Qualitative analysis at the interface of Indigenous and Western knowledge systems: the Herringbone stitch model

Abstract

This article describes the methodological challenges and opportunities of qualitative analysis from a position of critical Indigenous inquiry. It does not present findings but rather demonstrates a process of critical engagement with different methodologies to realize the most appropriate way to analyze data generated by Indigenous research. The article explores ‘interface research’, drawing upon multiple knowledge systems for data analysis as a means of producing new knowledge beneficial to Indigenous communities. Linking Western and Indigenous systems of knowledge, the contradictions and congruences of a hermeneutic study are explored as they pertain to the analysis of 15 Indigenous women’s lived experience of family violence. Indigenous methodology, in combination with hermeneutic principles, defined the process of analysis at the interface. As a result, a qualitative analytic model was developed and is offered as an innovative example of Indigenous data analysis that maintains Indigenous integrity and sovereignty and facilitates benefit to Indigenous women.

Keywords

Indigenous research analysis interface research Indigenous knowledges hermeneutics qualitative analysis domestic violence Indigenous women’s standpoint

Introduction

The methodological challenges and opportunities of qualitative research analysis of Indigenous data from a position of critical Indigenous¹ inquiry have been given little attention. The purpose of the article is not to present findings or analyses but rather to demonstrate a process of critical engagement with different methodologies to realize the most appropriate way to analyze data generated by Indigenous research. Drawing upon leading Indigenous thinkers, the concept of ‘interface research’ is explored as it applies to the analysis of a hermeneutic phenomenological study, the Cloaked in Strength project.

Bridging methodological understanding is critical to achieving high-quality qualitative research and successful research analysis and translation within the Indigenous context. While there is ongoing debate about the nature of Indigenous research, much of the research that is currently being conducted by Indigenous researchers demonstrates methodological flexibility and operates from ‘a position of being Aboriginal’ (Martin, 2003: 205). Positioned at the intersection of hermeneutic phenomenology, critical Indigenous feminism and Indigenous research, this study draws upon their interfacing strengths to develop a model of analysis. The Herringbone stitch model is the result of careful consideration of the paradigmatic contradictions and congruences at the interface. It attempts to resolve the contradictions and utilize the congruences to analyze, interpret and find meaning in the lived experience of violence of 15 Indigenous women. The model offers other qualitative researchers, in particular Indigenous scholars, an example of how interface research can support the analysis of Indigenous data while maintaining integrity and sovereignty.

Context

Indigenous scholars often wrestle with ways to operate within Western academic scholarship while adamantly adhering to our cultural bases (Grieves, 2009; Kovach, 2010a). The last 25 years has seen significant effort by Indigenous scholars across the globe to establish an Indigenous academic research agenda and pioneer change in research practices. Anchored to the movement of Indigenous peoples’ sovereignty and ongoing political struggle, the agenda seeks a self-determining knowledge space that privileges the Indigenous mind and voice for the benefit of Indigenous people (Rigney, 2006).

Defined within the context of Indigenous worldviews, Indigenous research is positioned differently to a Western research agenda and requires a number of Indigenous research principles to be met. The discourse of decolonized and indigenist research has sought to reclaim control and position Indigenous research such that Indigenous worldviews and knowledge systems are not othered but rather form the basis from which new knowledge is generated (Martin, 2003; Rigney, 2006). Indigenous researchers have sought to navigate the interface between Indigenous and Western research to generate new knowledge that reflects the interests, values and priorities of Indigenous peoples. Snow et al. (2016) present a synthesized set of principles important to achieving these which include: indigenous identity development; indigenous paradigmatic lens; reflexivity and power sharing; critical immersion; and participation and accountability. Analysis in this context has only recently been scrutinized in the context of the Indigenous data sovereignty debate (Kukutai and Taylor, 2016).

The study

The Cloaked in Strength study is built upon the core principles of Indigenous research identified by Snow et al. (2016) with specific reference to relational accountability (Kovach, 2010b; Wilson, 2008), place (Tuck and McKenzie, 2014), reciprocity, and reflexivity (Martin, 2003). Structured within an Australian urban Indigenous context, it centers Indigenous women who are mothers in its exploration of family violence and how cultural practice can support their stories and inform family violence responses. The research uses a fusion of hermeneutic and Indigenous principles to analyze the data using Indigenous women’s standpoint as the interpretive lens.

This research focuses upon the lived experience of family violence of 15 Indigenous mothers living in Narrm.² The women were engaged through the Indigenous community-controlled sector using Indigenous methods of engagement and data collection. The study adhered to cultural protocols, community values and relational accountability (Wilson, 2008) as it engaged the women through individual interviews, possum skin cloak making workshops and a yarning circle. Indigenous methods of yarning (culturally safe conversation) (Bessarab and Ng’andu, 2010) and dadirri (deep listening) (Ungunmeer, 1988) are orally based practices that facilitated and maintained an inquisitive curiosity throughout the interview process such that participants were able to tell the story they wanted to tell.

