Abstract
What are beautiful Indigenous communities? How are we as original communities good for each other and our planet? This article asserts that these kinds of questions undergird Indigenous research methodologies as more than research paradigms and as life-sustaining worldviews that produce research designs that engage processes of healing and helpfulness and that reflect Indigenous pluriversal realities. Anchored by Indigenous knowledge systems, Indigenous pluriversalities counter the ubiquity and pervasiveness of coloniality by presenting, on one hand, distinct experiences under coloniality and, on the other hand, creative anti-colonial and decolonial strategies to care for the many Indigenous worlds that constitute planetary life. Within the current global schematic designed to produce consumers, this article considers how Indigenous research as a field continues to make space for ideas of individual and collective responsibilities to emerge.
Keywords
Introduction
I am a Wanka and Quechua social sciences researcher who is by blood lineage and shared cultural genealogy related to the pueblos originarios, the first communities, where I work in the Andes mountainous regions of Peru. Quechua refers to our ethnicity and shared language family across the Quechua-speaking Indigenous peoples of Peru. I am clear regarding my relations, yet, like other Indigenous scholars who have written of connection (Beals et al., 2020; Weber-Pillwax, 2004), I continue to grapple with the meaning of research in relation to community—first and always seems to be the question of how useful is our work in the immediate moment and long term and within the web of reconciliations—with the past—and possibilities—with the future? In this article, I introduce two guiding questions that I see as part of the constant between Indigenous research and notions of community benefit—What are beautiful Indigenous communities? How are we as the human parts of our own original communities good for each other and our planet? This article asserts that these kinds of questions undergird Indigenous research methodologies as more than research paradigms and as life-sustaining worldviews that produce research designs that engage processes of healing and helpfulness and that reflect Indigenous pluriversal realities as the lived acknowledgements of the Indigenous worlds that make up teqsimuyu, our planet. Anchored by Indigenous knowledge systems, Indigenous pluriversalities counter the ubiquity and pervasiveness of coloniality by presenting, on one hand, distinct experiences under coloniality and, on the other hand, anti-colonial and decolonial strategies to care for the many Indigenous worlds that constitute planetary life.
At the same time, coloniality has produced a dominant lifeworld ternary structure of capitalism, modernity, and development, which requires the erasure of certain diverse knowledges, the suppression of the power of collectives to make known, and the need to cast doubt on the unique capacities of Indigenous peoples and our more-than-human relatives as knowers. Thus, also confronting the current global schematic designed to produce consumers, this article is a counternarrative about research that is inspired by Quechua cosmovivencia, the lived experience of Quechua cosmology—our way of understanding the ordered universe and our place in it. To address the question of connection, this article describes Indigenous research as inseparable from Indigenous knowledge systems that prioritize aims and practices of planetary beauty. First, aligned with the spirit of positionality as story, I begin this writing with reflections on places and protocols of introductions before offering three frames on Indigenous researchers being and becoming in the world—to awaken, to stand, and to shine—that draw from Quechua conceptualizations. I offer this work to Indigenous students who are called by their families and communities to assume ever greater individual and collective responsibilities, whether within or outside of their ancestral territories.
Travelers
I write from Mni Sota Makoce, translated from the Dakota (Indigenous people of Minnesota, United States) language as the land where the waters reflect the sky, where Dakota and Ojibwe (Indigenous people of Minnesota) stewarded their places for millennia, where their descendants continue to hold and model what it means to be a good relative, a philosophy that is being taught to me by my friend, Iyekiyapiwin Darlene St. Clair, a Dakota scholar and tribal member of C̣aƞṡayapi, where the trees are marked red, or the Lower Sioux Indian Community. I think about how an Indigenous person like me, from another place, figuratively moves from being a traveler who has come from a long distance, to being a settler living on land where I hold no family or community history, to a guest welcomed into the homes of Dakota and Ojibwe peoples, their schools, and tribal buildings, to a non-blood relative who shares kinship through commitment to collective work. To me, these identities reflect the migrations and often arduous journeys that humans will make to arrive somewhere that appears desirable. Perhaps we have been invited, perhaps we have dreamt of these places, perhaps it has been prophesied—as in the case of the Ojibwe who migrated thousands of years ago from the eastern part of North America to this area because they were told to find the place where food grows upon the water, meaning the homelands of manoomin, or wild rice that they nurture and harvest through ceremony and their physical labor.
The traveler is central to my family history. My own Japanese father traveled through Latin America, falling in love with languages, communities, and my Wanka and Quechua mother. There are other travelers—my great-grandfather, Felipe Carhuamaca, a Wanka man from the community of Huamanmarca, the place of the hawks, walked across the steep central Andean mountain ranges of the region of Junín, Peru, until on one of his excursions he was killed transporting sheep through a canyon. Among the children he left behind was my grandmother, Antonieta Jesusa, born in 1910 and who would eventually marry my grandfather, Antonio Huaman, a Chanka (Quechua-speaking Indigenous peoples of Peru) and Quechua man. Antonio had known travel since he was a boy. As an early teenager, he left his work in the mines of Huancavelica and walked to Junín, bringing with him his mother, his nephew, and his little sister who was permanently deaf from a mining explosion. They arrived in Junín as somewhat unwelcomed guests and settled in the community of Chongos Bajo. It was here that Antonio built a life with my grandmother, and although she was Wanka, from one of the oldest families in the region, their children, including my mother, would often be called ñucca and halla by their peers, derogatory terms in reference to the idea of primitive and remote Indigenous highlanders and specifically, their non-Wanka father. Ñucca is an insult that refers to someone who does not speak the dominant language of Spanish and is viewed, even by other Indigenous community members, as less civilized. At times, they were also called chimpash, which is a term that refers to someone who is from an other side and is used toward people from the same community but who are part of different ritual or ceremonial groups within that same community, for example.
