Abstract
For centuries, Indigenous and historically oppressed communities have been studied by Western researchers whose claims have been accepted without question and, in many instances, have led our communities’ continued oppression. With increasing numbers of individuals from historically marginalized communities entering higher education and becoming researchers and teachers of research ourselves, we are challenged to consider whether and how the research stories that we tell will be different from the research that precedes us. In this article, I draw from the Hawaiian concept of ho‘oku‘iku‘i (to stitch or piece together) and the French notion of bricolage to discuss how my graduate course in qualitative data analysis equips researchers from Native Hawaiian and other Indigenous and historically oppressed communities with new analytical tools to challenge oppression and tell both more critical and more empowering stories about the schools and communities in which we work and live.
Keywords
To tell different stories, we need different research methods.
The quote above is centered at the top of the syllabus for my doctoral course in qualitative data analysis at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. As a Native Hawaiian educational researcher teaching qualitative analysis in a College of Education at a mainstream university, I place this quote front and center to make clear from the onset the perspective that informs my teaching of the course. For centuries, Native Hawaiians, like other Indigenous and historically oppressed communities, have been studied by Western researchers whose claims, until recently, have been accepted without question and, in many instances, have led to our peoples’ continued oppression. However, now that growing numbers of Native Hawaiians and individuals from other Indigenous and historically marginalized communities are entering higher education and becoming researchers and teachers of research ourselves, the question that looms before us is “How will the research stories that we tell be different, or will they be different, from the stories previously told about us by Western research?” 1
I begin my qualitative analysis course by suggesting that if educational researchers who are concerned with challenging oppression and promoting social justice want to tell different, and ultimately more liberating, stories about our school and communities, we may need to use different tools of analysis; for if we continue to use the same, dominant analytical methods, we may quite simply end up retelling the same, dominant stories. I then invite my students to join me in a semester-long, collaborative apprenticeship for qualitative research bricoleurs who aspire to tell both more critical and more empowering stories about the schools and communities in which we work and live. Working collaboratively within the framework of “research as bricolage,” we set out to assemble, explore, and utilize multiple methodological and analytical tools with an emphasis on methods of analysis that are appropriate for emancipatory research in Indigenous and historically oppressed communities.
Introducing Research as Bricolage
Our class introduction to the concept of research as bricolage (Lévi-Strauss, 1966) begins with a discussion of two contrasting images: (a) a photo of my 19-year-old neighbor’s set of tools and (b) a photo of my father’s toolkit. My neighbor’s toolkit is a shiny, new, and meticulously organized mechanic’s toolkit. Jackson is a college freshman who lives with his parents and studies auto mechanics at the local community college. For his last birthday, his parents surprised him with a secondhand car and an elaborate toolkit with ratchets, wrenches, and sockets organized systematically in sixteenth-inch progressions. When something in his car is in need of repair or maintenance, Jackson orders the necessary parts and reads the detailed instructions or the owner’s manual on how to fix it. Following the directions step-by-step, he applies his tools as indicated and his car is usually back to normal in no time.
My father’s toolkit, however, is a bricoleur’s toolkit. My father is an 84-year-old Native Hawaiian man who has been fixing things all his life. He’s what Hawaiians call a laukua or jack-of-all-trades. Consequently, his toolkit is more varied than a mechanic’s toolkit, enabling him to accomplish a diversity of tasks. Like many Hawaiian families, my father’s family didn’t have a lot of money when he was growing up. Therefore, when things fell into disrepair, he learned to fix them using whatever tools he could find. For this reason, his toolkit isn’t fancy, shiny, or expensive. It’s simply an assortment of tools that he’s gathered through the years.
But my dad can fix just about anything with this toolkit: his car, his grandchildren’s bicycles, the toilets in the house, electrical wiring—even the kitchen sink! He didn’t go to school to learn how to do this, and he doesn’t spend a lot of money on tools or spare parts. He just uses his good intuition, his creativity, and whatever he has at hand to ho‘oku‘iku‘i or piece together a workable solution. 2 After he repairs something, it may not always look exactly as it had initially or work exactly as it used to, but it always does the job.