The metaphor of the analytic model presented in this article specifically rests upon the workshop phase of the study, the possum skin cloak making. Possum skin cloaks were traditionally made by Indigenous communities across south-eastern Australia for every-day use such as warmth, baby supports, for use in ceremony and in preparation for the birth of a baby (Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies, 2017). Cloaks were inscribed with family and tribal lore that imbued the wearer with cultural identity, place and belonging, and was a practice that facilitated cultural memory (Couzens, 2017). Contemporary possum skin cloak making, as a feature of place-based cultural restoration, is grounded in expressions of new life, renewal, belonging and cultural strength (Couzens, 2017), all synonymous with healing in the context of family violence.

The initial workshop ran over three days with a yarning circle embedded within it. The workshop was facilitated by myself, as lead researcher, and Dr Vicki Couzens, Gunditjmara Keerray Woorroong Woman and Senior Knowledge Custodian for Possum Cloak Story, who has been instrumental in the revival of possum skin cloak making over the last 20 years. The workshop offered an experience for the participating women to engage with a cultural practice not only through a shared lived experience of family violence but through a shared sense of identity as urban Indigenous women. The workshop ensured that the collective experience and understanding of family violence for the participants was acknowledged through a relational frame that afforded connectedness between participants. Embedding a possum skin cloak workshop into the study design also acknowledged that the nature of family violence for Indigenous women demanded a healing component that validated their lived experience and resilience (Andrews, 2020).

The participants requested further opportunities to meet, yarn and work on the cloaks beyond the initial workshop and so 11 subsequent day-long workshops were held over the course of the study. These follow-up possum skin cloak workshops continued to operate as a data collection method before shifting to a means of participant reflection and feedback for the analysis. The participants who continued to be involved with the study offered reflection and guidance throughout the coding, analysis and synthesis phases, thereby operationalizing the Herringbone stitch model.

Qualitative analysis at the interface

Interface research

Research at the interface is defined by Durie (2004: 8) as that which employs ‘two sets of values and methods not simply to bridge the benefits that might arise from each, but ultimately to produce gains for indigenous peoples most of whom live at the interface’. At the interface there are contradictions that come with the merging of knowledge systems. Although challenging, Durie (2004) suggests these be used to enhance research. Martin (2008) similarly identifies the research interface as that in which to establish new and innovative constructs about, and relationships with, knowledge and research. She urges researchers to engage the research interface such that it repositions knowledge and it ‘is no longer a site of resistance, but a site of decolonisation and transformation’ (Martin, 2008: 131).

Bridging Western and Indigenous systems of knowledge requires an articulation of how they meet at the interface or what the point of encounter looks like. The paradigmatic distinctions between Western and Indigenous research are therefore important to understand. This is not to diminish one over the other, but rather to illustrate that while we might position ourselves at the interface and engage their congruences, the origins and sensibilities of Indigenous and Western philosophies are different. Hong et al. (2017:23) state that ‘research sites are fraught with tension, and it is to the researcher’s and participant’s advantage to generate complex understandings of those tensions’. The task therefore is to draw from both through a process of critical Indigenous inquiry in order to undertake an Indigenous research agenda that yields benefit to Indigenous communities and meets the principles of Indigenous research.

The epistemological, ontological and axiological assumptions of each knowledge system reveal several significant, macro-level differences (Kovach, 2010a). Western research paradigms often conceptualize knowledge as an entity, to be owned or harnessed, whereas the Indigenous understanding of knowledge is that which is a product of relationality (Kovach, 2010b; Tuck and Mckenzie, 2014; Wilson, 2008). Tuck and McKenzie (2014) identify the predominantly secular and linear nature of Western paradigms, while the Indigenous paradigm places emphasis upon the connectedness of the human, spiritual, and natural dimensions through a cyclical continuum of place, time, and understanding (Martin, 2003; Wilson, 2008). Indigenous research paradigms are built upon relational oral histories and cultural memory (Kovach, 2010b; Moreton-Robinson, 2000), placing knowledge within the collective rather than with the individual, thereby challenging the methodological individualism of most Western paradigms. ‘Two-eyed seeing’, described by Bartlett et al. (2012), offers a similar model to interface research whereby each research paradigm is recognized separately but by seeing them with two eyes different ways of knowing can be brought together. Analysis of Indigenous data in this context requires careful consideration but equally offers an area for further exploration. Using the research interface, a new, Indigenous theoretically driven process of analysis is made explicit here through the Herringbone stitch model.