I am not sure how my grandfather made sense of his foreignness, but that he and his half-Wanka children would have been viewed skeptically despite sharing a common language family is not surprising due to the affinities that Indigenous peoples hold to their lands and the many beings that live there with them. The geographical landscape of Peru can be understood through its vast eco-regions—at least eight types of landscapes with certain characteristics, as documented by Peruvian geographer and philosopher Javier Pulgar Vidal in the late 1930s. These regions are the chala, yunga, quechua, suni, puna, janca, rupa-rupa, and the omagua and each of these terms holds their own local derivations. For example, yunga is also called chaupiyunga, yunca, ongoy, and coca by its peoples (Pulgar Vidal, 1946/2014). More specifically, as Pulgar Vidal explains, chala are the lands that adjoin the ocean on the western side of the Andean decline; yunga are the lands of the warm climate of the valleys and ravines that climb the Andes immediately after the chala, and those valleys and ravines of the same climate that extend into the eastern Andean decline; quechua refers to the temperate lands that extend to both declines; suni refers to the cold lands; puna refers to the very cold plateaus and cliffs; janca are the snowy peaks and white —glacial— regions of the country; rupa-rupa refers to the parts of the Andean hills and valleys covered with forested vegetation, located in the eastern decline of the Andes; and omagua is the immense jungle plain through which the Amazon and its tributaries run, whose waters flow to the Atlantic Ocean (Pulgar Vidal, 1946/2014). For convenience, most people will say that Peru is divided by three major regions—the coast, the highlands, and the jungles. While this is true, Pulgar Vidal’s work reveals complexities and depth to land that historically acknowledge the character of these places and how people relate to them. Concurrently, as we consider the characteristics of these areas, Indigenous peoples who live and work in these places must also grapple with how the regions have changed over time and are being altered by human activity, and as a result, what it means for many species to interact in harmony and discord.
Of mountains and rivers
In my travels across the Americas and beyond, I have been privileged to work with other Indigenous peoples who generously teach me how they see themselves in relation to their people and places. From my friend, Lo:t^t Honyust, an Onyota’a:ka (People of the Standing Stone, the Oneida people with communities in Wisconsin, United States, and Ontario, Canada) teacher at a school called Tsi’niyukwalihó•t^ (learning place), I learned almost two decades ago that his community’s desire is for their children to know their identity by their spirit names—the name given to a person in their Indigenous language, their clan, tribal nation, and what their homeland is called. Along with each of these components of a person’s identity are deeper knowledges and lessons, including prophesies, teachings, and ceremonies. From my friend and writing collaborator, Dr. Peter Mataira whose iwi are Ngāti Porou and Ngāti Kahungunu, I learned that a Māori introduction is incomplete without acknowledging your mountain and your river, enduring markers that link a Māori person to their genealogy (personal communication, November 14, 2021). These types of acknowledgements of how Indigenous peoples identify themselves are meaningful to me because learning what constitutes a proper introduction in other communities helps me to think about the questions and answers that Quechua students and researchers like me are asking about ourselves, including what we still hold and how to relate to a dramatically shifting world around us. Today, a typical introduction with a runa or nuna, a Quechua person, will depend on if you meet in community or elsewhere and on what kind of sensibility and trust they see in you. If you are lucky, you will learn the names of their community and those of their immediate and extended family. This is valuable information because you will know from whom they are actually descended and to whom they are connected presently based on their genealogy; you will be able to visualize their land and with that, what the community is known for and how the people live there.
My mountain is Waytapallana, the place where the flowers are gathered, in the Quechua Wanka language. Waytapallana is the highest mountain in a range named after it, among 16 other mountains. Waytapallana’s peak is a majestic 5,768 m or over 18,900 ft and the entirety of the range includes approximately 25 lakes of various sizes and colors, including turquoise blue in the immediate vicinity of the Waytapallana peak (Quispe Palomino, 2010). To the Wanka, Waytapallana is also a deity, one of our Apus, a seminal energy-life force, and he and his family are the surrounding mountains to whom ceremonies are dedicated. Waytapallana is also one of Peru’s tropical glaciers and, over the last two decades, has retreated over by over 50% due to climate change. From my grandmother’s second floor balcony, which is reached by a wooden ladder, there is a clear view of Waytapallana—my mother awakened daily to the gaze of the mountain, my grandmother and aunts gathered their flowers for ceremonies and healings there, and from them, I learned that we Wanka are loved in relation to the beauty of this being.
My river is Wankamayo, the river of the standing stone, known in English as the Mantaro River, who in our stories was created through the chaos and death of two serpents whose fighting broke the shores of a vast lake where they lived, creating the river and the entire Mantaro Valley. If the story is true, and I believe that it is, this would make sense because Wankamayo flows from Chinchayqutra, also spelled Chinchayqocha—both in Quechua—the great northern lake, known as Lake Junín. Lake Junín connects to both Wankamayo and the Upper Amazon basin and is the largest lake located entirely in Peru. The whole area was designated a national wildlife reserve in the 1970s—Reserva Nacional de Junín (Junín National Reserve)—and today, it is a dumping ground for acid mine drainage resulting from one of the oldest and most exploited mining operations in the country, the Cerro de Pasco mining district, having produced silver, copper, lead, and zinc since the Spanish colonial invasion of the 1500s (Rodbell et al., 2014). In 1999, the Peruvian government declared the reserve in a state of emergency, resulting in legally based attempts to curb further environmental damage from mining (Quispe Palomino, 2010). The reserve is home to endangered species heavily impacted by the mining contamination, including the Junín flightless grebe, the Junín rail, and a species of Andean frog (Rodbell et al., 2014; Shoobridge, 2006).
