American Indian Culture and Research Journal

using aboriginal knowledges protocols and practices rather than western ones is seen by the colonizer set as being problematic our methodologies and protocols are not deemed to be scientific or rigorous or valid they’re seen as being primitive second class at best our methodologies don’t fit the white rules the house rules dealer’s choice and of course our protocols are simply precolumbian how our elders say (though not in so many words) has it come to be that scientific rigor (mortis) has infected this land of our ancestors how have the mis taken assumptions of science come to be privileged over other ways is the scientific method itself not fundamentally flawed an intellectual virus which has become the agent of transmission for western hubris so is perpetuated ad ministratum —Peter Cole, “trick(ster)s of aboriginal research: or how to use ethical review strategies to perpetuate cultural genocide” I wish to start this article in search of a middle path; there will be no effort made to hide myself behind some outdated and outmoded convention that pretends a disembodied and objective author/researcher has produced this work. I free myself from (the myth of) objectivity and follow in the path of feminist and critical researchers by recognizing and identifying my own positionality. I hope, through writing this article, to build an atmosphere of safety “where I can begin to speak from an integrated place” as an Indigenous man and not just as a social scientist “who normally speaks as an objective authority and removes [himself] from the spoken or written word.” I seek a middle path through which to traverse the “tricky ground” of Indigenous research; a middle path that will hopefully find “in-between spaces” open to new epistemological pathways, through which new voices and ideas can be heard within the social sciences and, in particular, within geography.