Special Issue: Decolonizing and Indigenizing the “Religion
and Science” Discourse
Indigenous Methodologies, Decolonizing the Academy,
and Re-­connecting Stories with Planetary Places
APPLYING INDIGENOUS RESEARCH METHODS
Edited by Sweeney Windchief and Timothy San Pedro.
New York: Routledge, 2019
Pp. 195. $36.99.
INDIGENOUS METHODOLOGIES: CHARACTERISTICS,
CONVERSATIONS, AND CONTEXTS
By Margaret Kovach 2nd ed. Toronto: University of
Toronto Press, 2021
Pp. 313. $29.95.
REVIEWER: Whitney A. Bauman
Florida International University,
Miami, FL 33199, USA
“If we see all the qualities of holistic, animate, and relation-
ships embedded within community, place, and kin as being
indelibly linked, couched within an axiological supposition,
and contextualized within Indigenous culture, we are on our
way to identifying an Indigenous epistemological stance.”
(Kovach 68)
“Whether we are imagining the universe in relation with the
spirit, nature, or group, we are perpetually in-­relation. For
Indigenous knowledges, the valuing of many truths cannot
be divorced from collective knowledge.” (Windchief 25)
These two opening quotes from different works reflecting on
Indigenous research and methodologies reveal just how differ-
ent and thus helpful these models can be in addressing con-
temporary issues of ecological degradation, climate change,
and ongoing injustices based on colonialism, racism, anthropo-
centrism, and a whole host of other “isms” that have arisen out
of western colonial discourse. Though each of the texts under
review here is full of differences based upon the authors’ own
locations, histories, and places, there are some serious com-
monalities that work together to “decolonize” modern Western
knowledge structures in helpful ways: viz. they focus on knowl-
edge as holistic, relational, ethical, and contextual. In addition,
these indigenous research programs come out of a more imma-
nent/animistic ontological framework, as opposed to the objec-
tive/universal framework that sees the really real as outside of
this world. This immanent framework creates the epistemology/
Religious Studies Review, Vol. 49, No. 2, June 2023
© 2023 Rice University.
ontology that breaks down the colonial, patriarchal hierarchies
that lead to so many of the “isms” mentioned above.
Before getting into the important themes of the texts and
as a non-­Indigenous scholar trying to learn from these texts, I
want to first emulate the authors by identifying my own history,
identity, and place. This is not just a friendly ice-­breaking prac-
tice, but rather according to these methodologies, the subject’s
position is a crucial part of knowledge production. After briefly
locating myself and laying out some of the important ideas and
principles in the text, I argue that ethically, these indigenous
understandings of knowledge and research might also help de-
colonize the modern Western academy through un-­disciplining
our thinking, becoming better listeners to historically and con-
temporarily marginalized voices, and through re-­thinking dis-
ciplines based upon ethics, aesthetics, and inter-­relationality.
Thinking with Embodied Realities
Kovach and the various authors in the Windchief volume start
by locating themselves within the histories of their communi-
ties and the academy. The Windchief volume, taking from an
earlier Kovach text, talks about the importance of “yarning,” of
telling one another’s stories to weave these stories into common
understanding (i–­xxii). Furthermore, Kovach argues that “Our
life story shapes our research interpretations. Past is prologue.
Memory is preface. We know what we know from where we
stand. We need to be honest about that” (9). Repeatedly these
texts emphasize the need to think contextually from place,
which includes the human and non-­human world, both past and
present, and with an eye toward the future. As storied bodies,
we each bring unique understandings and perspectives into
view since no two stories are exactly the same. If knowledge is
a process, then, and if truth is immanent and multiple (rather
than transcendent and single), the more stories we hear from
differently embodied authors, the more we will understand a
given place, thing, process, event, or idea. Knowledge is, in this
way, relational and multi-­perspectival. Toward that end, I begin
here by briefly contextualizing my own thinking.
I was born in the small rice and soybean farming town
of Stuttgart Arkansas, where I grew up on a family farm and
learned human-­earth relations in an embedded way. This con-
tributed to how I intellectually conceive of culture-­and-­nature
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as always and already together. I also watched as this fam-
ily farm transitioned from a vibrant community of life—­with
family gardens, fruit trees, reservoirs for fishing, and plenty
of spaces for hunting—­to a monocrop of Monsanto soybeans.