Another wonderful thing about my father’s toolkit is that, in addition to using his tools to fix things, he also uses them to build or create contraptions of his own. For instance, to this day, my brother and I have fond memories of tearing down the steep driveway of our childhood home in a wooden soapbox car with no brakes and minimal steering, which my father cobbled together using the wheels from our sisters’ old roller skates along with scraps of wood, a discarded hub cap, and a broom handle. Because my father’s toolkit doesn’t rely on a set of instructions, it allows him to be more creative in what he builds and repairs.
My qualitative analysis course was developed with these two contrasting toolkits in mind. I structure the course as a collaborative venue in which my students and I support one another in becoming research bricoleurs who strive to assemble and use analytical toolkits that are more like my father’s than my neighbor’s.
Bricolage in Historical Perspective
The French word bricoleur refers to a handyman or handywoman who makes use of the tools available to solve a problem or complete a job. In The Savage Mind, French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss (1966) used the term bricoleur to describe a jack-of-all-trades who is adept at manipulating and reworking a finite field of intellectual and/or material resources to carry out a varied set of tasks. More recently, Denzin and Lincoln (2000) have applied the concept to qualitative research and have likened qualitative researcher bricoleurs to quilt makers who use an assortment of research strategies, methods, and techniques to develop new perspectives on old problems. When one approaches research as bricolage, decisions regarding which interpretive practices to use are not necessarily made in advance. Instead, the choice of materials and methods are inspired by, and depend upon, the context. Moreover, if a research bricoleur needs to invent or piece together new tools or techniques, he or she will do so (Denzin & Lincoln, 2000).
As Kincheloe (2008) asserts, the metaphor of research as bricolage is not designed to create “an elite corps of expert researchers . . . who deploy their authority over others by excluding them from the conversation about knowledge production” (p. 127). On the contrary, research bricoleurs value diverse forms of knowledge, especially those knowledges that have historically been subjugated. They likewise value the abilities and insights of their research participants. By drawing upon a variety of methodological, epistemological, and cultural traditions—and seeking insight from the margins of Western societies and the ways of knowing of non-Western peoples—bricoleurs make previously repressed features of the social world visible and seek to challenge the hegemonic status quo.
Consistent with the logic of bricolage and its suspicion of grand theories and narratives, throughout my qualitative analysis course, my students and I use theoretical frameworks and interpretive methods that are intentionally eclectic—mingling, combining, and synthesizing theories and techniques from disparate disciplines and paradigms (Kaomea, 2000). Like the traditional Hawaiian proverb that advises “E ‘ai i ka mea loa‘a” (literally “Eat what is available” or more figuratively “Make do with what you can find”), we do not attach ourselves to any one theoretical perspective, but, instead, we “make do” (de Certeau, 1984) with an assortment of interpretive tools that are suited to our particular analyses. While some of our tools are native or Indigenous (‘ōiwi), others are borrowed or foreign (haole).
Ho‘oku‘iku‘i, Quilting and Hawaiian Resistance
A number of Indigenous scholars are understandably skeptical of the emancipatory potential of Western tools and metaphors for research in Indigenous communities and argue instead for research rooted in strictly Indigenous ways of knowing (see, for instance, Richardson, 2013). In my course, however, we acknowledge the Hawaiian proverb or ‘ōlelo no‘eau that says “‘A‘ohe pau ka ‘ike i ka hālau ho‘okahi” (“Not all knowledge is learned in one school” or “One can learn from many sources”; Pukui, 1983, p. 24).
Hawaiians have a long and successful history of resourcefully adopting and adapting foreign tools and concepts to our own ends. In the mid-1800s, for instance, when our cultural knowledge and values were being degraded and suppressed by Western knowledge and our people were dying off from Western diseases, Hawaiian scholars used the combined powers of the missionary-introduced Hawaiian language orthography and the Gutenberg printing press to ensure that the stories and wisdom of our people would survive into perpetuity. Similarly, after learning the art of quilting and sewing from American Calvinist missionaries, who upon their 1820 arrival in Hawai‘i endeavored to civilize and domesticate the native women, Hawaiians used the needle and thread for their own cultural expression.
