New 'digital garden' aims to bring together Indigenous research and academics, reduce harm

CTVNews.ca Writer, Producer

As an Unangax̂ scholar, Eve Tuck knows how academic research can harm and alienate Indigenous communities.

She’s seen how elders in her community on St. Paul Island, Alaska, talk about painful experiences with non-Indigenous researchers, where they were left feeling betrayed, and confused.

Tuck has been a professor for more than 15 years. She’s had many people approach her over the years, asking how best researchers should approach Indigenous communities.

“I didn’t ever want to come up with one model that was a universal way of doing research, because Indigenous communities are so diverse around the world…our knowledges come from the specificity of those places,” she told CTVNews.ca in a phone interview.

Knowing that Indigenous knowledge is multidimensional and global, Tuck, who is an associate professor of critical race and Indigenous studies at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto, wanted to make available the important research being done worldwide that are led by Indigenous scholars and communities.

That’s why she’s led the creation of the Collaborative Indigenous Research Digital Garden, a platform that launched Tuesday with the help of other academics at Uof T. The ‘garden’serves as a digital repository that focuses on studies done with Indigenous communities, rather than work done on Indigenous communities globally.

“I wanted to create a place where we could show the array of types of ethical research that people have created for themselves, in the aftermath of this other kind of colonial, harmful research,” she said.

Dr. Eve Tuck and the Tkaronto CIRCLE Lab Members who created the digital garden (Supplied by the University of Toronto)

More answers aregrowing all over the worldabout how to best approach research around Indigenous communities and evolving methodologies, instead of a singular way, she said. That’s why the platform is called a garden— it’s ever evolving, she said.

In Canada, there is a long history of research and academic pursuits that harmed Indigenous communities. For instance, nutritional experiments were performed on Indigenous children in residential schools in the 1940s, where researchers denied children nutrition to see the impact on the body.

A 2018 report from the federal Panel on Research Ethics highlighted that research on Indigenous peoples in Canada has been done primarily by non-Indigenous researchers.

Flawed approaches have marred the relationship between academic research and Indigenous communities, the report said.

In Indigenous communities globally, each place has adifferent relationship with colonialism and history with how research has been conducted, said Tuck. That’s why each community’s needs may be different, and so research approaches should be different, she explained.

Another goal of the garden is to make this kind of research accessible, as academic writing and research can often be alienating and use overly complex language to impress seriousness, when really it prevents people from understanding the work, she said.

“The way that people are sharing their studies is by creating a profile of the studies in the digital garden. It’s more immediate than a journal publication which can take many years, from submission to actual publication,” she said.

It’s also more relevant for research users, she said.

Users can enjoy the digital garden by searching for specific topics they are interested in. There are also expandable fields on the platform where a user can learn more about the research and methodology and how an analysis was approached.

And Tuck expects the garden to continue to grow, over months and years.

“The most important piece of the site is that users are able to contribute their own studies. There is a contribution form that people can download, and work on, with their collaborators,” she said.

Tuck said Indigenous scholars can often feel isolated in academia, and have their work unfairly scrutinized or labelled as advocacy due to working alongside Indigenous communities to mitigate harms.

The garden is a way to ensure those researchers feel connected and supported, she said.

“My hope is that people see that this is already an established set of practices, and one that is still growing, and inviting to people who are inspired to take action in the face of the harms that research has done,” she said.

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