Vol. 2 No. 1 (2016): Engaging with Indigenous Communities

The way in which scholarly work and research has been commonly pursued on Indigenous cultures and peoples has been subject to criticism for a number of decades. As early as 1969 Vine Deloria Jr. in Custer Died for Your Sins criticized scholars for engaging in useless and objectifying research, and argued for relevant communitydriven research. While community-engaged research has been gaining traction in the academy recently, community engagement has been an important dimension and principle of Indigenous research for quite some time. Since the 1980s Indigenous scholars from across the globe assert that Indigenous-focused research needs to be respectful, collaborative and useful. Today we have witnessed the shift from “Indigenous as object” of study to community-engaged collaborative research that is based on and driven by Indigenous agency.