The Herringbone stitch model

Traditionally, in Australia, pelts of a possum skin cloak were sewn together using kangaroo sinew (Couzens, 2017; Gibbins, 2010). Today, in its revival, possum skin cloak making uses a waxed saddle twine to replicate the traditional sinew. It is sewn using either a blanket stitch or a herringbone stitch, the latter sometimes being preferred as it allows the pelts to be sewn with flush joinery (Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies, 2017). A herringbone stitch creates a zig-zag interlace that includes a small back stitch. It is a particularly strong stitch but one that has a little give in it too, offering flexibility. Sewing together one side each of two possum pelts, the stitch progresses horizontally along the join in a cyclical motion—diagonally up to the right, small back stitch to the left, diagonally down to the right, small back stitch to the left, diagonally up and so on.

The Herringbone stitch model (see Figure 1) employs the material practice as a metaphor for knowledge generation and negotiation through a number of hermeneutic key concepts: ‘being-in-the-world’, ‘fore-structure’, ‘life-world existential themes’, the ‘hermeneutic cycle’ and ‘fusion of horizons’ (Gadamer, 2004; Heidegger, 1962; Tuohy et al., 2013; Van Manen, 1990). These have been integrated with Indigenous research principles and Indigenous feminist thought to form a model of analysis. Their interaction with one another at the interface offers an innovative approach to qualitative research analysis that facilitates benefit to Indigenous women.

Figure 1.

The Herringbone stitch model – qualitative analysis at the interface of Indigenous and western knowledge systems.

The twine

As an Indigenous woman researcher, I brought to the study and its analysis my own subjective ‘knowing’, which is indicated in the model as the waxed twine itself. Also known as ‘preunderstanding’ (Tuohy et al., 2013), fore-structure refers to the structural framework of our own experience given to us as a tool for ‘knowing’ the world. Preunderstanding allows Indigenous women’s ways of knowing, being and doing to be the foundation of the analysis and differs from phenomenological analysis in that it does not seek to take a bracketed position of not knowing, but rather uses the subjective stance as a frame through which to constitute an interpretation of ‘truth’ (Laverty, 2003). It takes stock of our past experiences and acknowledges our presuppositions through a process of continuous reflection (Tuohy et al., 2013). This is also a distinct feature of Indigenous methodologies. The twine therefore functions as an Indigenous woman’s standpoint providing the structure with which to ‘know’ the world, always present as it weaves its way along facilitating the stages of reflective analysis and the relationship between researcher and participants (in this case Indigenous women). As the twine is sewn using the herringbone stitch, the concepts of being-in-the-world and the life-world are used to ground the interpretation within Indigenous women’s subjectivity and interpret the themes. Laverty (2003: 24) writes, ‘Meaning is found as we are constructed by the world while at the same time we are constructing this world from our own background and experiences’.

The stitch

As an iterative process, the herringbone stitch represents the hermeneutic cycle. Distinct to hermeneutic research is the relationship that the researcher has with the story, how the story is told, and how the storytellers and the researcher interpret the story.

Hermeneutic analysis produces understanding through systematic and collaborative reflective-interpretive processes known as the hermeneutic cycle (Laverty, 2003) and refers to the repeated and cyclical movement between part and whole in the textual interpretation (Moustakas, 1994). This process determines the ‘structures of the experience’ as a way to draw out essential themes (Van Manen, 1990: 79).

The stitch is sewn in a cyclical movement to merge the possum pelts, moving between reflection and interpretation, between the parts and the whole and between researcher and participants. Drawing on Indigenous values of collectivity and relationality, the hermeneutic cycle was employed to move between the components of stories and the whole story to come to a new collective story, developed by both researcher and the women. Each cycle involves reading, reflective writing, dialogue and interpretation to reflexively co-create understanding with the participants (Rapport, 2005). As a process that maintains relational accountability, it also meets a critical principle of Indigenous research (Wilson, 2008). Importantly, the cyclical movement between researcher and the women serves to enable a focus on the textual parts but also maintain a perspective on the collective story. This allows the analysis to be situated at the interface of two important methods of interpretation, which Durie (2004: 7) refers to:

While analysis into smaller and smaller components is a standard scientific method, indigenous knowledge places greater emphasis on the construction of models where multiple strands can be accommodated to make up an interacting whole. Understanding comes not so much from an appreciation of component parts as from synthesis into a wider context.

The rigor of the process sits with the ‘multiple stages of interpretation that allow patterns to emerge, the discussion of how interpretations arise from the data, and the interpretive process itself’ (Laverty, 2003: 31). The cycle rests upon and promotes the ongoing connectedness and relationship between the women and researcher, bringing together two horizons of understanding.

