Centering Indigenous Research & Communities in Advancing Antiracist Research

Ample scholarship has been dedicated to the ways that research has been harmful to Indigenous communities, and challenges faced by historically excluded scholars from across racial groups are well documented. In this work we consider the role of Indigenous peoples, knowledges, and practices within a framework of antiracist social work research. Indigenous peoples occupy a liminal space whereby we have been constructed as both political identities as well as a racialized category. We question the adequacy of antiracism alone as a framework for addressing the erasure, invisibility, and violence against Indigenous peoples and knowledges in research and scholarship. We write as Indigenous scholars focused on Indigenous health equity research and start by placing ourselves in relation to the content. We describe the role of settler colonialism in the racialization of Indigenous peoples and then turn to considering decolonizing and Indigenist research in relation to antiracist research. We end with recommended actions for individuals and institutions to support Indigenous scholarship in their efforts to advance antiracist research.