Research: Research methodologies

Dadirri comes from the Ngangikurungkurr and Ngen'giwumirri languages of the Daly River peoples in the Northern Territory. Dadirri is the practice of deep listening and reflection based on mutual respect. Dadirri provides a framework for engaging with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people as individuals and with communities in a culturally respectful way.

Dadirri is reinforces the importance of community consent and reciprocity in research

Further reading

• Walking together to create harmony in research(2020)

  In 2017, the authors began PhD, studying the potential barriers to aftercare treatment for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children aged under 16 who had sustained a burn injury in one of five major hospitals in Australia. The paper aims to discuss this issue.

• Dadirri: an Indigenous place-based research methodology(2022)

  We detail an Indigenous research methodology capturing community-based truth-telling in an Aboriginal community in the Northern Territory, Australia. We present Dadirri—a deep contemplative process of listening to one another—as a research methodology and a co-developed research model from the Nauiyu community. Dadirri is applied on the Country, with the cultural custodians to which it belongs, the Ngan’gikurunggkurr people from the Daly River region, Northern Territory.

• 'Dadirri': Reflections on a research methodology used to build trust between a non-indigenous researcher and indigenous participants(2014)

  This article focuses on a philosophical approach employed in a PhD research project that set out to investigate sport career transition (SCT) experiences of elite Indigenous Australian sportsmen. The research was necessary as little is known about the transition of this cohort to a life after sport, or their experiences of retirement.

• Through a Critical Lens: Indigenist Research and the Dadirri Method

  In this article we discuss Dadirri, an indigenous research method and way of life, as a vital research framework, connecting it to other relevant political and critical methodologies such as Freire’s transformative education process and Habermas’ theory of communicative action. In doing so, we illustrate how this methodology provides a significant framework for indigenous researchers undertaking liberatory studies that promote change.

Choctaw and American Indian academic, writer and educator LeAnne Howe first introduced the term tribalograhy to describe the way in which Indigenous storytelling and oral traditions, in the context Native American peoples and their role in the creation of American creation, interweave Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples across time and space. Tribablography is employed by many Indigenous researchers and academics as a framework for their practice.

Further reading:

• "One time ago": an urban Aboriginal tribalography[Master’s thesis](2009)

  This thesis uses the method of tribalography developed by Choctaw author LeAnne Howe (2002) to contextualise my life experience and research journey as part of the broader Indigenous encounter with modernity. In reviewing the literature relevant to this area I expand on the concept of tribalography to make this a foundational philosophy in approaching Aboriginal women’s autobiography.

• Manifestations of Tribalography in Indigenous American Literature: LeAnne Howe and Beyond[Master's thesis](2021)

  After looking at Howe's work as a model for tribalographic texts, The Grass Dancer will be explored as an example of tribalography, and The Indolent Boys by N. Scott Momaday will be explored as an example of embodied tribalography.

• Wisdom of the Land and the Environment in Oral Traditions: Between Cherokee and Negev Tribes[Master’s thesis](2021)

  I will use LeAnne Howe's theory of “tribalography,” which provides a framework for the understanding of tribal storytelling. In her theory, LeAnne Howe argues that storytellers use certain elements, such as the land, the people, and the social environment, from the tribe they belong to. Thus, studying and examining the overlapping between the Cherokee and the Negev tribes will provide a better and more solid understanding of “tribalography”.

Developed by Dr Tyson Yunkaporta and Donna Moodie from the Institute of Koori Education, Faculty of Arts and Education, at Deakin University. Thought ritual describes a method of Indigenous data analysis to be used in conjunction with Indigenous frameworks and methods that are concerned with data collection.

Further reading

• Thought ritual: Indigenous data analysis method for research(2019)

  This paper proposes a standalone Indigenous data analysis tool that is a hybridisation of ancient oral culture practice and contemporary thought experiment, grounded in Aboriginal protocols of communal knowledge production that are aligned with principles of complexity theory. It represents a significant departure from western academic approaches while promoting high levels of intellectual rigour. It also offers the intriguing possibility of examining non-Indigenous data-sets using an Indigenous Knowledge process, potentially resolving the issue described by Walters (2005) of quantitative data being largely ignored to date in Indigenous research.

Groundwater methodology is one method in which Indigenous people and knowledges and environmental science research and technology can collaborate to benfit communities.

• A transdisciplinary engagement with Australian aboriginal water and the hydrology of a small bedrock island.(2021)

  This study used transdisciplinary research methods to explore the ways in which Yolŋu Aboriginal gapu and Western science hydrological knowledge can work together and contribute towards water management on Milingimbi Island, a small, resource-constrained, bedrock island. Transcending disciplinary boundaries is distinctly different to an interdisciplinary, socio-hydrological perspective, which can pose a risk to hybridizing Aboriginal knowledge and Western science.

The decolonisation of research practices is vital to creating an inclusive, ethical and accurate research environment.

• ACRL: Anti-Colonial Research Library

  This Library holds a collection of open-access articles and books, websites, and YouTube videos on Indigenous and anti-colonial research methodologies. If you are looking for practical examples from different parts of the world and want to know more about these research methodologies, start here! - ACRL