Brown Paper Chronicles: Refusal and the Limits of Collaborative Design Work with Indigenous Youth

Abstract

Abstract:In a collaborative project between a small university and a local nonprofit devoted to Indigenous children and their families, ethnographic improvisations based on design approaches were used as part of a digital storytelling project. Encounters were designed to produce an “ethical space” for translating childrearing values for which transmission has been interrupted by histories of residential schooling, assimilative adoptions, and continuing patterns of foster care. The final report of Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission framed these improvisations to ethnographic methods that were meant to incorporate experts including researchers, young and old, university- and agency-based, settler and Indigenous. Hopes for moments of partial attunement between ontogenic-epistemic worlds to be achieved through para-ethnographic collaborative design approaches were challenged by moments of refusal. These moments took place in a collaborative space created to engender design thinking and co-conceptualization among para-ethnographers as part of the transition work that many are now calling for in the era of truth and reconciliation. Still, the translation work demanded of young Indigenous researchers meant a kind of doubled burden as cultural experts as well as young Indigenous people. Their refusals were generative, even as they suggested that collaborative methods may serve as yet another politics of recognition in the era of reconciliation.