Although the missionaries sought to teach the natives to quilt and sew to introduce Hawaiians to “civilized” behavior and attire for women, Hawaiians began to use and adapt the tools and techniques taught to them by the missionaries to fashion their own style of quilts through which they voiced their Indigenous beliefs and reasserted their native identities. For instance, in the years leading up to and following the United States’s 1893 illegal occupation of the Hawaiian nation, the Christian motifs and icons that were originally taught to Hawaiian quilters by American missionaries were supplanted by images of Hawaiian flags and the Hawaiian coat of arms, which Hawaiian natives wove into their quilts as symbols of allegiance to an independent Hawaiian nation and resistance to foreign domination. There are accounts from this time period of Hawaiian families sewing Hawaiian flag quilts for their beds and asserting that they were born under the Hawaiian flag and intended to die under it (Hammond, 1993). Through quilting, Hawaiians were able to express their loyalty and political protest in the privacy of their homes at a time when such public symbols were forbidden.
Likewise, in 1895, when Queen Lili‘uokalani was imprisoned in ‘Iolani Palace and the Native Hawaiian population was petitioning for the return of the monarchy, the Queen and her companions created a magnificent, nine-panel silk patchwork quilt that simultaneously chronicled her 10 months of imprisonment and protested the sequence of events that led to her illegal dethronement and arrest. With two Hawaiian flags sewn into every corner of the center square, and significant dates and symbols interspersed throughout, the quilt proudly bears the embroidered names of Lili’uokalani’s supporters who remained steadfast in their allegiance to their queen and their sovereign Hawaiian nation (Kimokeo-Goes, 2007). Thus, Hawaiians took this established art form of American quilting and made it their own. Although fashioned from Western fabric, thread, and needles, these Hawaiian quilts evolved as expressions of Hawaiian resistance to Western domination and served as symbols of loyalty to their native identity and community.
Course Content and Pedagogical Approach
Like the quilters who came before us, in my qualitative analysis course, my students and I adopt and adapt tools and theories from a variety of sources to ho‘oku‘iku‘i or stitch together a rich tapestry of analyses that privilege Indigenous perspectives, expose and “speak back” to Western domination, and promote social justice and Indigenous self-determination. In the first half of the course, we assemble our interpretive toolkits. We begin by reading studies by Indigenous and social justice researchers who apply multiple methods of analysis to the interpretation of interview transcripts, student work samples, and other qualitative texts. We then consider whether and how these various tools could potentially inform our particular research projects within our respective communities. When students find tools used in these studies that they think might be relevant to their current or future research, we read further to investigate the origins and possible uses of those particular tools. Consequently, our reading list is an emergent construction consisting of a myriad of theoretical, methodological, and applied readings along with relevant, illustrative pieces from contemporary literature and popular culture.
By the middle of the semester, we have accumulated an eclectic assortment of analytical tools, including juxtaposition (Kaomea, 2000), defamiliarization (Shklovsky, 1965), reading erasures (Kaomea, 2003), rhizoanalysis (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987), the Hawaiian process of mahiki or peeling away (Pukui, Haertig, & Lee, 1972), ha‘i mo‘olelo or Hawaiian storytelling (Kaomea, 2001), counter-storytelling (Delgado, 1993), and so on. With our toolboxes overflowing with interpretive tools, we then progress to the second phase of the course, in which, we put our toolkits to use as we assist one another in analyzing the qualitative data that we have been collecting independently outside of class. Each student selects a piece of qualitative data that he or she would like the class’ help in interpreting and we work collaboratively to apply the analytical techniques that we have collected in our toolkits to assist one another in making sense of our data.
In preparation for this second phase of the course, I introduce my students to two mo‘olelo or stories that serve as foundational metaphors or touchstones for us throughout the remainder of our time together. The first is the mo‘olelo of Queen Lili‘uokalani and her faithful companions who worked collaboratively with the Queen to create the majestic nine-panel protest quilt, which I referred to earlier. Throughout her imprisonment, Lili‘u’s loyal supporters stood by her side and quilted along with her, often adding pieces of their own garments to the quilt and embroidering their names in solidarity. At a time when Native Hawaiian voices of resistance were silenced and discredited, this collaborative quilt provided these women the rare ability to speak.