The pelts

The coming together of the possum skin pelts is indicative of hermeneutics’ ‘fusion of horizons’ (Rapport, 2005: 135). The cyclical process of hermeneutic analysis of reading, reflective writing, dialogue and interpretation derives understanding through a ‘fusion of horizons’ (Gadamer, 2004). Understanding happens when an encounter shifts our present understanding or horizon to a new understanding or horizon. The hermeneutic understanding for this study draws from a series of reflective encounters between researcher and the women, which works to find new meaning as the horizons of each merge. The horizons in this study also reflect the oral-textual relationship. Consistent with Wilson’s (2008) notion of Indigenous research methodology, the interpretation and understanding of the researcher therefore becomes accountable to that of the women. Van Manen’s (1997) ‘existentials’ are dimensions with which to explore and reflect upon the data to be analyzed. They include ‘lived space’, ‘lived time’, ‘lived body’ and ‘lived human relation’ (Rich et al., 2013). The life-world, described as the ‘everyday structure through which “being-in-the-world” unfolds’ (Seamon, 2015), is drawn upon to examine the lived experience of the women and draw together new understanding. As the pelts come together, they connect the women, the researcher, the oral and textual themes and the new meanings about the phenomenon; connections that are bound to Narrm as the place in which the new understanding is imbued with meaning. A cloak emerges therefore as the pelts come together, with flush joinery and strength, but enough flexibility to meet the demands made upon it.

The Herringbone stitch model offers an example of qualitative inquiry that begins with the concerns of Indigenous women and which offers a model of analysis that promotes research benefit for them. Its significance can be identified within Martin’s (2008) conceptualisation of interface research as a place not of resistance, but of decolonisation and transformation. The centering of Indigenous women’s voice within the model through critical engagement with multiple knowledge systems produces a new relationship with knowledge and research – one that upholds Indigenous self-determination through strengths-based research. The ensuing two sections explore the contradictions and congruences that are apparent at the interface of hermeneutics, Indigenous knowledge and Indigenous feminist thought and which are considered in the context of this newly forged relationship.

Applying a critical lens: addressing the contradictions

Critical Indigenous inquiry begins with the concerns of indigenous people. It is assessed in terms of the benefits it creates for them. The work must represent indigenous persons honestly, without distortion or stereotype, and the research should honor indigenous knowledge, customs, and rituals. It should not be judged in terms of neo-colonial paradigms. Finally, researchers should be accountable to indigenous persons. They, not Western scholars, should have first access to research findings. (Denzin and Lincoln, 2008: 2)

Anchoring the study to hermeneutics required a critical understanding of its principles and methods of analysis, in order to determine how it could successfully merge with an Indigenous methodological approach and analytic framework. This process raised two contradictions. First, with an emphasis on textual interpretation, hermeneutics aims to understand participants’ situated experience of a phenomenon (Heinonen, 2015). Written textual understanding is vital in the hermeneutic analytic process and as such raised the initial contradiction. What of the oral traditions that operate beyond an exclusive textual hermeneutic and which maintain a cultural practice of transmitting knowledge orally? Ong (1995: 8) says that ‘to speak (or write) of an “oral text” is an anachronism’ and so how to embed within the process of analysis the oral emphasis that underpins the relational aspect of Indigenous women’s worldview was considered carefully (Kovach, 2010b).

In order to achieve an analysis and interpretation that honored the oral storying provided by the women of this study, I included reflections on the oral processes of engaging with women across the research project. This occurred during the recruitment and interview stages and throughout the possum skin cloak workshops and yarning circle. The reflections are a record of retrospective thoughts, insights and comments (recorded on the same day but after each recruitment session, interview or workshop) about the nature of the orality of the women as it facilitated their engagement with the project, me, each other and the possum skin cloak making. The reflections also make reference to non-verbal communication, emotion and sensory responses that were not captured in the transcription.

Aiming to ‘embody’ the research and its analysis, the audio recordings were listened to throughout the process of analysis to further identify the participants’ experience by drawing meaning from their ways of speaking (Chadwick, 2017). Wording was also included throughout the analysis that reflected the culturally distinct orality of the women; sentences, phrases and quotes that represent relationality, place and cultural meaning, for example, ‘sister girls’, ‘Koori grapevine’ and ‘us mob’. It was important to make explicit within the model of analysis that the new understandings of the study were emerging from a fusion of textual and oral processes. While these strategies are inadequate to wholly address the issue of textual analysis using oral data, it makes some headway toward acknowledging the contradictions and challenges of fusing worldviews and associated practices within research.