Undoubtedly, this helped guide my intellectual and activist pas-
sions for thinking about humans and nature. I was also raised
in the episcopal church, but felt more at home being out in na-
ture, perhaps in part because I am also a queer male from the
rural south: being away from other humans, and with other an-
imals and the rest of the natural world, I did not have to explain
myself, cover up, or act in certain ways. There was a certain
freedom tied up in my identity and my relationship to the land,
and this relationship was torn asunder by the policies put in
place by President Reagan that destroyed family farms all over
the United States.
As a queer white male in the South, it was only later,
as I went to college and grad school, that I learned about my
unearned white male white privilege, about how colonial-
ism erased the first peoples from the place where my family
farm was located, and about the history of slave and low-­
wage labor that was part of the history of that family farm
and region in general. There were so many silenced voices
and stories that were covered over through years of colonial
mindsets and racism. Furthermore, the white farming town
narrative based upon growing rice (and hunting ducks), was
all constructed through draining the water aquafer in that
region. Just as the stories of people had been written over, so
too the story of the land. I’ve since gone on to get a PhD in
Religious Studies, and I use these experiences to help teach
the history of how religious ideas shape human-­human and
human-­earth relations.
The Violence of Objective and Universal Thinking
A noticeable difference between these two texts and the dom-
inant models of knowledge found in modern Western thought
had to do with the stark contrast between the nature of knowl-
edge and knowledge production and the methodologies of the
modern Western academy. As Kovach argues, “One emphasizes
qualities such as process orientation, holism, and collectivism
and the other emphasizes output orientation, atomism, and
individualism” (29, 65). This is not only a matter of different
understandings of the human in relationship to other humans,
the earth, and knowledge production, but it is about the very
violence done toward Indigenous and other communities
when modern Western ways of knowing are forced onto peo-
ples and places. Both texts talk about the history of removal of
Indigenous peoples and the forced “re-­education” of peoples.
This, of course, amounts to a loss of culture, identity, and place.
In addition to the brute politics and economics in the
history of colonization, another reason for the differences in
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thinking about knowledge in relationship to peoples and places
has to do with the location of knowledge. Dominant systems
of Western knowledge understand knowledge, for the most
part, to be disembodied and in some realm that transcends
the material world (even if the material world participates in
it). Furthermore, as feminists decolonial and other scholars
remind us, the disciplines of the modern Western university
are developed in conjunction with colonization: “Western sci-
ence has been instrumental in subjugating and discrediting
Indigenous knowledge systems and peoples” (Kovach 64; cf.
Windchief 67). The assumed ideal subject behind the construc-
tion of “the sciences” and “the humanities” (or the natural and
human sciences) was an individualistic European male subject,
and these humans were exceptional to the rest of the natural
world. Knowledge from this space of removal is more about
finding general, objective universals than about paying atten-
tion to specific bodies, peoples, and places. Though neither of
these texts talk about it specifically, the colonization by (mostly)
monotheistic Christians helped pave the way for the removal of
peoples and a hierarchy of knowledge that places truth outside
of the material world. In other words, both Western (monotheis-
tic) religions and Western (reductive and productive) sciences
have suggested that particular bodies and places do not matter
when it comes to “discovering” knowledge. I would argue that
this type of modern Western thinking has materialized in the
world (at least in part) through colonization, genocide, injus-
tices, and the environmental degradation associated with the
Anthropocene.
Re-­membering the past and the future of the
planetary community
It is important to note that neither text throws out modern
Western understandings of knowledge and their methodologies
all together, but rather they seek to place them alongside other
methods and knowledge production systems, focus them on re-
connecting with human and earth others, and re-­member the
world for a more just and ecologically sound future. In other
words, how might we re-­attune modern scientific practices to-
ward the entire planetary community rather than just toward
an idea of progress for some humans?
