Linda Tuhiwai Smith remains the central reference in any serious discussion of the decolonization of research. This post grows out of listening her in this video lecture, but also out of my own experiences in the field. What follows is not a systematic reconstruction of her work, but an attempt to expand some of the questions she raises and connect them to situations I have witnessed myself.
Coloniality devastated Indigenous peoples. It displaced them from their lands, enslaved them, fractured their deep relationship with the earth, tore apart their communities, destroyed their bodies, appropriated their labor and identities, and robbed them of their wealth. The scars of this history are not confined to the past. They endure, and they continue to shape the present.
In that context, research methods are far from neutral. They are never just technical tools for gathering information. They emerge from particular histories, institutional formations, and structures of power. As such, they can either reproduce colonial ways of knowing or help unsettle them. To study decolonial methods, then, is not simply to learn a different set of procedures. It is to ask how research itself participates in coloniality, and how it might instead become part of the work of resistance, restoration, and justice.
Decolonial methods require a profound reimagining of research. They ask us to move away from colonial frameworks and to disrupt their continuing hold on knowledge production. This means centering Indigenous perspectives, prioritizing relational accountability, and orienting research toward collective well-being rather than extraction. Decolonizing research is not only a methodological task. It is an ethical and political one. It involves resisting colonial structures while advancing the possibility of healing, self-determination, and sovereignty.
And sovereignty is, in many ways, the central issue. Sovereignty over knowledge, over land, over memory, and over futures. To reclaim sovereignty is to break from systems that have historically sought to erase Indigenous identities and ways of knowing. It is to restore the ties between knowledge, community, and place, and to foster forms of inquiry that empower rather than dominate, that sustain rather than dispossess.
This is why decolonial work begins with a different understanding of knowledge itself. Knowledge is not only about what happened 200 years ago, or 100 years ago, or even yesterday. It is also about what is happening now. Coloniality is not a closed historical episode but an ongoing structure. There is a continuous thread of ideas, categories, and strategies rooted in colonial power that still shapes how people live, how institutions function, and how Indigenous worlds are interrupted and governed.
Seen from this angle, the history of academic disciplines becomes impossible to ignore. When researchers go into the field, they often arrive from outside the communities they study, armed with methods designed to observe, classify, explain, and interpret. Yet many of these methods are deeply entangled with colonial histories. Their genealogy can be traced back to European travelers, adventurers, missionaries, engineers, and administrators whose forms of inquiry served imperial expansion. Geography, anthropology, natural science, and even science and technology studies do not stand outside this history. They were shaped, in important ways, by colonial projects of ordering the world.
That history makes the decolonization of research urgent. If research is to contribute to Indigenous survival, self-determination, and flourishing, then it cannot simply continue as usual. Decolonizing methods are not a matter of minor technical adjustment. They demand a deep rethinking of what research is for, whom it serves, and how it is carried out. Indigenous self-determination cannot be treated as an optional add-on. It must be placed at the center of research practice.
This also means taking ethics seriously in a fuller sense than institutions usually allow. Research ethics are not only about forms, permissions, and procedural compliance. They are about how we treat one another. How do scholars support and respect one another? How do we build fair collaborations? How do we reference properly, cite inclusively, and avoid reproducing academic hierarchies that make some voices visible and others disposable? If decolonial research is serious about justice, then its ethical commitments must extend beyond elite institutions and include community colleges, grassroots organizations, and the communities whose lives and knowledges are at stake.
Power, of course, is at the heart of the matter. It is not enough to speak vaguely of inclusion. Indigenous scholars and community members must be part of research teams in substantive ways. Their participation is not optional, symbolic, or supplementary. It is necessary. This may unsettle traditional academic power structures, including the authority often concentrated in the figure of the principal investigator. But that discomfort is precisely the point. Transformative research cannot emerge without transforming the relations of power through which research is organized.
One useful place to see these issues clearly is the interview. In the social sciences, interviews are often treated as simple and straightforward: ask questions, record answers, analyze the data. But anyone who has done serious qualitative work knows that this is misleading. Why do we interview people in the first place? What kind of encounter does the interview create? What assumptions does it make about speech, authority, relevance, and truth?
The interview is never innocent. Its very structure carries expectations about who asks, who answers, what counts as a meaningful response, and how that response will later be interpreted. Different methodologies offer different ways of approaching these questions, but even before decolonial language became available, the interview was already a site of power. The interviewer is the one who directs the exchange, defines the frame, and extracts an account. The interviewee is too often treated as a source of information rather than as a person situated in their own epistemic and relational world.
