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How can scholars best give back to the communities in which they conduct their research? This critical question arises from a long history of colonial scholarship that exploited study subjects by taking knowledge without giving anything in return. It is a problem faced by all field researchers, even those working in their own communities.
 
Over the past several decades—and especially since the evolution of feminist methodologies, participatory research, and the post-colonial turn in the 1990s—there have been calls for research to be less exploitative, but also for researchers and for the research itself to give something back. Giving Back: Research and Reciprocity in Indigenous Settings addresses the need for reciprocity in the research process, especially (though not exclusively) in regard to Indigenous Communities.
 
The twelve case studies in this volume demonstrate that giving back can happen through the research itself – through the careful framing of questions, co-production of knowledge, and dissemination of results – but also through the day-to-day actions and attitudes of researchers that inevitably occur in the field. It can range from everyday give and take, to the sharing of research materials, to larger and longer-term engagements.
 
As practitioners of community-based research gain greater awareness of these issues, scholars and institutions need guidance and strategies for ensuring reciprocity in the research process. This volume presents a variety of situations from a wide range of research contexts, discussing what has and hasn’t worked, and exploring what issues remain.
 

Indigenous peoples globally have a keen understanding of their health and wellness through traditional knowledge systems. In the past, traditional understandings of health often intersected with individual, community, and environmental relationships of well-being, creating an equilibrium of living well. However, colonization and the imposition of colonial policies regarding health, justice, and the environment have dramatically impacted Indigenous peoples’ health.

Building on Indigenous knowledge systems of health and critical decolonial theories, the volume’s contributors—who are academic and community researchers from Canada, the United States, Sweden, and New Zealand—weave a narrative to explore issues of Indigenous health within four broad themes: ethics and history, environmental and ecological health, impacts of colonial violence on kinship, and Indigenous knowledge and health activism. Chapters also explore how Indigenous peoples are responding to both the health crises in their communities and the ways for non-Indigenous people to engage in building positive health outcomes with Indigenous communities.

Global Indigenous Health is unique and timely as it deals with the historical and ongoing traumas associated with colonization and colonialism, understanding Indigenous concepts of health and healing, and ways of moving forward for health equity.

Contributors:

Sharon Leslie Acoose
Seth Adema
Peter Butt
John E. Charlton
Colleen Anne Dell
Debra Dell
Paul DePasquale
Judy A. Dow
C. Randy Duncan
Carina Fiedeldey-Van Dijk
Barbara Fornssler
Chelsea Gabel
Eleanor Louise Hadden
Laura Hall
Robert Henry
Carol Hopkins
Robert Alexander Innes
Simon Lambert
Amanda LaVallee
Josh Levy
Rachel Loewen Walker
David B. MacDonald
Peter Menzies
Christopher Mushquash
David Mykota
Nancy Poole
Alicia Powell
Ioana Radu
Margo Rowan
Mark F. Ruml
Caroline L. Tait
Lisa Tatonetti
Margaretha Uttjek
Nancy Van Styvendale

Governing Indigenous Territories illuminates a paradox of modern indigenous lives. In recent decades, native peoples from Alaska to Cameroon have sought and gained legal title to significant areas of land, not as individuals or families but as large, collective organizations. Obtaining these collective titles represents an enormous accomplishment; it also creates dramatic changes. Once an indigenous territory is legally established, other governments and organizations expect it to act as a unified political entity, making decisions on behalf of its population and managing those living within its borders. A territorial government must mediate between outsiders and a not-always-united population within a context of constantly shifting global development priorities. The people of Rukullakta, a large indigenous territory in Ecuador, have struggled to enact sovereignty since the late 1960s. Drawing broadly applicable lessons from their experiences of self-rule, Juliet S. Erazo shows how collective titling produces new expectations, obligations, and subjectivities within indigenous territories.