Doing Indigenous Methodologies: Toward a Practice of the “Careful Partial Participant”

Abstract

Abstract In this article, we describe teaching through experimental writing workshops designed to introduce students to a way of writing that expresses Indigenous methodologies in recognizing multiple epistemic authorities. We propose an alternative configuration of the “author in the text” who comes to life in analytic texts generated with and through Indigenous methodologies. In approaching writing through a differently configured author, we propose a form of participatory ethnographic writing that encourages writers to see themselves as partially participating in the collective workings of Indigenous knowledge communities. Based on experiences from the organization of two experimental writing workshops with Indigenous studies and visual cultural studies master students at UiT (the University of Tromsø–The Arctic University of Norway), we present a template with storytelling categories for transitioning fieldwork experience into text. How to “participate with care” thus fuels the possibility of such a transition as well as resistance within Indigenous scholarship and pedagogical approaches.