Due to the building of the Upamayo Dam for hydroelectric power in the 1930s, Wankamayo was spared from some of the major contamination that Chinchayqocha faces but was contaminated through the large metallurgical complex of La Oroya, also used for mining since the 1500s but escalating in production in the early 20th century, later including the infamous Doe Run copper smelting operation. Despite its proximity to the mining operations, our river is a water source for agriculture, fish farming, livestock, and human use—along the roads and homes it is not uncommon to see people still bathing in the brownish colored water and animals drinking from it, even though locals understand it to be poisoned. In 2003, Wankamayo was declared in a state of emergency by the President of the Republic of Peru under Law No. 28082 (Quispe Palomino, 2010). As a result of its contamination, there have in recent years been government and scientific reports outlining the dangers of heavy metals and their impacts on children’s cognitive and other forms of development and the dangers of carcinogens due to Lead and Arsenic (Custodio et al., 2021).
I outline these scientific points as a Wanka and Quechua runawarmi, human woman, and an educational researcher with an ontological investment in what these places signify and what they are becoming. In other words, the way that I understand my existence is bound up with our mountain, our river, our lake, and her dying birds and frogs—our human and more-than-human family members. Thus, the way that we introduce ourselves and the ways that others introduce themselves to us are data that address places, to whom we are related and accountable, and what matters to us. Our introductions are also reminders to ourselves and to the ones with whom we speak that we are not alone: We rely on many beings and they rely on us—maybe not for sustenance, maybe to see and admire them and to commit to not hurting them. I think sometimes about the coldness of higher education and the cruelty of extraction. I think about what it would mean to introduce ourselves with philosophies that urge us to name our relatives and our places, to declare our accountabilities. Would the Cerro de Pascos and La Oroyas of the world have happened? How can honoring our relations help us to rethink the mechanisms of ideas of progress now?
Despite how important declarations of accountability and recognition of relationality can be, learning how to do this or even being given the knowledge of our own identities, including about our more-than-human relatives, cannot be assumed. Maybe we as Quechua people once introduced ourselves in relation to all of our Apus instead of only doing this in ceremonies. Maybe our introductions took days or months instead of seconds. The Kanaka Maoli scholar Manulani Meyer (2011), well-regarded among Indigenous peoples for her ability to discuss Native Hawaiian epistemology, explains that epistemology is the philosophy of knowledge and that despite European academic claims to the term, it can mean infinitely “anything we wish it to mean” (p. 13, Meyer’s emphasis added). She helps us to imagine a way of thinking about knowledge that is untethered by colonial history and domination, that is not qualified based on what the colonial determines. She tells us that epistemology asks us to consider the difference between knowledge, knowing, and understanding; how we know that we know; what is intelligence; and what holds meaning for us. She also says that the fact that these ways of understanding are not completely clear to us is the result of colonial distraction and its mind control. And yet, she writes, “We are transforming and becoming clear through our conflicts, not despite them. A world-wide collapse of our oceans, fresh water, cultures, and land environments should inspire us to be courageous about the priorities of our times” (Meyer, n.d., p. 2, emphasis in original work).
Rikch’arisun (we awaken)
What are the impacts of colonial distraction and how are they linked to the priorities of our times? Why is it important to name coloniality and to understand its workings, including its agents and the structures that house and regulate what is deemed knowledge or worthy of knowing?
Gonzalo Lamana, professor in Hispanic Languages & Literatures at the University of Pittsburgh, traces the origins of early Spanish colonial encounters with Indigenous and Andean peoples. In How Indians Think (Lamana, 2019), he notes that we know a number of things about this time period—we know that through the issuance of decrees regarding the Americas by the Catholic Church known as the Papal Bulls in the 1400s, any land discovered and to be discovered had been claimed by the Church’s representatives, including living Spanish and Portuguese agents and their not-yet-born descendants. We know that upon contact with Natives in the so-called New World, the Spanish Crown mandated the reading of a document called El Requerimiento, or The Requirement. As Lamana (2019) states, The text required political submission to the Spanish kings and recognition of Christian superiority. The ritual updated Indians about their “true” history and the “true” conditions of their existence—what they did not know and did not know that they did not know. (p. 5)
The so-called true history that was announced to Indigenous peoples was that the European God had created the world and all men, that the pope was his representative, and that the Spanish king had God and Church-given power to dominate the lands where Indigenous peoples lived. Indigenous peoples who read this document were also informed that they were the children of the European God and vassals of his majesties. Upon this reading, the Indians were given a choice—they could welcome the Spanish representatives as loyal subjects destined for a peaceful future, or they could refuse to accept “reality as it really was” and suffer the force of whatever was to come; in other words, the consequence of resistance was justifiable death and violence because the Indians had been given notice (Lamana, 2019, pp. 5–6).