The second mo‘olelo that I share with my students is the story of my father and his “fix it” buddies. Whenever my father is stumped on a repair project, he phones my uncle and a couple of friends who come right over with their toolkits in hand. My dad explains the problem that he’s having with his car, the dishwasher, or whatever project he’s working on, and then, lets the group try their hands at fixing it. They take turns “looking under the hood,” share their thoughts about what might be wrong, and then roll-up their sleeves, get out their tools, and work together to come up with a solution. On other days, when his buddies need help and my dad gets “the call,” he packs up his tools and heads over to their place to return the favor. My dad and his buddies can spend hours working on each other’s repair jobs, and they seem to be learning a lot and enjoying themselves in the process.
The second half of our qualitative analysis course proceeds in a similar fashion, with each of us taking a turn at bringing in data that we are struggling with, or that we would like another opinion on, and the rest of us rolling up our sleeves, getting out our interpretive toolkits (or sewing kits), and helping each other bring out the stories that are embedded in our data. In the remaining weeks of the semester, each student has the opportunity to share his or her developing research project and request feedback from the class in two collaborative feedback sessions. The first session is typically more preliminary and exploratory (e.g., asking for classmates’ initial thoughts on an interview transcript or other piece of data), while the second session is more developed and refined (e.g., an oral presentation in which one shares the progress made in interpreting a transcript and asks the class for further feedback and suggestions). Through this collaborative approach, the students’ varied theoretical and methodological backgrounds are collectively brought to bear on their classmates’ respective research topics as each week the class turns their energies to coming up with useful ways of understanding the case in question. Working together in this collaborative research community, we aim to provide each other with new resources, new perspectives, and new ideas for telling new stories about these and other qualitative texts.
A Patchwork of Student Research Projects
In examples that follow, I offer a patchwork of three student research projects that my class worked on over this past semester: three “panels,” if you will, of a much larger, collaborative class quilt. These three panels serve as concrete examples of the ways that students “make do” with the range of analyses and insights that are shared collaboratively among the class. Moreover, each panel is a bricolage in itself; a clever assemblage of interpretive tools and empirical materials that together provide us with new perspectives on old and enduring social, political, and educational challenges.
Panel 1: Reading Erasures and University Censorship of Hawaiian Community Artwork
At the time of her class data sharing, Haley Kailiehu, a second-year doctoral student and Native Hawaiian community artist, was coming to terms with a traumatic incident, in which portions of a beautiful on-campus community mural, which Haley thoughtfully designed and supervised to completion, had been censored and painted over by University of Hawai‘i staff members who originally approved Haley’s mural application in conjunction with an upcoming University arts festival. 3 Haley had organized the community mural project to provide members of the Native Hawaiian community an opportunity to convey their aloha for the sacred mountain of Mauna a Wākea (also known as Mauna Kea) and express their opposition to the University’s involvement in the proposed construction of the world’s largest telescope at the mountain’s summit. (Because of its unique elevation and atmospheric conditions, this sacred summit is the site for a number of Hawaiian cultural and religious practices that are conducted nowhere else in the world. It is also home to some of the most unique and fragile native plants and animals that are found nowhere else on earth.) Approximately 100 Hawaiian community members and allies participated in the painting of the mural in protest of the telescope and the irreparable damage that its construction would bring to the mountain’s cultural and natural resources.
For her class data sharing, Haley brought in before-and-after photos of the mural. The first was a photo of the mural upon completion. Proudly flanked by its community artists, the mural features a stunning artistic rendering of the genealogical connection of Native Hawaiians to this sacred mountain along with a written critique that asserts “The University of Hawai‘i cannot be a Hawaiian place of learning [as stated in the University’s strategic plan] while leading the desecration of Mauna a Wākea.” The second photo of the mural was taken on the morning after the completion of the community mural project. In this photo, the portion of the mural that proclaimed the community’s message of resistance, along with chalked in statements of solidarity from other Indigenous Pacific Islander students, had been covered over with green paint and a hastily painted advertisement for the University arts festival.