This is precisely why Indigenous methodologies, particularly those grounded in storytelling, matter so much. They force us to ask different questions. How do you sit with someone and invite a story? How do you receive it? How do you recognize what has been shared without reducing it to raw material for your own analysis? These are not secondary concerns. They go to the heart of what research is. If a student says, “I’ll conduct a one-hour interview using these standard questions,” the problem is not simply lack of sophistication. The problem is that they may not yet understand that knowledge does not always emerge under those conditions.
In some contexts, a one-hour interview may even be a sign that something has gone wrong. Why only one hour? Why was the encounter so limited? Did the person trust you? Did they feel comfortable? Were they actually engaged? In many settings, meaningful knowledge emerges much more slowly. It takes shape over hours, days, meals, silences, and shared experiences. Trust is not a preliminary step to “real” research. It is part of the research itself.
I was reminded of this during my own fieldwork in rural Colombia. I was accompanied by a PhD student from Germany. She was intelligent, committed, and enthusiastic, and she had arrived with what seemed to be a very solid interview plan. But it soon became clear that her plan consisted of a long list of questions that could barely sustain the kind of conversations people were actually willing to have with us. I tried to be polite and let her proceed, partly because she seemed so motivated, but after a while the dynamic became obvious. Those questions simply fell into nowhere. They did not open the conversation; they closed it. And almost by inertia, I would say, the encounter ended up moving in another direction: the rigid format dissolved, and what remained was a much more open, unstructured conversation, closer to the rhythms and terms through which people actually wanted to speak.
Not long ago, while having a beer with a friend from a small town in Granada, I heard a very similar story. He told me he had witnessed a student interviewing an elderly man who lived in a cave house, the kind still found in parts of Granada. The student asked questions in the standard research idiom: how long have you lived here, what led you to dedicate yourself to wine production, and similar things. The old man remained almost wordless. My friend said the whole scene felt awkward, not because the man had nothing to say, but because it seemed like two completely different worldviews were colliding. The structure of the interview assumed that knowledge could be extracted through a sequence of predefined prompts. But the man’s way of inhabiting the world did not fit that format. What unfolded was not dialogue so much as the visible clash between incompatible frameworks.
These moments matter because they reveal something deeper than mere methodological failure. They show that decolonizing research is not just about replacing one method with another. It is about rethinking the very conditions under which knowledge becomes possible. Traditional practices rooted in communal and cultural life have often been adapted into research methodologies precisely because they create spaces where people feel able to speak openly and on their own terms. What matters is not simply collecting information, but creating a context in which meaningful exchange can occur, while remaining fully conscious of the researcher’s presence and power.
This is one reason why creative, performative, and practice-based research methods have become increasingly important, especially in postgraduate work. Researchers are experimenting with media, arts-based practices, and collaborative forms of inquiry that open new possibilities for decolonial work. One striking example comes from Canada, where a group of researchers used basket-making as a research method, making something together while stories, memories, and knowledge unfolded through the process. In such cases, method is not merely a container for content. The activity itself becomes part of how knowledge is shared, held, and created.
This resonates with the broader point made in the third edition of Decolonizing Methodologies, which includes a new chapter titled 21 Further Projects. The significance of that addition lies not simply in expanding a menu of techniques, but in showing that decolonial research remains open, inventive, and unfinished. There is no single decolonial method that can simply be adopted and applied. What matters is the larger transformation in thought and practice.
That is why decolonizing research cannot be reduced to methodological substitution. Colonial ways of reading, theorizing, and applying methods will not produce decolonial outcomes, even if the vocabulary changes. What is required is a more radical shift: a rethinking of why we research, how we relate to those with whom we work, what forms of knowledge we value, and what futures we are helping to build.
Decolonial work is therefore not the work of the isolated researcher parachuting into a field site and extracting insight. It depends on collaboration, collective action, and shared commitments with marginalized communities, including Indigenous peoples and people of color. It challenges entrenched academic norms because it refuses the fantasy of detached expertise. It demands accountability to those whose lives are affected by research.
And that accountability is not abstract. Communities care about what research does. They care whether it helps, whether it harms, whether it respects, whether it matters. What is at stake is never only academic output. It is the lives, futures, and well-being of real people. This is why there is such urgency in decolonial work. It is not one more methodology to place on the shelf beside others. It is a vital, disciplined, and transformative practice.
To commit seriously to decolonizing research means approaching it with clarity, responsibility, humility, and purpose. It means recognizing that methods are inseparable from histories of power. It means making sovereignty, justice, and relational accountability central rather than peripheral. And it means building forms of inquiry capable not only of producing knowledge, but of sustaining communities and opening the possibility of a more equitable future.