The second contradiction centered upon working toward an interpretation of ‘truth’ from an Indigenous women’s relational standpoint. Finding a position on this was paramount to achieving a methodologically sound study that gave validity to the Indigenous women participating in it and to those whom may benefit from the new understandings drawn from it. Demirezen’s (2018) Gadamer’s Hermeneutics as a Model for the Feminist Standpoint Theory and a number of Indigenous women researchers helped to wrest this into a workable frame.

To begin with, I felt that I needed to shift the gaze to the self and consider my role as a researcher and an Indigenous woman (Berger, 2015; Martin, 2003). In doing so, accountability as an ‘Aboriginal woman researcher’ (Fredericks, 2008: 113) and reconciling my being, knowing and doing within the research became important to deliberate upon for the process of interpretive analysis. Situated at the intersection of insider–outsider researcher, I was obliged and expected to understand and articulate both my insider position as an Indigenous woman and mother, and my outsider position as a researcher.

Bainbridge (Bainbridge et al., 2013: 279) writes of her subject position in her research, ‘my Aboriginal self and relationality infused my role of researcher, as did the life experiences and beliefs I brought to research as the foundation for knowledge construction’. My role as an ‘Aboriginal woman researcher’ provided a presupposition with which to operationalize Indigenous women’s subjectivity throughout the process of analysis and interpretation. As such the subjectivity, or ‘multidimensional nature of reality and truths’, was bound by my own assumptions of ‘what can be known and who can know it’ (Bainbridge et al., 2013: 279). Demirezen (2018: 42–43) posits that having a presupposition ‘provides us with a ground in order to derive an agency from the regimes of truth which constitute us’. This means we have a base upon which to test, and re-test our prejudices until we reach satisfactory understanding. Further, through the coming together of different perspectives, ‘we recognize the contingency of our knowledge’, which results in more than one standpoint (Demirezen, 2018: 43). In this way, the dynamism of truth and reality in the context of difference therefore operates as the missing unfixed ground of a standpoint approach (Demirezen, 2018).

Heeding the messages of Indigenous women researchers and returning to ‘the concerns of indigenous people’ (Denzin and Lincoln, 2008: 2) also assisted in finding the right balance. Smith (2003: 39) states that interface research and decolonizing methodologies are ‘about centering our concerns and world views and then coming to know and understand theory and research from our own perspectives and for our own purposes’. Revisiting the purpose of the Cloaked in Strength study, as that of giving voice and a shared space to Indigenous mothers who have experienced family violence, told me that the analysis must be grounded in their everyday realities as both individual women but also as a way to harness their collective strengths. This led me to understand that through the analysis, ‘what can be known and who can know it’ would be derived from a process of shared interpretation that accounted for and operated within Indigenous women’s relational subjectivity (Fredericks, 2008; Moreton-Robinson, 2000). The Cloaked in Strength study would therefore bring Indigenous women’s ‘knowingness’ to the fore with relational accountability between the women and researcher integral to the process (Martinez, 2008).

To address these complexities, methods of rigor proposed by Creswell and Miller (2010) as important to the qualitative paradigm were used, and Indigenous principles of accountability and relationality were centered (Wilson, 2008). Using a dialectic approach, multiple lenses were utilized and included: myself as researcher to establish the assumptions and co-establish (with the women) a standpoint; the women to assess the credibility of the data and the interpretation through a number of opportunities to reflect upon and contribute to the progress of analysis; and finally, a number of third-party reviewers, such as academics within the family violence and Indigenous research spaces and research colleagues (Creswell and Miller, 2010; Wilson, 2008). Peer debriefing, prolonged engagement in the field through a number of day-long possum skin cloak workshops and thick, rich description of the embodied experience of family violence were also strategies used to strengthen this study (Chadwick, 2017; Creswell and Miller, 2010; Wilson, 2008).

A merging of worldviews: applying the congruences

The point of encounter between hermeneutics, Indigenous knowledge and a critical Indigenous feminist perspective brings together a number of complementary principles. While not sitting in complete congruence with one another, phenomenological hermeneutics are able to facilitate Indigenous voice and worldview, which supports an analysis framework, which in turn supports research benefit for Indigenous women. Considering Indigenous knowledges and Indigenous feminist scholarship, as they operate at the interface, the congruences can be found in their capacity to be reflexive.

Indigenous knowledges operating at the interface

In Australia, the Dreaming is a depository for the truth about life’s meaning and is the creative epoch of Australian Indigenous peoples. As with most Indigenous philosophies, it provides lore, or a template for living, by way of spiritual ancestors and offers a worldview that holds a central place as identity, relationality, non-lineal time, environmental connectedness and custodianship, and orality (Korff, 2019). Knowledge is carried orally through generations by cultural memory. Assmann and Czaplicka (1995: 129) define cultural memory as a social archive of cultural practices (dance, story, rites, ceremony, song) that are referred to as ‘figures of memory’ and which operate to maintain a collective identity.

