Linda Tuhiwai Smith

Works

• 1999Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples

  Shows how Western research, from travel accounts to anthropology, took part in imperialism and still shapes the image of Indigenous peoples, and outlines a research practice that starts from Indigenous priorities, with twenty-five Indigenous projects as examples.

Position

Tuhiwai Smith is on the map for a book that changed how research with Indigenous peoples is done in many parts of the world. “Decolonizing Methodologies” (1999) starts from the observation that the word “research” is probably among the most tainted words in the vocabulary of the indigenous world: travellers, missionaries and scientists classified, measured and collected Indigenous peoples, and the knowledge they produced served colonial rule. With Edward Said and Frantz Fanon, Tuhiwai Smith describes the “positional superiority” of Western knowledge, which judges others while presenting itself as universal. The book does not reject research but asks who defines the questions, who owns the results and whom they serve. Kaupapa Māori research, grounded in Māori values and accountable to Māori communities, is the model; twenty-five Indigenous projects – from testimony and storytelling to the revitalisation of languages – show the range of a research practice that starts from Indigenous priorities. The book is widely cited in Indigenous studies and is used in education, health research, anthropology and development work. Later editions (2012, 2021) extend the argument to the institutional politics of universities and research funding.

Life & context

Linda Tuhiwai Smith, née Mead, was born in 1950 in Whakatāne and belongs to Ngāti Awa and Ngāti Porou on the east coast of the North Island; the anthropologist Hirini Moko Mead is Tuhiwai Smith’s father. Tuhiwai Smith studied at the University of Auckland, taking a BA, an MA with honours and in 1996 a doctorate with a thesis on the struggles of Māori in education. From the late 1980s Tuhiwai Smith helped to develop Kaupapa Māori theory and research at the University of Auckland, together with Graham Hingangaroa Smith and others. At the University of Waikato Tuhiwai Smith was professor of Indigenous education, dean of the School of Māori and Pacific Development, pro-vice-chancellor Māori and director of Te Kotahi Research Institute; Tuhiwai Smith has also served as a member of the Waitangi Tribunal, and since 2021 Tuhiwai Smith has been a distinguished professor at Te Whare Wānanga o Awanuiārangi, a Māori tertiary institution. Honours include appointment as Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit (2013), election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2021) as the first Māori scholar and the Rutherford Medal of the Royal Society Te Apārangi (2023).

Further main works

• Kaupapa Māori Research (in M. Battiste, ed., Reclaiming Indigenous Voice and Vision, 2000)
• On Tricky Ground: Researching the Native in the Age of Uncertainty (in N. K. Denzin/Y. S. Lincoln, eds., The Sage Handbook of Qualitative Research, 2005)
• Handbook of Critical and Indigenous Methodologies (ed. with N. K. Denzin and Y. S. Lincoln, 2008)