What scholars like Lamana do through their read of archival texts, including the primary sources written by those who kept records during the colonial invasions of the Americas, is help us to understand how Indigenous peoples were invented as a racialized entity with limited capabilities through the colonial era. In this process, Indians are fossilized as apparently so ignorant that we do not even realize that we do not know. I would add that because of the false dichotomy of Indianness and true knowledge, that even when we go through the motions of learning, our abilities to truly comprehend and bear knowledge remain in question, so much so that today, any of us might challenge ourselves—asking, “Is this right?” “What do I really know anyway?” “Do I belong here in in this field or at this university—did someone make a mistake?” These doubts are the reverberations of a global project of coloniality that will never serve Indigenous communities.
Coloniality and us
First described by Peruvian sociologist Aníbal Quijano (1992), coloniality answers the question of why despite political decolonization or independence of former colonies from their empires, there is still felt oppression. Even though colonization is no longer the only dominant method of imperial expansion, what is it that we, the formerly colonized, still live in and carry within us? What else, in addition to massive colonial wealth, was produced by the extractive and exploitative relationship between European and American empires and colonies? Quijano (2000, p. 533–534) argues that the codification of difference between the conquerors and the conquered, in other words, the idea of race supported by European science and rationality, was produced, as was a new model of global power focused on control of land and labor for capitalism, which desires exponential growth in perpetuity. He suggested four domains of control that constitute coloniality, and the model has since evolved, notably by Madina Tlostanova and Walter Mignolo (2009), among others (Maldonado-Torres, 2007), who write about the colonial matrix of power (CMP). The CMP helps us to visualize how control of land, labor, and economy is bound up with capitalism; how control of authority and its resources is bound up with the state; how control of normativity, including gender, sexuality, family, and religion, is bound up with the bourgeois family; and how the control of knowledge and intersubjectivity, including how we think about education, is bound up with Eurocentrism (Mignolo, 2002; Mignolo & Walsh, 2018; Quijano, 2000, 2007; Tlostanova & Mignolo, 2009).
Importantly, Quijano and others argued that coloniality is not static—the matrix shape-shifts and learns from itself because its agents have things that they want to do. Thus, scholars refer to the other side of the coloniality coin as modernity. What is most insidious about modernity is that it implants in people a desire for more, which requires the condition of always striving to have. This is about the big and small decisions that we make—the clothes that we wear, the food that we eat, everything that surrounds our daily lives and how those are linked with certain desires that have become perceived as needs, and how each thing comes from somewhere and is made up of elements that were imagined, labored, and produced in specific ways. Under coloniality or modernity, we are compelled to consider our own complicity, Indigenous or not, with the agendas that message us.
Rikch’arisun in the Quechua Collao, southern Quechua variety, means we awaken—and further, that we do not stay asleep or indifferent in the face of the problems that suffocate us. If we are to think about confronting coloniality, we must awaken to awareness of our own intelligences, our infinite spirit, heart, embodied, and emplaced knowledges, including what we know, how we know, and why we seek or value particular kinds of ways of knowing (Meyer, 2011). We also awaken to our intuition as we investigate the coloniality–modernity dynamic that limits the many ways of being and ways of knowing for its own purposes, and that demands that we think less of ourselves and more of what we have, build, and buy.
At the same time, to awaken can be disorienting because we are moving away from thinking of the world as a fixed entity, a given that we have been handed, where nothing needs changing or is changeable. Therefore, awakening also means reclaiming our status as considerers of the world and not as spectators of a world mythicized by imperialists. This distinction was powerfully observed by Brazilian educator Paulo Freire (2005). But just what is this world that we are waking up into, and what is our place in it? Is it a world where we are not called by our spirit names, where we may not know or be known to our clans and tribal nations, a world of broken things that our children can no longer map?
Sayarisun (we stand)
Alkunchallay wamanchallay alaykipi apakuway alaykipi apawaspa Ñanchallaman churaykuway. Alkunchallay wamanchallay kay ork’opim chinkark’uni, alaykipi apaykuway ñanchallaman churaykuway. Chaymantak’a ripusak’mi, chaymantak’a pasasak’mi viagueruwan tupaykuspa wamanguinuwan tak’rukuspay. Hawk of the sky, falcon of the rises, come down for a moment, I have become lost in these mountains, take me on your wings to the path. I have become lost in these mountains, hawk of the rises. I only ask that you take me to the path, come down for a moment, hawk of the sky. Leave me on the path, falcon. From there I will go with the travelers, with the flocks of the wamangas. Falcon, come down for a moment! —Altun Pawak’ Wamanchallay (2014) by José María Arguedas, emphasis added, translation by author
We do not need an empirical study to realize that the world is one of sadness and joy, togetherness and isolation. The poetry of Peruvian writer and ethnologist José María Arguedas pays homage to the Quechua speakers who raised him and the way in which they taught him that beings communicate across our Andean world. Arguedas is known for his evocative imagery of juxtapositions, notably despair and hope, which resonate through many of the stories of Indigenous peoples. In Peru, the centuries of social, political, and economic injustices escalated through the 1980s and 1990s in a violent conflict between the Maoist-inspired Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) and the Peruvian military. Known commonly in Peru as the time of fear, Sendero’s political agenda saw forced takeovers and occupations of rural Andean communities, including my own, and the executions of those who would not join the movement. As a state counter-terrorism measure, the military was deployed to villages, towns, and universities, which were viewed as suspicious incubators of Marxism and communist ideologies. Between the military’s amnesty and Sendero’s tactics, deaths and disappearances became commonplace. My own privilege of having a non-Peruvian father allowed us to live elsewhere and we would not return to Peru for over a decade. During this time, we corresponded by letters and the one phone in the village plaza or center, waiting for news of family. My cousins who were university students buried any books that could be viewed as leftist, and if they did not make the required state curfew, my aunts would go to the morgues in the morning with other parents who were also searching for their children. Stories of massacres, tortures, and executions became commonplace—everyone knew someone who had been killed by either Sendero or the military. By the time Sendero’s leaders were jailed and its movement ceased, conservative reports estimate almost 70,000 people dead with hundreds of thousands uprooted and displaced (Truth and Reconciliation Commission, 2001). Unsettling in other ways was and has been the persistence of the disappeared, no body to hold a vigil and to bury. This literally drove those family members and loved ones crazy with an unresolved grief.