While colonization has fractured this process to varying degrees, a collective consciousness of unity remains strong among Indigenous peoples, particularly among Indigenous women, as a new worldview is imagined (Starblanket, 2017). Fashioned from the strength of the old and the challenges of contemporary meaning, the resurgence of Indigenous knowing, being and doing offers a valuable frame with which to generate and understand new knowledge. It articulates the fundamental principles of Indigenous knowledges that apply to qualitative research and analysis, such as reciprocity and relationality, and provides space for forward-looking adaptability and progression.

Durie (2005: 306) urges researchers and practitioners to ‘Harness the energy from two systems of understanding in order to create new knowledge that can be used to advance understanding in two worlds’. Looking to an Indigenous philosophical worldview, with a recognition of its resilience and fluidity, there are some helpful global examples with which to consider analysis at the interface.

In 1998, Raymattja Marika introduced Gaṉma to English-speaking Australia in her Wentworth lecture³. Marika (1998), a senior Yolgnu Elder of north eastern Australia, described Gaṉma as:

Firstly a place; an area within the mangroves where the salt water coming in from the sea meets the stream of fresh water coming down from the land. Gaṉ̱ma is a still lagoon. The water circulates silently underneath, and there are lines of foam circulating across the surface. The swelling and retreating of the tides and the wet season floods can be seen in the two bodies of the water. (Marika, 1998: 7)

Marika (1998: 7) goes on to explain that, ‘Water is often taken to represent knowledge in Yolngu philosophy’. The salt water and fresh water represent the coming together of two parallel knowledge systems. The streams of water meet at the interface where a foam is produced, their mergence strengthening each source and leading to deeper understanding.

The Yolngu people say that if we try to capture the collaborative knowledge/foam in our hands it evaporates; it is only through gently holding the foam that it lingers, revealing itself to us. If we force it, it disappears. . . In order to hear the quiet sounds of foam, one needs to listen with one’s heart, to be aware of the experiencing not just the experiences (Kelly, 2008: 90).

In coming together, the waters ‘never lose their distinctiveness as separate and opposed parts of one whole’ (Yunupingu and Watson, 1986: 6–7) and as such Gaṉ̱ma provides a conceptual metaphor for western and Indigenous philosophies to sit together in research.

Similarly, another model is found in Aotearoa. Macfarlane et al.’s (2015: 52) ‘Braided Rivers’ approach to knowledge generation in their chapter ‘Sharing the food baskets of knowledge: Creating space for a blending of streams’. Macfarlane et al. (2015) draw upon Te Ao Maori (language) and Kaupapa Maori (philosophical principles) to demonstrate the culturally bound nature of knowledge systems. Western and Indigenous (Maori) knowledge systems, Macfarlane et al. (2015) argue, need to be positioned within a third space (the interface) such that one is not privileged over another. To illustrate this, Macfarlane et al. (2015: 64) offer a model that ‘attempts to interrogate and integrate Western science and Indigenous Maori models of programme development and evaluation’. Using a ‘he awa whiria’ (Macfarlane et al., 2015: 64) (a braided river) metaphor, two streams of knowledge connect and converge to maximize the benefits of each system, strengthening each system and balancing power relations.

Simonds et al. (2011) also demonstrate a successful mix of methodologies through their Crow tipi model of analysis in an exploration of patient–provider interactions in a Native American community. Developed through a process of cyclical community–researcher feedback, the model developed as a result of the community’s rejection of a pre-determined model of analysis and a coding process that broke up the individual stories. Using ‘a Crow cultural lens’ (Simonds et al., 2011: 839) the analysis was conducted through the development of a model that used codes to ‘hold’ the stories. This reflected higher level themes using ‘a culturally significant metaphor—the Crow tipi’ (Simonds et al., 2011: 841). In their deliberation on the process, Simonds and Christopher (2013: 2189–2190) write:

We learned that we must be respectful and diligent in our implementation of decolonizing research, paying careful attention to the process and being ready to acknowledge and make appropriate changes when Western methods or theories are not appropriate.

Each of these examples emphasize the distinctiveness of each knowledge system in their separateness while being strengthened through their mergence, a concept also supported by the hermeneutic cycle. The idea of respectful knowledge sharing to better inform and understand the complexities of a modern world not only preserves the memory and legitimacy of all knowledges but serves to foster and develop new thinking, or horizons.

