Decolonizing Policy Research as Restorative Research Justice: Applying an Indigenous Policy Research Framework (IPRF)

Abstract

What is required to decolonize policy research in doing knowledge production about Indigenous peoples? Policy studies has been complicit in maintaining a central methodological policy research problem: the ongoing prevalence of hegemonic imperial and colonial knowledge production practices in relation to Indigenous peoples. This problem persists through policy researchers producing anti-Indigenous genocidal native-place-invisibilization in scholarship. Ambiguous relationality is another mechanism through which elimination of the natives takes place in research–it is when researchers deliberately/unintentionally omit naming and visiblizing their positionality in relation to the native-places the researchers are working with. Undoing harms emerging from native-place-invisibilization and ambiguous relationality requires a ‘grounded normativity’ oriented native place consciousness, naming and visibilization of the native place(s) the researchers work on/with, respecting sovereign Indigenous research jurisdictions, and applying an Indigenous Policy Research Framework (IPRF). Decolonization as a solution to the policy problem being tackled in this paper looks like counter-hegemonic radical redistribution of power back to the community when conducting Indigenous policy research. The IPRF approach is formulated using a literature review methodology and consists of guiding questions and principles to help steward the processes of decolonizing policy research. The aim is to support the emergence of radically restorative research justice practices and repair historically harmful relations between knowledge-producing systems/institutions and the Indigenous communities about whom the knowledge production is done.