Thursday February 24 | Oakes Mural Room | 4:00 PM
Linda Tuhiwai Smith is Associate Professor of Maori Education and Director of the International Research Institute for Maori and Indigenous Studies at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. Professor Smith works as a consultant to the development of aboriginal and indigenous studies at five major universities in Australia and Greenland. In New Zealand she has been central to the development of a tribal university, Te Whare Wananga o Awanuiarangi, and to the nationwide movement for an alternative schooling system, Kura Kaupapa Maori. Her leadership represents the pioneering work of Maori scholars and activists which inspires indigenous and sovereignty work internationally.
Professor Smith’s book Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples (Zed, 1999) explores the intersections of imperialism, knowledge and research. From the vantage point of the colonized, the term ‘research’ is inextricably linked with European colonialism; the way in which scientific research has been implicated in the worst excesses of imperialism remains a powerful remembered history for many of the world’s colonized people. Here, an indigenous researcher issues a clarion call for the decolonization of research methods. In setting an agenda for planning and implementing indigenous research, Smith shows how such programs are part of the wider project of reclaiming control over indigenous ways of knowing and being.