Coloniality. Violence. War. If we recall that coloniality is a totalizing system of at least four domains, the regulation of control through violence makes sense. In the early days of colonization, violence and war-making aided imperial visioning and enforcement of colonial strategy, and perhaps today control is even more insidious because it is exercised through the seductive persuasion of modernity that is its own kind of epistemic and more than human violence because it is an enforcement of someone else’s way of wanting Indigenous peoples to be that costs our natural world her life. This is a condition that decolonial scholars like Julia Suárez-Krabbe (2015), a Danish and Colombian professor, refers to as the death project. According to Suárez-Krabbe (2015), the death project is the exercise of violence in coloniality, carried out through a dominant set of practices that link together racism, capitalism, patriarchy, and the depredation and desacralization of nature. Violence is targeted at the very real processes of life and conditions for existence, which she argues are plurality, in reference to the many ways of knowing the world and being. Suárez-Krabbe (2015) also argues that under the death project there are people, structures, and institutions with “the power and capacity to dictate who may live and who must die” (p. 4).
In Quechua, nuna and runa imply personhood, but personhood is reliant upon proper behavior. In other words, one can choose to cease to be a proper person because actions shape and define humanity. Being a person is then ordinary and extraordinary—ordinary because every being carries and circulates pacha—the universe’s energy-life force—known to living beings through breath, movement, and connectivity of the present to the past and future. But because all life is a gift, Pacha also makes us extraordinary. To honor such a gift requires paying close attention to what is around us by standing up for a good life. Sayarisun means we stand, we rise, we do this to take care of what belongs to us. In other words, we may not own our land, but we own our responsibilities and the values that determine how we will care for the land. Sayarisun also implies that we defend all those whom we were put here to care for, those who already care for us—from Ayllpamama, our Soil Mother who holds that which feeds us, to the humble kuruchakuna, the little worms who make the soil rich and who feed the beings who care for the flowering fruit that enrich our farms and whose designs we honor in our weavings. There is urgency to remembering and learning these things. Maybe every generation for the past five centuries has felt this urgency, which means that we are aware of what is required of us—observing and reflecting as did our ancestors before us, and taking a stand against the death project.
How do we stand against the death project? Upon what do we stand? One of my mentors, the late Yupiaq (Indigenous people of the State of Alaska, United States) scholar, Angayuqaq Oscar Kawagley (2002) stated, The spirit and pride of Native being has been struggling in a maelstrom of confusion due to the many people living with homeless minds, destitution, poverty, pestilence, war and dereliction of being, even as we live in the wealthiest nation in the world. You see, we have tried to comply with the wishes and dreamworks of a narcissistic society, but we have not been able to progress from the doldrums of uncertainty and hopelessness. However, a few of our American Indian and Alaska Native people have begun to see through the small channels in the blizzard and once we are able to see more clearly again, we will have something very important to share with the world. (para. 1)
Angayuqaq wrote compellingly about Indigenous knowledge systems. Raised by his grandmother in Bethel, Alaska, he used to talk about how he had the most beautiful education, until he went to school. He talked about schooling as a process of unlearning and devaluing his own ways of knowing. However, through innovating and adaptation, like so many others, he transformed his educational process to one of many returns to Alaska Native ways of life and advocated until his passing for what he called nature-mediated education that was rooted in Indigenous knowledge systems as values-oriented, observant of the physical and metaphysical world, and concerned with practical application of knowledge and skills exercised (Kawagley, 2006). In my work, I see these characteristics as foundational to Indigenous knowledge systems as the interconnected, beautiful, and innovative ways of knowing and doing that extend across and encompass our own understandings of the structures, processes, and institutions that make up Indigenous communities—our environments, technologies, economies, health, ancient and modern laws and governance, and our pedagogies and education.
Recovering and taking care of our knowledge systems and what informs them—our relationship with Mother Universe, Pachamama—are not just how we take a stand against the death project, but this work is also what my colleagues and I discuss in our interpretation of the life project (Tom et al., 2019). Under the death project, research problems and researched peoples are conflated. A research question solely about and not with Indigenous peoples inherently implies that Indigenous peoples themselves are a problem to be solved and the life project pushes beyond those simplistic ideas while challenging universal and normative terms, like sustainability, which too often center humans and financial economy in scholarship and policy. The life project is fueled by Indigenous peoples with clear and living connections to each other and their places asking questions, becoming those who investigate—we are the considerers realized. This is where Indigenous research methodologies and methods and Indigenous knowledge systems are inseparable, and as Indigenous peoples contribute to building what these mean, the possibilities are boundless.
