Key Ideas

• Critical Indigenous Research Methodologies (CIRM), an overarching line of thinking about methods and philosophies, is rooted in indigenous knowledge systems, is anticolonial, and is distinctly focused on the needs of communities.
• CIRM is rooted in relationships, responsibility, respect, reciprocity, and accountability.
• Research must be a process of fostering relationships between researchers, communities, and the topic of inquiry.
• CIRM recognizes the role of particular components that make it viable for communities, but ultimately it is of little use to create frameworks rooted in these principles if these methodologies do not also promote emancipatory agendas that recognize the self-determination and inherent sovereignty of indigenous peoples.

In academic research we recognize that there is, as Maori scholars Linda Tuhiwai Smith (1999, 2000) and Graham Smith (2000), among others, have noted, an overemphasis on a specific type of science and research, often positivist in nature and claiming to hold one singular truth (often referred to as Truth with a capital T). Grounded in a particular worldview inextricably linked to the practice of imperialism and colonialism—and with an unyielding insistence in the notion that Western scientific method and practices, which dominate the academy, are the only legitimate forms of knowledge production—academic research has, to put it politely, become estranged from indigenous communities. A Critical Indigenous Research Methodologies (CIRM) perspective, which fundamentally begins as an emancipatory project that forefronts the self-determination and inherent sovereignty of indigenous peoples is rooted in relationships and is driven explicitly by community interests. Given this orientation, the challenge is for scholars and institutions that prepare researcher-scholars to move away from such limited definitions of what kinds of knowledge systems and research processes can be labeled scientific and to consider the ways in which indigenous peoples and methodologies inform and frame scientific scholarly inquiry. This chapter responds to a growing call in the academy for rethinking positivist models; for exploring the boundaries outlining indigenous research; and for envisioning anew, or perhaps re-visioning, a research paradigm grounded in indigenous knowledges, beliefs, and practices.

We respond to this call here by offering an overview of CIRM as we interpret this process. In this chapter we present a view of CIRM that is unapologetically rooted in indigenous knowledge systems, is anticolonial, and is distinctly focused on the needs of communities (Battiste, 2000; L. Smith, 1999; St. Denis, 1992; Wilson, 2001b, 2008). In our discussion we attempt to engage in a relationship with those indigenous scholars who have gone before us as we address research concerns, advising current scholars and those who will come after our time of the fundamental need for upholding the basic tenets of CIRM while further refining or adapting analytical frameworks and models that have been developed for specific communities (for example, the Kaupapa Maori approach).