For her course project, Haley chose to analyze this incident and the accompanying before-and-after photos through the application of the interpretive tool of reading erasures. In our earlier class discussions on interpreting erasures (Kaomea, 2001, 2003), we considered how educational researchers who are committed to exposing oppression and recovering the voices and perspectives of Indigenous and historically marginalized people can move beyond the surface study of dominant texts and attend to situations, perspectives, and circumstances that have been literally or metaphorically buried, written over, or erased. We also explored how attending to erasures can enable educational researchers who strive for more complex and nuanced understandings of the colonialist and oppressive tendencies of schooling, to delve behind familiar hegemonic surfaces and unveil the many masked and insidious ways in which various oppressions are reproduced in our schools and communities.
With her classmates’ support and assistance, Haley skillfully weaved the analytical tool of reading erasures with settler colonial theory to reveal the ways in which the literal erasure of the Mauna a Wākea mural reflects a larger, more insidious, figurative erasure of our native voices, our cultural practices, and our very existence in Hawai‘i’s settler dominated society. By drawing a parallel between the settler university staffers’ desecration and erasure of the Hawaiian community’s words of protest on the mural and the settler state’s continued desecration and erasure of sacred Hawaiian lands and associated cultural and ceremonial practices, Haley succeeded in heightening the community’s awareness of settler colonial erasures and reignited a groundswell of student opposition to the proposed telescope.
Panel 2: Juxtaposition and Student Community iMovies
Anna Lee Puanani Lum is a Native Hawaiian graduate student in her fourth year of doctoral studies. She is also a classroom teacher at a Native Hawaiian-serving elementary school where students are bused in from various communities throughout the island. For her class data sharing, Anna Lee chose to analyze a series of iMovies, which were produced by her fourth-grade students in response to a social studies assignment that was intended to strengthen the children’s connections to the rich cultural history of the communities in which they live. Working in collaborative groups according to their moku (districts) or home communities, the students were asked to draw from traditional Hawaiian mo‘olelo (stories) of their moku and oral history interviews with community kūpuna (elders) or long-time residents to share the cultural history of their community through the production of an iMovie.
In their initial analyses of the student videos, Anna Lee and her classmates used the interpretive tool of critical clues (Zizek, 1991) to hone in on one video in particular that seemed oddly uncanny or distinctively different from the rest. The video in question focused on the moku of Kona, which encompasses the land division from Moanalua to Kuli‘ou‘ou. In addition to being home to the children’s elementary school and a number of wahi pana (culturally significant places), the Kona district is also the location of downtown Honolulu and the tourist center of Waikīkī.
What Anna Lee and her peers found particularly intriguing about the iMovie that the students created for the Kona district was the group’s choice of Disney’s Lilo and Stitch soundtrack as the dominant background music for their video. The group’s use of music from this romanticized and exoticized Hawai‘i-based Disney comedy drama seemed antithetical to the assignment’s intention of encouraging the students to tell the traditional stories of their native communities in their native voices. To pursue this critical clue further, Anna Lee applied the interpretive tool of juxtaposition to read (or view) the students’ Kona district video alongside a Lilo and Stitch movie trailer. As our class had discussed in an earlier session, the interpretive tool of juxtaposition, or reading a text alongside an unlikely partner from another era or genre, can enable researchers to draw new insights from unlikely comparisons (Kaomea, 2000). Correspondingly, viewing the students’ Kona district iMovie and the Lilo and Stitch movie trailer side-by-side intensified Anna Lee’s awareness of the Disneyfied, tourist perspective assumed by the students’ video, which largely consisted of postcard views of Waikīkī tourist attractions, including high-rise hotels along the Waikīkī coastline, sunbathing tourists lounging on the sand at Waikīkī beach, and evening shots of swaying palm trees and hula dancers amid an unnaturally pink Hawaiian sunset.
Using this tool of juxtaposition, Anna Lee became more acutely aware of the difficulty for Indigenous youngsters to truly know their native land and perpetuate the native stories of their communities in a settler colonial environment where our native landscape and historic sites have been overlaid and obscured by concrete, high-rise urbanization and mass tourist attractions while our traditional stories about these places have likewise been re-written and Disneyfied to better appeal to global consumers. This initial analysis has motivated Anna Lee to further explore how she might more effectively apply place-based instructional methods to better assist her students in peeling back these layers of obfuscation to recuperate and retell more traditional stories of their native communities from a native perspective.
