Paper presented at the International Conference on “Intellectual Property Rights: Conflict/ Coexistence in Human Rights, Health and Indigenous Rights“, held at BPC College, Piravom, Kerala, India, during 17-18 December, 2018.

1. Challenges of Doing
Participatory Research in
Indigenous Communities
Babu George, PhD
Fort Hays State University, USA
Paper presented at the International Conference on “Intellectual Property Rights:
Conflict/ Coexistence in Human Rights, Health and Indigenous Rights“, held at BPC
College, Piravom, Kerala, India, on 17-18 December 2018.

2. What is an
Indigenous?

3. My Experiences with Research among
Indigenous Communities
• Consulting projects and scholarly research among the Native
American communities and the American Indians, since 2011.
• Cherokee, Apache, Cheyenne, Comanche, Inuit, Navajo, Choctaw, Alaskan
Native communities (Iñupiat, Yupik, Aleut, Eyak, Tlingit, Haida, Tsimshian, etc.)
• Topics studied include:
• Healthcare
• Economic development
• Aboriginal / community centered business models
• Tribal governance
• Education opportunities
• Climatic change and adaptation

4. Two Purposes of Research in Social Sciences
• What should be the purpose of social research?
• Simplistic view:
• Exploration, description, explanation
• Nuanced view:
• Research as a lever for emancipation Vs oppression
• Research findings could be used to empower the
indigenous communities or to enslave them.

5. Emic-
Vs
Etic-
Paradigms
Research as the construction of subjectively
meaningful knowledge for a community’s
benefit
Vs
Research as an objective tool to find out
knowledge, preexisting out there that is
value-neutral.
• Indigenous people’s own interests should provide
an overarching perspective, guiding
methodologies used in research done amongst
them.
• The indigenous communities and the researchers
should co-participate and co-explore knowledge that
finally results in the former’s emancipation.

6. Not Denying the Importance of Positivism and
Objectiveness
• To study the impact of a medicine upon patients, controlled
experiences are designed.
• These experiments have a universal design.
• This is probably the only correct method!
• Except for the interaction between medicine effectiveness and patient trust in it and the
doctor / clinic (potential placebos).
• However, if the objective were to study the adoption of medicine by
two different communities of people (e.g. Mala Arayans of Sabarimala
Vs Kurichians of Kannur), we need to first understand their
“language” to make sense of their lived realities.

7. Some Topics for Indigenous Research in
Business and Economic Development
© James Cook University, Australia

8. Participatory
Action Research
• People impacted by a social reality
works with a researcher to define
the problem, determine the
methodology, gather and analyze
data, and arrive at knowledge,
which could later be employed for
positive social change among
these people.

9. The Canadian Institutes of Health
Research (CIHR) Guidelines on
conducting research among the
aboriginals.
Step 1: Relationship Development

10. The Canadian Institutes of Health
Research (CIHR) Guidelines on
conducting research among the
aboriginals
Step : Research Proposal Phase

11. The Canadian Institutes of Health
Research (CIHR) Guidelines on
conducting research among the
aboriginals
Step 3: Research Execution Phase

12. Harmful Biases in Researching Indigenous
People
Colonial and Neo-Colonial Legacy
• Colonial and neocolonial
influences upon them may make
the indigenous people even not
know their own more authentic
legacies.
The Normative Views of Westerner
Researchers
• (Wrong) belief that the
indigenous people want progress
in the same way the Western
urban elites want them of.
• The Western preference for
certain knowledge types (e.g.
quantified knowledge) and ways
for knowing (e.g. surveys).
• Researcher as expert and
research participant as
uninformed.
• An expert with a PhD in
Anthropology researching
healthcare concerns of Native
communities in Attappadi,
going to the community
shamans and asking questions
as if the ‘expert’ has an upper
hand on knowledge.
Knowledge should be a commodity
tradable in the market, for the
private gains of the possessors of it.
• Most indigenous communities
believe in the inherently public
domain nature of knowledge.
• Unscrupulous businesses event
misuse this – take patent on
knowledge that is already in the
public domain, protected only
by community codes.
Western research ethic boards (e.g.
IRBs) have standardized, normative
ideas of what is ethical.
• Does not recognize the
uniqueness among different
communities
• For many native communities, the
distinction between people and
objects of inquiry are artificial.

13. Rules of Thumb to Identify Biases
Who commissions and
owns the research?
Who farmed the research
questions and the
methodology?
Who pays the researchers
and their assistants?
Who is going to write the
research report?
How will the findings be
communicated?
Who will profit from the
findings?
Does it have the potential
to transform the
communities
(psychological, social,
economic, political,
technological)?

14. The Challenge
“There are difficulties in getting Africans involved in the theorizing and building of knowledge on
ways of conducting research. You have to address questions such as how do you test the validity of
your findings…by African or Western standards? What language do you use to build a research
community and how do you research, store, and transmit the accumulated knowledge? Arguably ,
the whole idea of research belong to the north/western paradigm, so probably some Africanness will
have to be sacrificed in the process.”
- Bagele Chilisa, University of Botswana

15. The Challenge Explained
• Temptation to employ Western frameworks and paradigms to define research
issues
• The inexperience of the ‘scientifically trained’ researcher to work with methods
aligned with existing indigenous knowledge systems, and to employ their
constructs and hypotheses.
• E.g. Teleology – everything is purpose driven – is alien to the scientific method,
yet at the core of most indigenous ways of knowing.

16. Insights from one of
my Studies
• Lor, P. H.,& George, B.P.(2014).An
appreciative inquiry into the healthcare
concerns of the elder Hmong women
living inAlaska, USA. Journal of Rural and
Community Development, 9(3), 337–
347.
• Examines the concerns of an isolated
migrant indigenous community
• This is an undergraduate research
project!
• Employed Appreciative Inquiry
Methodology
• Use of Focus Group methods
a.k.a. “story-sharing circles”.

17. Question
Time!
Should we go into the Sentinelese
tribe to recover the body of the
American tourist / preacher killed
by them?
• Why?
Should we establish a sustained
and ongoing relationship with
traditionally isolated tribes like
these?
• Why?

18. Thank you!