in it; 3) understanding of
intersecting ideas; 4) resisting and disrupting hegemonic tendencies through tactical strategies; and 5)
understanding institutional structures and power relations (see p. 201).
As African American writer bell hooks notes, many people choose to live in the margins, understanding
that there’s richness there. Many researchers, too, choose the margins as rich sites of inquiry.
“Participatory action research, Kaupapa Maori research, oral histories, critical race theory, and testimonio”
are examples of research methodologies emerging from research at the margins (p. 205). Researchers who
research the margins are often marginalized themselves, especially in highly contested societies; however,
they are often rewarded with more interesting possibilities. To do “good” research, they must be guided by
clear principles and rigid adherence to indigenous priorities.
Research expands knowledge, but “research for social justice expands and improves the conditions for
justice; it is an intellectual, cognitive and moral project, often fraught, never complete, but worthwhile” (p.
215).
Chapter 12: Getting the Story Right, Telling the Story Well: Indigenous Activism, Indigenous Research
Activists might do research and researchers might be activists, but research and activism are different
activities, so they require different tools and different discourses. However, researchers and activists can—
perhaps must—collaborate to advance indigenous interests. And, of course, they must collaborate with
indigenous peoples. However, many are suspect of change, so not all indigenous peoples are cooperative in
advancing their own interests, which can make collaboration difficult.
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Researchers aiming to decolonize communities forget to decolonize the academy and, in effect, succumb to
or perpetuate the very power structures they aim to dismantle. To overcome this, researchers can be
critical of their own motives, making sure to always align their agenda with the larger indigenous peoples’
project discussed earlier chapters.
There are no neutral spaces for research or activism—they exist within power structures.