A way to stand and defend: Indigenous research
Indigenous research methodologies and research designs reflect infinite possibilities of how we think about and do research. Every research project and researcher subscribes to a particular worldview that informs the design of their project and they are responsible for describing this when explaining what it is that they are doing, why, and how. Some research worldviews are interested in how people make sense of their own experiences. Others are focused on change and others yet are interested in power dynamics and gendered inequities. Yet, despite several decades of Indigenous scholars writing about their research worldviews (Johansson-Fua, 2014; Mertens et al., 2016; Oliveira & Wright, 2016; Rigney, 1999) research scholars do not necessarily include, teach, or support Indigenous research methodologies as part of the array of research worldviews available to our students. There are likely a lot of reasons for this—maybe Indigeneity is viewed as esoteric or people are afraid of misrepresentation or appropriation. Whatever the reasons may be, in my own experience as a university and out-of-school educator, we can and ought to recognize the existence of research paradigms that are of and serve Indigenous peoples, including their distinct places, needs, languages, and cultural practices.
Despite distinctions across ways of thinking about and doing research with Indigenous peoples, there are characteristics held in common when describing Indigenous research methodologies (Atalay, 2012), including that they are mindful of Indigenous self-determination—meaning what people hope for their lives and the strategies that they use to achieve this and over time—which is inseparable from Indigenous knowledge systems because we need all of the important things that people are and do to take care of each aspect of our communities. Indigenous communities need scientists, lawyers, teachers, engineers, language speakers, doctors and healers, poets and artists, mathematicians, writers, and so on. Much of my work in educational research is about investigating how to support the growth of our own people and what hurts and blocks them. Second—and this was laid out for us so well by Shawn Wilson (2001) over 20 years ago—is that Indigenous research is the confluence where Indigenous ontologies, epistemologies, axiologies, and methodologies meet—that is, our existence and purpose, what we know and how we know, what we value, and how we think about and shape the search for knowledge and how we recognize it when we see it, hear it, or feel it. In Quechua, these senses are not separated—for example, there is a term in Quechua Collao for a linkage between mind and heart, illanay, which is the feeling in thought (R. Vizcarra, personal communication, November 22, 2021). Third, Indigenous research holds the hope of Indigenous and place-informed pluriversal inquiry, meaning that the diversity of what we seek to know and how we ask—that is, the many methods of research design—is made vital by the many different worlds that we recognize and the many beings that are of service to those worlds. This proposal is linked with my stance that Indigenous research methodologies are more than research paradigms and are vital evidence of life-sustaining worldviews that produce research designs that engage processes of healing and helpfulness and that reflect Indigenous pluriversal realities—the philosophical and the daily.
The Cree scholar Cora Weber-Pillwax in 1999 also offered us principles of Indigenous research that laid the foundation for these meaningful pluriversal connections—within our worlds and across them. She offered us points to be mindful of and that distinguish our research from westernized methodologies and methods—in other words, she writes that Indigenous research asks for recognition and enactment of the belief of interconnectedness of all living things, research as lived Indigenous experience, groundedness of theories in Indigenous epistemology, and sacredness and responsibility of maintaining personal and community integrity (Weber-Pillwax, 1999). But Weber-Pillwax also did what wise people will do, which is to hold open the door rather than to shutter it with directives. She shared with us her excitement for where we would take Indigenous research in the future—which is now: Each research project will be a research project layered over a research experience layered over a personal experience layered over a research project. Living through and integrating the thinking, visioning, talking, intuiting, and/or writing of these layers (for some people and some sections using two languages) is the form of rigor demanded by the present forms of indigenous scholarship. (Weber-Pillwax, 1999, p. 39)
Community-mindedness has incredible reach and researchers from every distinct language place will have something personal and collectively derived to add to how we understand research in relation to ourselves and our worlds.
This kind of work is happening among Indigenous researchers and dedicated friends today and there are awesome examples across many fields and communities and ways of knowing. I have had the privilege of working with and learning from some of them—the theories and methods of Indigenous storywork by Jo-ann Archibald (2008), the research with Sámi and Indigenous language revitalization and multilingualism being done by Patricia Fjellgren and Leena Huss (2019), to the questions about what it means to do multispecies ethnography that takes into account the earth and her creatures in the Andes and that centers loss and grief by María Elena García (2019), and the Ojibwe community members here in Minnesota who push university science students to think about how to interview a lake in an environmental study (Sumida Huaman et al., in press). These are examples of Indigenous researcher collaborations that are always becoming, as Tewa (Indigenous people of the Southwestern United States) artists Nora Naranjo Morse and her daughter Eliza Naranjo Morse eloquently describe our relationship with ourselves, each other, and the universe through their artwork.