An Indigenous feminist interpretive framework

Looking to Indigenous feminist thinkers and scholarship, the Herringbone stitch model drew from an Indigenous women’s relational standpoint approach as the primary interpretive framework to inform the analysis. Indigenous feminism holds central issues beyond the grasp of white feminist theory such as belonging to country, relational connectedness, cultural and spiritual reciprocity, cultural identity and self-determination (Green, 2017). As it steadily grows, Indigenous feminism draws from both white and black feminist theory and distinctly operationalizes the movement for social, political and economic equity within the context of colonization. The understandings drawn from it are useful to thinking about analysis at the research interface and how Indigenous women have distinct requirements for methodological inquiry.

Twenty-five years ago, Lucashenko (1994: 21) wrote of (Australian) Indigenous women and white feminism:

The Black paradigm—in its many fractions—is different, radically different to that of mainstream feminists, yet few in the women’s movement are cognisant of even the fact of that difference, let alone its content. Your ignorance of our Black struggle is often so overwhelming that we take the easiest option and dismiss you as simply part of the wider problem of colonisation, which is not, I suggest, an optimal outcome for either party.

Lucashenko (1994: 22) goes on to define the nature of the tension between white feminism and Indigenous women’s lives, citing racism and violence as just two of the significant rifts between the experiences of powerlessness as she explores ‘male violence’ and ‘white violence’. In her articulation of women’s truths and alluding to the absence of a gendered lens when examining Indigenous women’s lives, Lucashenko (1994: 24) says ‘there are, of course, other ‘truths’ than race in our indigenous lives’. In subsequent work Lucashenko reveals the intersectional nature of Heidegger’s ‘being-in-the-world’ (Van Manen, 1990) offering an analysis of the juncture at which Indigenous women find themselves and stating they are, ‘forced into a false dichotomy – are you feminists or Black? – Aboriginal women have, much of the time, been silenced about issues of crucial concern’ (Lucashenko, 1996: 387).

Fast forward twenty-something years and much has changed while nothing has. With a greater willingness to explore the common ground with white feminists and a broader understanding of the now well-established black feminist theory, Indigenous feminism is finding a space to generate gendered analyses of Indigenous women’s lives. The barriers are still significant however as Indigenous women argue against the deficit discourse that weighs heavily upon them and challenge the racial solidarity often used to silence and which frames much of the research conducted in Indigenous communities. Green (2017: 5) states that colonialism, as ‘the single most urgent structural condition affecting Indigenous women’, is ‘shaped by patriarchy and racism’, which places Indigenous feminism in a unique position to be, according to Blaney (cited in Green, 2017: 11), ‘the tool that will bring about decolonisation’.

The feminist discourse confirms the need for strongly affirming a research standpoint to privilege the self-definition of Indigenous women. Indigenous women’s relational standpoint offers the frame within which to consider the concept of hermeneutics’ ‘being-in-the-world’. Drawing from Donna Haraway’s situated knowledges, Kimberlé Crenshaw’s intersectionality, Nancy Hartsock’s standpoint theory and the black feminist thought of Patricia Hill Collins and bell hooks, Aileen Moreton-Robinson (2000) offers an Indigenous women’s relational standpoint theory. Moreton-Robinson (2000) uses Indigenous women’s life writings to articulate a framework for analyses of discourses of power and knowledge that privilege Indigenous women’s self-representation.

An Indigenous woman’s standpoint is informed by the social worlds imbued with meaning grounded in knowledges of different realities from those of white women. . .they include sharing an inalienable connection to land; a legacy of dispossession, racism and sexism; resisting and replacing disparaging images of ourselves with self defined images; continuing our activism as mothers, sisters, aunts, daughters, grandmothers and community leaders, as well as negotiating sexual politics across and within cultures. Such a standpoint does not deny the diversity of Indigenous women’s experiences. Indigenous women will have different concrete experiences that shape our relations to core themes (Moreton-Robinson, 2000: xvi).

Using Moreton-Robinson’s work and those within the emerging Indigenous feminist space, the Herringbone stitch model was constructed to reflect, through the analysis, the unique place occupied by Indigenous women and the multi-faceted, situated ‘truths’ of their lived experience of violence.

Discussion

Analysis interprets, draws meaning from, and examines data and is therefore critically important to Indigenous research, its privileging of Indigenous peoples’ concerns and its benefit to Indigenous people. Cram et al. (2006: 177) describe researchers as knowledge brokers who are ‘collectors of information and producers of meaning which can be used for, or against indigenous interests’. While there have been some shifts in qualitative research, there remain gaps regarding Indigenous research and analysis and finding appropriate and innovative ways for researchers to adequately analyze data in keeping with Indigenous principles is important.

In considering interface research, the significance is the integration and interaction of knowledge systems that build upon the insights and methods of one to enhance the other. Both Durie (2004) and Martin (2008) identify the opportunities available through interface research that support the Indigenous brokerage of knowledge through the sharing of systems. Resulting in a space that eases the tensions and supports decolonized approaches, the interests of Indigenous peoples can be well served at the interface as a result of the ‘two-eyed seeing’ that Bartlett et al. (2012) describe.