Panel 3: Counter-Storytelling and Native Hawaiian Student Success in Higher Education
Michaelyn Nakoa is a Native Hawaiian graduate student in her fourth year of doctoral studies in educational psychology. She also works as the coordinator of Native Hawaiian student success in the department of student services at a local community college. In this capacity, she monitors the academic progress of Native Hawaiian students and offers personal and career counseling, academic advising, and student workshops to enhance their academic success.
As a student success counselor, Michaelyn is all too familiar with the negative statistics regarding the plight of Native Hawaiians in higher education. For instance, Native Hawaiians consistently lag behind their non-Hawaiian counterparts in terms of academic preparation for higher education and college enrollment. Hawaiian students who do enroll in college are more likely than students of other backgrounds to leave after their first year. Of those who persist beyond the first year, their rate of retention until degree completion is lower than their non-Hawaiian peers, and those who do graduate take longer to do so (Balutski & Wright, 2013).
Much of the current research on Native Hawaiians in higher education assumes a deficit-based perspective in which the educational experiences of Native Hawaiian students are described in terms of cumulative barriers or challenges that ultimately overwhelm the students’ ability to achieve their educational goals. Numerous studies, for instance, paint a picture of Native Hawaiian students who enter higher education with poor academic preparation and insufficient financial and/or family support, and ultimately fail to thrive in the university environment. As Michaelyn suggests, although identifying the barriers to educational achievement is an important component of a comprehensive understanding of the Native Hawaiian experience in higher education, it is also a very limited perspective as it fails to include stories of Native Hawaiian student success.
Michaelyn aimed to reframe these conversations by considering Native Hawaiian students’ perspectives on their higher education journeys. With this intention in mind, for her class data sharing, she brought in her students’ “education plans,” which were written at the end of an introductory college success course that she teaches, along with students’ academic transcripts and longitudinal data acquired from students who remained in contact with Michaelyn and shared personal updates on their career trajectories. By applying critical race theory and counter-storytelling (Delgado, 1993), along with the Hawaiian practice of ha‘i mo‘olelo or “talk-story,” to her analyses of these various data sources, Michaelyn and her classmates were able to provide a more hopeful perspective on Native Hawaiians both within and outside of higher education.
Critical race theory departs from mainstream scholarship by emphasizing the importance of counter-storytelling as a methodological and analytical tool. Critical race theorists distinguish between majoritarian stories, or stories of those in power, which are a natural part of the dominant discourse, and counter-stories, or stories of those experiences that are not often told (those on the margins of society), which can serve as a tool for analyzing and challenging the majoritarian story. Thus, counter-storytelling is both a technique of telling the story of experiences that are rarely told and a tool for analyzing and challenging the majoritarian stories of those in power. Counter-stories challenge the perceived wisdom of those at society’s center and provide a context to understand and transform established belief systems (Delgado, 1993).
Consider, for example, the case of one of Michaelyn’s former students, Kekoa. Kekoa is Native Hawaiian and the first in his family to attend college. A cursory look at Kekoa’s university transcript suggests a majoritarian story of academic failure. After enrolling in Michaelyn’s introduction to college success course, Kekoa dropped out of school. A couple of years later, he enrolled at another community college campus and dropped out there as well. He is currently not enrolled at any institution of higher learning.
As Michaelyn explains, on the basis of Kekoa’s transcript alone, the University would characterize Kekoa as personally failing to attain the goal of community college graduation and negatively affecting the statistics on Native Hawaiian student success. However, a counter-storytelling analysis that considers Kekoa’s transcript along with his narrative “education plan” and longitudinal data, which Michaelyn acquired through informal, talk-story conversations with Kekoa when he visited her a few years after dropping out of school, provides a more nuanced and optimistic account.
