Preparing for the inquiry

Preparing for the inquiry

Q'um Q'um Xiiem scholar and educator, Jo-Ann Archibald (2008) asserts that preparation is needed to engage and have relationships with stories. This relationship involves knowing the proper protocol to engage with the teller while also knowing how to listen. Listening to stories requires us to acknowledge that our head, heart, body, and intuition are interacting with the telling and are being affected by listening. The story’s impact is dependent on what we need to understand in that moment and the circumstances of our life. Often, we may not immediately know what we are to ascertain however, the impact will reveal itself when we need it (for example, this is evident further in the work as illustrated in this video of coming into the analysis process). Connecting to the stories and knowing we may not recognize the lessons straight away requires trust in the unknown. Grahams Andrews, my Michif teacher, shared at one research gathering, “when you do things in the right way it will come to you” (personal communication, February 2019). Enacting practices and protocols with the intent of goodness and respect does not mean you immediately get what you need, there’s patience and trust in things will happen when they’re supposed to happen. Being prepared for the inquiry and while the process unfolds requires one to let go of control and not try to make situations happen. Moreover, being prepared does not mean that processes might go awry but it means that when they do, we will flow with them, instead of against them. Through my doctoral research, I have had to rely on trust to move through the work, it has not been easy, particularly when you feel you have so much at stake. This was a lesson for me that I had to learn from the onset of the inquiry, I had to trust the work, myself, and creation.

Coming into an oral system

The methodology for this dissertation came through my relationship with Elder Reg Crowshoe. Teaching alongside Reg for many years, I did not realize at the onset that I would soon be changing the direction of my research plan to situate my inquiry within an oral system of knowledge generation and validation. As I shared in the section, Wisdom seeking through an oral system, my learning and understanding of an oral system were impressed upon me by sitting with Reg and Rose Crowshoe many times. My first interactions with the system did not happen in books, but with smudge, in a circle, often in a tipi. I share in the adjacent video: coming into an oral system, I have felt an oral system before, as a child, but the systematic nature of knowledge acquisition and validation was new to me in this way. As I became more and more entrenched in the system, I knew that this would be the methodology that guided my doctoral inquiry. I remember sitting with Reg and Dr. Field, my doctoral supervisor, one day discussing an oral system as methodology in the university and particularly if the process was one that we wanted to enact and advocate for. Reg encouraged me to move on with the methodology as it was time that the academic institution begin to step out of the proverbial box and assess their own rules and policies to include and protect different knowledge systems. Western academic institutions have strict guidelines and rules about what constitutions knowledge and its validation. Preparing to have an oral knowledge system guide my inquiry, I knew I would be challenging the institution’s cognitive imperialism (Battiste, 2013). Not only was I coming into a relationship with oral knowledge systems, but so was the Faculty of Graduate studies. My dissertation was comprised completely of video chapters warranting special permission from the Faculty of Graduate Studies and the Werklund School of Education to forgo a traditional written dissertation. Once ready for the candidacy defense, I paralleled ceremony and the oral exam to validate the candidacy in both systems. The candidacy paper and oral exam, as I offered, were outside the traditional parameters thus requiring the institution to rethink the ways in which they approach and tend to academic validity. As one of the first students to use ceremony for validation, the University had to begin to understand what was required to have Indigenous knowledge systems in action and the resources needed to honour those processes. For example, a ceremony to validate knowledge relies on protocols that need additional funding for knowledge keepers to facilitate the process. Creating new policies that allow and protect Indigenous knowledge is crucial to allow them to flourish in their own right while disrupting and dismantling the supremacy of western academic traditions and the written word.

Recognizing myself within an oral system

In the summer of 2020, I participated in an online undergraduate course, through the University of Manitoba, to learn Michif. Before this course, I knew very little, only a few words; I previously tried to engage with learning my language, but my efforts were sporadic and bumpy. I had learned, and inherently knew, that Métis people were and are an oral people – we come from an oral culture. I would tell this to the students in my undergraduate courses to provide them some inkling to who the Métis are; I would cling to this sentiment while learning of an oral system from Reg. Since 2011, I have slowly learned about an oral system, I have patiently become a relative through this system, I have tried my best to understand how I can live it as a way of living, thinking, and becoming. A few weeks ago, I had an earth shaking experience (more metaphorically, than figuratively!), I was listening to meestress, Heather Souter, my Michif teacher, and now kin, describe verbs to the class, “the tags [before and after the verb] prompt relationality, they keep things in order…our language is an oral language” (personal communication, July 23, 2020). I wasn’t shaken by what she said, but I was shook by the unison of what she said and learning of my language. Over the course of the term, and after we had some language in our hearts, she began to explicitly detail how our language positions us as always in relationship; our language constructs our view of and relationships with/in the world. This learning, and my newly embodied linguistic capabilities, enabled me to understand an oral system from a changed perspective. I went from thinking about an oral system from the sidelines, from the periphery, to coming into the circle, not as an observer, but as a relative – it’s almost as if I had to see the system through my Michif perspective, and not through Reg’s eyes. Reflecting back on past experiences, I have tried to prove to others, and probably more so to myself, that we are an oral culture; I would say, we smudge, we participate and host ceremonies, my relative was a pipe carrier — my efforts often seemed unconvincing. On that day, as meestress Souter spoke, I knew that we are an oral culture, not only because of practices we enact, but because of the worldview that is constructed for us through our language and the relationships we form thereof.