Research that exercises Indigenous self-determination in relation to Indigenous knowledge systems and that explicitly demonstrates ontological, axiological, epistemological, and methodological connections shows us the many tools that emerge from our pluriversal realities and that we bring, sharpen, and develop in deep fellowship with the worlds of Indigenous communities, researcher colleagues, and the work itself. The work of researchers and allies shows us that everything in research is connected and that if you ignore one part of an Indigenous knowledge system or fail to consider varying understandings of temporality, your story of what is happening is incomplete. Indigenous research also shows us that we need each other—we need our ancestors and our families, whatever those look like. At a pragmatic level, this means that we need interdisciplinary and interepistemic teams who will work together in kindness and who understand that it will take every person on this planet contributing their gifts with their whole hearts to change the course of the future. As Indigenous peoples, we also need a sense of resolve that withstands heartaches. Through a language understanding of relationship with one’s place, Māori scholar, Hirini Moko Mead, conveyed this resolve most eloquently—reminding us that place and self are bound together, even where people and policies fail: A bundle of attributes come with the fact of being born of Māori parents or even of one Māori parent. One of these attributes is the right to a place for the feet to stand, that is, tūrangawaewae. It is a place where one belongs by right of birth. Tūrangawaewae represents one spot, one locality on planet earth where an individual can say, “I belong here. I can stand here without challenge. My ancestors stood here before me. My children will stand tall here.” (Mead, 2003, p. 43)
K’ancharisun (we shine)
On November 4, 2017, I walked with one of my aunts to the Plaza de Armas, the main historic center space in the city of Cusco. There, elected officials and city leaders held celebrations and speeches to commemorate the start of the largest Indigenous rebellion against Spanish governance in Peru, which had been launched that same day in 1780 by Quechua leader José Gabriel Condorcanqui, known as Tupac Amaru II. Tupac Amaru, which translates from Quechua as fighter serpent, and his wife, Micaela Bastidas, led widespread uprisings and Spanish government overthrows across the highlands in protest of the Bourbon Reforms. Evading capture for about a year, this movement became known as the Tupac Amaru Rebellion or Tupac Amaru Uprising and gained traction as an Indigenous movement for a return to pre-Spanish invasion Peru, to the time of the Inkas. By May of 1781, Tupac Amaru and Micaela Bastidas, along with other movement leaders, had been captured and brought to the Plaza de Armas where they were tortured and executed. Bastidas was strangled and beaten to death and the Spanish officials ordered for Tupac Amaru to be quartered by horses. When this was unsuccessful, he was dismembered and parts of his body were distributed to different regions for public display.
My aunt and I watched as different groups entered the plaza space—including Indigenous officials from different communities, activists, and farmer leaders, bringing with them paintings of Tupac Amaru and flowers. We listened as they recounted the life, death, and purpose of Tupac Amaru in Quechua and as they spoke of his courage, his heart, and how this movement lives on in the causes of the people today. After each clear pronouncement, those of us gathered around repeated the call—kawsachun, long live or so that they may live. I think about this moment a lot—how some might say that we Indians need to let go of the past or that we are too sensitive to remember that in this place where tourists gather and take photos and where vendors sell their goods, this is where Tupac Amaru and Micaela Bastidas met their end. I think about them here in their last moments, surrounded by mountains and above them the Andean sky. I think about how our people remember, how they continue to march down from their communities into this grand plaza, and how we mourn these and many other murders and yet also take inspiration into our breath.
These kinds of realizations are connected with what Kanaka Maoli thinker, Pōkā Laenui (2000) refers to as the mourning phase in decolonization. We mourn these losses and those who suffered them as we also make difficult choices today that distance and bring us closer to those struggles. But there is a time and place for mourning. We also have a responsibility to investigate and to (re)learn, to use, and to contribute to Indigenous research as a way to stand and defend so that they may live, and in doing these things, that is when we begin to shine. This is the meaning of k’ancharisun—we illuminate with wisdoms that are not always easily learned and that cannot be taken for granted. In many cases, our wisdoms have been stolen from us, but we reclaim them to move forward. Most importantly, because Quechua is inclusive, k’ancharisun also implies that we serve as light for living well for others. We do not do shine alone as individuals because we are never alone—our worlds hold the living and non-living, the human and more-than-human.
The Andean world Hanaq Pacha is the Sky or Upper World, Kay Pacha—This Earth World, and Ukhu Pacha the Inner, Under, or Interior World. Ours are convivial worlds that require deep recognition of Father Sun, Mother Moon, the Morning Star, Deity Mountains, the Mist, Mother Oceans, Mother Lakes, and Sacred Life-Giving Springs of Water. We are connected to them all when we honor our collective relationship to them through our conversations with each other. For example, as my mother’s sister, Mama Ines, a Quechua Collao teacher explains, the root word of rikch’arisun, rikch’ariy, or any Quechua word on its own makes sense only because of conversation in place and time. The words of the people, like those languages spoken by the rocks, trees, flowers, birds, insects, are animated through energy-life force, breath, motion, and our togetherness. This article is titled “Indigenous knowledge systems and research for planetary beauty” because we awaken, stand, and shine for a reason—we require purpose other than the promises of Euro-centric modernity. Awakening asks us to think about the many ways of being and knowing, the knowledge systems that shape reparative, generous, and kind interactions with our worlds and for teqsimuyuntin, the whole planet.
Indigenous research offers us the tools to take a stand, to defend—by asking, “In what other ways we can define knowledges, how are knowledges felt and experienced, and toward what purposes?” As well, the famed Māori scholar Linda Tuhiwai Smith writes that Indigenous research is very strong in its capability to address ethics. She says that Indigenous peoples collectively share “the historically sustained experience of research as the Object” that has been shaped by a research expert, validated by governments, universities, and corporations (Smith, 2005, p. 101). Despite these unequal power dynamics, we hold other ways of knowing about ourselves and our environments. An important caveat is that these ways of knowing, which our research draws from and informs, may be different from what our ancestors knew 20,000 years ago, 500 years ago, or 50 years ago, but they still “provide access to a different epistemology, an alternative vision of society, an alternative ethics for human conduct” (Smith, 2005, p. 101). She warns us that this is not just about trainings on ethical violations or human subjects review processes but about rethinking what it means to work with people who have been systematically dehumanized. When we consider our knowledge systems and our work for them, we stand up against the death project and the death ethics linked with dehumanization and the decisions of who gets to live and who must die. We stand for the life project. In Quechua, this is akin to, Yapanchis llank’ananchis teqsimuyunchis sumaq kananpaq—We must all work for a full and beautiful planet, which goes hand-in-hand with yapanchis llank’ananchis teqsimuyunchis kawsarinanpaq—to revive what is dying so that it may live again.
