Indigenous Methodologies of Care and Movement

Abstract

In this essay, I examine how research methodologies can draw from Indigenous peoples’ care work and mobilities to contribute towards Indigenous futurities. I draw on stories of my own research trajectory, that has been shaped by the support of Mushkegowuk women, and bring them into dialogue with Indigenous feminist theorizations of futurities, relationalities, care ethics and movement. I examine how methodologies of care can act as extensions of relations of care, and in the process, activate the complexities and expansiveness of Indigenous community, or what I call Indigenous relational geographies, through movement across lands and waters. I reflect on how Indigenous movement is learned and embodied through relations with the non-human world by grounding my discussion in the significance of water relations in the muskegs in so-called northern Ontario Canada and how they have helped me understand Mushkegowuk kinship relations as rippling out in and beyond that region. Overall, I am interested in how mobile relations of care evoke full and fluid conceptions of Indigenous kinship that exceed colonial spatialities, and end by considering how these relationships are crucial in shaping the visions and material relations of Indigenous and anti-colonial futurities moving forward.