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Potential and Pitfalls: Settler Scholar Engagement in Indigenous Research

Sarah Panofsky, Lisa Hartwick, Marla J. Buchanan

2023 Canada

This article explores the potential and pitfalls of approaching Indigenous research as settler scholars in an attempt to redress the intergenerational damage of colonization on Indigenous culture and to contribute to a process of healing. We consider Indigenous historical trauma and survivance, and their intersections with Western psychological models and Western research paradigms. We then work with the principles of Indigenous Storywork (Archibald, 2008) to consider our own complex engagement in Indigenous research to bring to light how a profound commitment to relational ways of knowing and being are required elements of culturally appropriate and culturally safe psychological research.

Indigenous approaches to knowledge, ethnicity and race, epistemologies, decolonizing the academy, pedagogy