As a model drawing upon the interface, the success of the Herringbone stitch model’s was contingent upon the alignment of a number of Indigenous research principles with those of hermeneutics. Methodological flexibility was important to find the congruence that enabled the Indigenous data to be appropriately analyzed and interpreted. Snow et al.’s (2016) principles were important to achieving Indigenous voice and benefit for the women via the analysis. The principles act as the brokerage framework for engaging in Indigenous research and in particular when seeking to conduct Indigenous research at the interface. The compatibility of hermeneutics with an Indigenous research study such as this one does not mean it will have universal applicability, rather it demonstrates the critical immersion that Snow et al. (2016) speak of that engages a lens of critical consciousness, a process of specificity required for every research study.

The hermeneutic principles enabled the methodological flexibility required in Indigenous research. The fusion of horizons and hermeneutic cycle similarly offered capacity to heed the calls of Durie (2004), Martin (2008) and other Indigenous scholars regarding decolonized and flexible methodologies that seek benefit for Indigenous communities. Most significantly however, the engagement of hermeneutics at the interface provided the Cloaked in Strength study with a frame for interpretation and analysis that did not ‘other’ the women who participated, but rather placed their lived experiences as urban Indigenous women central to the research. This offered them participation, voice and benefit (Andrews, 2020).

Research at the interface between Western and Indigenous paradigms requires a delicate dialogue with careful consideration. Accounting for the contradictions between Indigenous and Western philosophical values and drawing together biases and assumptions offered the analysis a quality drawn from the two. In the context of colonization, the messages drawn from the interface must be ones of respect, humility, participation and above all subjectivity to Indigenous peoples. For non-Indigenous researchers, Williams (cited in Denzin and Lincoln, 2008: 6) offers a timeless warning, ‘We are not Navajo . . . their traditional stories don’t work for us. Their stories hold meaning for us only as examples. They can teach us what is possible. We must create our own stories’. In response, Indigenous researchers are engaging with non-Indigenous research spaces at the interface. Using Indigenous knowledges as a sound foundation, it offers new possibilities for a renewed relationship with knowledge and the boundaries it seeks to breach.

Conclusion

This article focused on qualitative analysis at the interface of Indigenous and Western systems of knowledge. The contradictions and congruences of research at the interface of differing philosophical values were explored and demonstrated by detailing the process of establishing an analytic model for an Indigenous research study. The article, through its presentation of the Herringbone stitch model, offers important methodological insights for qualitative researchers, Indigenous and non-Indigenous alike.

In spite of a growing discourse within the literature about Indigenous research, there is little that focuses upon the minutiae of qualitative analytic process. This article therefore adds an important contribution to the literature about Indigenous qualitative analysis. Indigenous knowledge systems are necessarily integral to analysis but do not have to be positioned as tools of resistance. Rather, as Durie (2004) asserts, they can maintain their legitimacy as a valid method of inquiry, operate as a mechanism of decolonization and merge with Western knowledges at the nexus of innovation and progression.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

The author acknowledges the contribution to this article by way of support, editing, concept development and critique, and academic and cultural guidance of:

Professor Cathy Humphreys, Professor of Social Work, School of Health Sciences, Faculty of Medicine, Dentistry and Health Sciences; Co-chair Melbourne Research Alliance to End Violence Against Women and their Children (MAEVe), the University of Melbourne, Australia.

Associate Professor Bridget Hamilton, Director of the Centre for Psychiatric Nursing, School of Health Sciences, Faculty of Medicine, Dentistry and Health Sciences, the University of Melbourne, Australia.

Dr Vicki Couzens, Gunditjmara Keerray Woorroong Woman and Senior Knowledge Custodian for Possum Cloak Story, who taught me and the women of the Cloaked in Strength study how to make a possum skin cloak and whose work toward reviving this significant cultural practice has fostered the metaphor detailed in this work.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author declares that there is no conflict of interest.

Funding

The author disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: Indigenous Research Initiative of the Melbourne Hallmark Research Initiatives Program, the University of Melbourne, Australia.

ORCID iD

Shawana Andrews

Notes

Author biography

Shawana Andrews is a Trawlwoolway woman of south eastern Australia. Shawana is a social worker and public health researcher, and currently holds the position of Senior Research Fellow in the Department of Social Work, School of Health Sciences at the University of Melbourne, Australia. She has worked extensively with the Victorian Indigenous community in Australia throughout her clinical career and subsequently within academia. Shawana has published and presented widely about Indigenous health, Indigenous family violence and Indigenous research.

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