Several years after Kekoa dropped out of college, he stopped by to see Michaelyn at her campus office. He was working for a community organization, helping “at-risk” youth, which was exactly what he had stated as his career goal in his education plan. In fact, he was on campus that day because he was bringing these youth to the community college for a tour and to encourage them to pursue a college education. Thus, while the majoritarian story suggests that Kekoa did not succeed in accomplishing the college’s goal of graduation, the counter-story, based on his education plan and his current job of assisting at-risk youth in pursuing higher education, reveals that he is actually well on his way to meeting his personal educational goals and likewise helping others meet their educational goals as well. Instead of writing Kekoa off as another negative statistic, Michaelyn characterizes Kekoa’s story as an educational success story (both personally and as a Native Hawaiian) regardless of his lack of formal degree attainment. For while he may not have graduated from college, Kekoa is a testament to the fact that we can live fulfilling lives without a university credential; that we can live, learn, and serve others, throughout our lives, outside of the academy, whether we choose to focus our efforts on the ‘āina (land), in the kai (ocean), or elsewhere in the community.
Conclusion
Each semester, I begin my qualitative analysis course, as I began this article, by asking my students, How will the research stories that we tell be different, or will they be different, from the stories previously told about us by Western researchers? As the “panels” above suggest, my students answer with a rich tapestry of creative research projects that powerfully illustrate how the interpretive tools of collaborative analysis and ho‘oku‘iku‘i or bricolage can shed new light on ongoing struggles for social justice and self-determination. Haley’s project demonstrates how attending to literal erasures can provide us with an entry to thinking about the many ways in which Indigenous peoples have been subject to erasure and attempts to eliminate our native existence. Her project also suggests that we can counter these erasures through courageous acts of Indigenous survival and resistance. Anna Lee’s project demonstrates how a focus on critical clues and juxtaposition can reveal contemporary reproductions of colonial representations of Indigenous peoples and can likewise inform future efforts to avoid the continual replication of dominant colonial imaginaries. Finally, Michaelyn’s project demonstrates how critical race theory, counter-storytelling, and the Hawaiian practice of ha‘i mo‘olelo or talk-story can be used to challenge deficit models of contemporary Indigenous cultures and enable us to re-read and reframe stories of apparent failure (in higher education, for instance) as personal and community success stories.
Moreover, these student research projects simultaneously alert us to critical issues in Native Hawaiian struggles for social justice. The first study draws our attention to the need for preserving our sacred places, the second to the necessity of valorizing Native Hawaiian knowledge against Western tourist narratives, and the third to the importance of recognizing the value of occupations and activities that empower the self and the community, whether or not these activities involve certified schooling.
As the students’ tapestry of projects suggest, this approach of collaborative bricolage enables us to identify and challenge taken-for-granted assumptions (the invisible stitching, if you will) that are sometimes so engrained in our consciousness that we do not even “see” the dominant suppositions on which our schools and society are based. With these tools, we can produce research that calls attention to and interrogates power rather than reinforcing power (Tuck & Yang, 2014). We can challenge and counter misrepresentations of Indigenous people rather than reproducing these representations. And, we can further sovereignty and social justice rather than inhibit it.
Granted, because my course does not offer a step-by-step framework for conducting research as bricolage, it is not always easy for some students to adopt this methodology. There are occasionally one or two students who emerge from the course with a working toolkit that more closely resembles my neighbor’s rather than my father’s. In most cases, it is simply a matter of maturity. As these students grow, learn, and mature as researchers, their toolkits become more varied, and these young researchers who so assiduously clung to plans and dominant tools early on become more confident in working without a plan, and improvising and taking on new tools as they follow the interpretive clues to wherever they might lead. On other occasions, however, it may sometimes be the case that a student is so attached to dominant, hegemonic perspectives that he or she is initially unwilling or unable to use tools that critically challenge the status quo. The student might, on the contrary, insist on sticking with tools that reaffirm his or her dominant, “commonsense” understanding of the world as the only “reasonable” one, and may consequently reassert that dominance through the use of mainstream narratives and methodologies.
In these and all cases, I remind my students that research is not just about observing and recording but is also about acting in the world (Kincheloe, 2004), and I explain that ho‘oku‘iku‘i and bricolage are methods by which we can act responsibly toward the world through research. As these budding researchers depart from my course with their toolkits in hand, I challenge them to use their newfound tools to expose injustices, combat oppression, and bring “genuine change” (Lorde, 1984) to their schools and communities.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
The author is grateful to Laura Bisaillon, Elaine Coburn, Nadine Ijaz, and Timothy San Pedro for their helpful feedback on this article.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.