As one of the authors in the Windchief volume writes,
“Finding knowledge that endures is a spiritual act that animates
and educates. These are spiritual principles, that, if played out
as epistemology, help us enter spaces of wonderment, discern-
ment, right viewing, and mature discourse” (109). Part of the
“spiritual” (not religious) that is focused on here is that what
animates all bodies in relation: human and non. Knowledge pro-
duction from an animistic context depends upon the yarning to-
gether of many different stories rather than coming to a single
universal, objective agreement. As Kovach argues:
 Religious Studies Review • VOLUME 49 • NUMBER 2 • June 2023
It is no wonder that narrative, as a form, is the primary
means for passing knowledge within Indigenous traditions,
for it suits the fluidity and interpretative nature of ancestral
ways of knowing based in holism, an intangible animism,
and a tangible relationship with community and place (157).
If knowledge is located within evolving sets of relation-
ships within the material world, then storytelling is a way to
get to know the multiple perspectives that make up the truths
of a given world. From this way of understanding knowledge
production, the method of multiple stories and their tellings
provides a more robust understanding of a given place, event,
or thing. The production of knowledge and truths is a continual
process of listening to multiple stories and those who tell them
and finding ways to “yarn” these stories together.
The Importance of Mobilizing Knowledge for
Communities
Because knowledge is always knowledge for, both texts under
review point out the importance of mobilizing knowledge for
specific communities, specifically Indigenous communities
(Kovach 241; Windchief 10). This is important since so much
knowledge has been stolen and abused by non-­ Indigenous
scholars (both historically and in the present). Thus, toward the
end of this brief review, I focus on how I might mobilize this
knowledge from my own location as a University Professor in a
modern Western, public university setting.
First, I should note that I am not doing Indigenous scholar-
ship. I am, rather, trying to respectfully learn from Indigenous
methodologies, histories, and stories. As such, to mobilize the
knowledge I am gaining for my classroom setting, I hope to
use some of these stories to help my non-­Indigenous students
understand the history and contemporary ways in which
Indigenous peoples have been violently colonized. Second, I
think it is important to point out that our current disciplinary
model in the modern Western university is inherently a colo-
nizing one and one that creates a lot of violence to earth bod-
ies (Indigenous, black, brown, female, queer, and non-­human
ones). I think this latter part can be done by the telling of
multiple stories: many of my students come from immigrant
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families and are first generation to college who have stories
of their own colonized pasts to tell. The stories of the envi-
ronmental and geological history of South Florida and those
of the First Peoples there are also layers to add to the class
discussion. Finally, as Miami-­Dade and South Florida con-
tinue to feel the worsening effects of climate change, it will be
useful to yarn together stories that might help us live within
that place in new ways and within a planetary future that pro-
motes the flourishing of multiple ideas, bodies, and stories
(both human and non).
One specific project I have modified considering these meth-
odologies is a series of essays called the “Ecological Footprint
Essays.” This project involves three short essays with three dif-
ferent but related themes. The first essay asks students to fill
out their ecological footprint and to reflect on it. The second ask
students to trace their food consumption for a day: how was it
grown, what type of labor was used, how were animals raised,
and where did the food travel from, for example. The third essay
is to have students take on an avatar of an animal, plant, insect,
or ecosystem, and then perform a “council of all beings” (as
developed by Joanna Macey) in which their organism tells the
human community how human actions affect it. If I want to im-
prove upon this according to these Indigenous methods and in-
sights, I will ask students to locate themselves within their own
bioregion in the first essay (what is the history of the peoples in
the land; where do water, energy, etc.) come from; and what types
of species do students share the bioregion with. In the second
essay, I’d have students figure out what types of food sources are
indigenous to the area in which they live and which ones can
be sustainably raised/grown in the region. Finally, in the third
essay, I’d have students do a little bit more research on the idea of
totem/spirit animals and think about the significance of the av-
atars they adopt beyond the mere biological/ecological. In these
ways, I think the students will be able to connect their own daily
stories with the stories of the history of a given place and with
the stories of other living things around them. In the end, such
a project might help to weave together knowledge from multiple
perspectives by listening deeply to one another and the earth and
figuring out how stories might link together in better ways for
the planet (including humans).