Indigenous Thinkers

“Promoting Indigenous Scholarship and Thought in the Academy:
Lessons from New Zealand”~podcast
 

 
Linda Tuiwai Smith is a Professor of Education at the University of Auckland, New Zealand and is the Joint Director of Nga Pae o te Maramatanga the National Institute of Research Excellence in Maori Development which is one of seven centres of research excellence in New Zealand. She has an extensive background in the field of Maori education as a researcher and teacher and through her involvement in major policy initiatives. Professor Smith is known internationally as a public speaker on issues related to Indigenous education, development and research methodology and for her critically acclaimed book “Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples.”  Professor Smith is also the co-editor with Judith Simon of “A Civilizing Mission? Perceptions and Representations of the New Zealand Native Schools System” that was drawn from an oral history research project. She and Norman Denzin are currently co-editing a forthcoming volume on critical and Indigenous methodologies. She has been the recipient of prestigious research grants from New Zealand’s Marsden Fund for research on youth. In the area of policy development Professor Smith was a member of the Tertiary Educations Advisory Commission that provided advice to the Ministry of Tertiary Education on tertiary reform. She is Chair of the Maori Tertiary Reference Group for theBest Evidence Synthesis Work of the Ministry of Education and is on the Council of Te Whare Wananga o Awanuiarangi, a Maori institution of higher learning.
 
 
“Research is probably one of the dirtiest words in the indigenous world’s vocabulary. (p.1) This line, from the introduction to Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s book Decolonizing Methodologies, sets the scene for an extensive critique of Western paradigms of research and knowledge from the position of an indigenous and “colonized” Maori woman. Tuhiwai Smith’s book challenges  traditional Western ways of knowing and researching and calls for the “decolonization” of methodologies, and a new agenda of indigenous research. According to Tuhiwai Smith,“decolonization” is concerned with having “a more critical understanding of the underlying assumptions, motivations and values that inform research practices”.
                                                                                                                                                  Carla Wilson
                                                                                                                                                 Social Policy Journal of New Zealand, Issue 17