I end this article with an observation of where we as researchers who are also community members may find ourselves in this moment. I do not work with famous people or international leaders. I work with good and kind farmers, teachers, healers, and students—I talk with the cooks who sell Andean foods in the plazas of our villages and towns and the children who accompany their parents to the corn and potato fields. I am told by them that the ceremonial ones say that we the people have become parasitic—we drink from and then poison the earth’s blood, we eat from her flesh, and we dirty her. Widespread mining opens our mother’s womb and she becomes frightened. She suffers and our mountains suffer because we cannot put them back together. I think about what our ancestors saw in 1532 when the Spanish arrived to our lands and in the subsequent years as development increased, what Tupac Amaru and Micaela Bastidas might say today. I imagine that we did not think that the mountains would be taken or that we would sell them, or that the price we would pay for electricity so that our students can do their homework at night would be the loss of the frogs who are the keepers of the waters and wetlands, or the birds whose songs and stories are the connection to Hanaq Pacha.
And yet, we have fight in us: In the 1600s, one of our Quechua scribes, Guaman Poma de Ayala, who depicted our cultural practices and the changes he witnessed under Spanish dominion, expressed that our people had entered a time of great transformation, a world where things are not right. But it had also been said that another time of transformation would begin and we are in that time now. This is the moment for Indigenous researchers as we work to free ourselves to recall and dream, as well as for our students to understand that the decisions that we make daily give motion to this change and that within it all, we embody Pachakuteq, the transformation of the universe. Kawsachun.
Footnotes
Author’s note
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and publication of this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and publication of this article.
Glossary
C̣aƞṡayapi Lower Sioux Indian Community tribal nation
Chanka Quechua-related culture; variety of Quechua language
Quechua Quechua-speaking Indigenous people of Peru
Wanka Quechua-speaking Indigenous highlands people of Peru
Dakota the original Indigenous people of the region now known as Minnesota, United States
Lower Sioux Indian Community
Ojibwe a Native American Tribe, South-Central Minnesota, United States an Indigenous people of Minnesota, United States; also, of various regions of Canada
Oneida an Indigenous nation of the Haudenosaunee, an Indigenous confederacy, with significant populations in Wisconsin, United States, and Ontario, Canada
Onyota’a:ka People of the Standing Stone; Oneida people in the Oneida language
Tewa Indigenous peoples of the Southwestern United States; also part of the Pueblo Indian Nations of New Mexico
Yupiaq an Indigenous people of the State of Alaska, United States
Ayllpamama our Soil Mother; life-giving soil who holds that which feeds us
Apus Deities; seminal energy-life forces
Hanaq Pacha Sky or Upper World
Kay Pacha This World; this Earth World
illanay literally, the thought that flies; also interpreted as the feeling in thought and connection between thought and emotion
k’ancharisun we shine; we illuminate (for the benefit of others)
kawsachun long live; so that they live; so that they may live
kuruchakuna the little worms who make the soil rich and who feed the beings who care for the flowering fruit that enrich our farms and whose designs we honor in our weavings
Pacha the universe’s energy, life force—known to living beings through breath, movement, and connectivity of the present to the past and future
Pachakuteq refers to the transformation of the universe; also he, she, or they who transforms or will transform the universe
rikch’ariy and rikch’arisun
root word of rikch’ariy is to awaken; rikch’arisun is we awaken—and further, that we do not stay asleep or indifferent in the face of the problems that suffocate us
runa or nuna Quechua Collao term for person; implies personhood; Note that this article uses both Wanka and Collao varieties of Quechua. For example, nuna is the Wanka variety, runa in Collao. Terms like tiqsimuyu, rikch’ariy, sayariy, and k’anchariy are written in Collao.
runawarmi human woman
sayarisun we stand, we rise
tiqsimuyuntin tiqsimuyu is planet; tiqsimuyuntin is the entirety of the planet
Tupac Amaru also spelled Tupaq Amaru; fighter serpent
Ukhu Pacha the Inner, Under, or Interior World
yapanchis llank’ananchis teqsimuyunchis sumaq kananpaq
we must all work for a full and beautiful planet
yapanchis llank’ananchis teqsimuyunchis kawsarinanpaq
to revive what is dying so that it may live again
chimpash someone who is from an other side, which divides even people from the same Indigenous community and language group; the term can be used towards people from the same community but who are part of different ritual or ceremonial groups, or those who are rivals
halla an insult in reference to a person who is viewed as less civilized, assimilated, or educated and who thus is not fluent in the dominant language of Spanish
ñucca an insult in reference to a person who is viewed as less civilized, assimilated, or educated and who thus is not fluent in the dominant language of Spanish; the insult can be wielded by Indigenous peoples and non-Indigenous peoples—typically urban discriminating Peruvians
ya’a I (personal pronoun)
caƞṡayapi where the trees are marked red
Mni Sota Makoce the land where the waters reflect the sky
Onyota’a:ka People of the Standing Stone; an Oneida people
tsi’niyukwalihó•t^ learning place
cosmovivencia the lived experience of Quechua cosmology
pueblos originarios first communities
Sendero Luminoso Shining Path, a Peruvian Maoist-inspired guerrilla movement
