This resource is meant to supplement the workshop “Relations and Accountabilities” by Sadia Khan[1], from the First Nations Information Governance Centre (FNIGC). It is a combination of reflections compiled for, acquired during, and processed following the workshop. It is therefore a product of IndigeLab Network’s invitation to prepare a workshop for their series as well as of contributions from the workshop participants who asked questions and shared their thoughts and experiences.

The FNIGC lab:

We saw our workshop as a reflection on the relations and accountabilities of our FNIGC ‘lab.’ Through its various units, FNIGC leads and participates in a variety of knowledge production and knowledge sharing endeavours with First Nations and Indigenous constituencies all over Canada and beyond. In broad strokes, the two kinds of research undertaken are:

1. large-scale quantitative health and well-being surveys with on-reserve and remote communities, and
2. small-scale qualitative critical social science work that may be summarized as research about research, concerned with the epistemologies, methodologies, methods, ethics, and political economies of research done with First Nations and Indigenous communities and their data

We see the FNIGC lab as constituting a number of internal and external relationships that include, broadly speaking:

• the self of each person involved
• the work relations (colleagues of different ranks and duties, institutional environment)
• specific research that we do
• the external relations that flow from and into our work

Intelligences, relations and accountabilities

Anishnabe Elder Jim Dumont offers that “We cannot talk about being an intelligent person without knowledge of and access to all the levels of our intelligence capacity – i.e., the intelligence of the body, the mind, heart and spirit.”[2] In many ways, self-identified research spaces—including FNIGC—tend to privilege (certain kinds of) intelligence of (certain kinds of) minds, over the other intelligences laid out by Elder Dumont. As we continue to reflect on these words, we understand that these broader set of intelligences make intelligible to us broader ways of relating and avenues of accountabilities.

These reflections are also emerging from engaging with Opaskwayak Cree scholar, Shawn Wilson’s elaboration of the concept of “relational accountability.”[3]

Specifically, for this workshop we reflected on:

1. Emotional accountabilities
2. Material accountabilities
3. Epistemological accountabilities

Questions and provocations on three accountabilities

1. Emotional accountabilities

If we:

• understand emotions as always already there in the dynamics of our lab whether or not they’re being acknowledged;
• employ the intelligence of the emotions within the culture and relations of our lab;
• are trauma-informed, compassionate, creating conditions of “affirmation and transcendence”[4] for ourselves and our colleagues;

        How can this inform how we relate to and are accountable to:

• the self
  • the work relations (colleagues of different ranks and duties, institutional environment)
  • specific research that we do
  • the external relations that flow from and into our work

Crucially, if we understand the necessary interconnections of the manifestations of emotions in each of the above scales, how do we practice emotional accountabilities at the individual and collective scales within the lab?

• What kinds of collective emotional accountabilities could be built into the cultural, material and social infrastructure of the lab so that:
  • Individuals are not isolated in dealing with their own or other lab-mates’ emotional experiences that deplete individual capacities
  • There is collective acknowledgement of the collective benefit of building up the emotional safety of each person in the lab and of the lab as a collective space
    • This may involve, in addition to generous benefits for privately accessed therapy, project funding consistently prioritizing an on-call therapist for individual and group sessions—this is one of the intersections of emotional and material accountabilities

Quotes for reflection:

• African American poet, Nikki Giovanni: “[I]f you don’t understand yourself you don’t understand anybody else.”[5]
• American Sociologist, Avery Gordon: “Complex personhood means that all people (albeit in specific forms whose specificity is sometimes everything) remember and forget, are beset by contradiction, and recognize and misrecognize themselves and others. Complex personhood means that people suffer graciously and selfishly too, get stuck in the symptoms of their troubles, and also transform themselves. Complex personhood means that even those called “Other” are never never that. Complex personhood means that the stories people tell about themselves, about their troubles, about their social worlds, and about their society’s problems are entangled and weave between what is immediately available as a story and what their imaginations are reaching toward…Complex personhood means that even those who haunt our dominant institutions and their systems of value are haunted too by things they sometimes have names for and sometimes do not. At the very least, complex personhood is about conferring the respect on others that comes from presuming that life and people’s lives are simultaneously straightforward and full of enormously subtle meaning.”[6]

• Material accountabilities

There are obviously plenty of connections between the emotions of the lab and its material conditions. For example, the salary, benefits, job security of a lab would certainly contribute to the emotional states of the people working in it. Dominant culture tends to discourage explicit discussion of the concrete material conditions being experienced by each person and the implications of the inequalities present. If the material conditions are opaque, the emotional implications of them are also left unacknowledged and addressed.

The material accountabilities of a lab might be understood to be of two intersecting kinds as sketched out in the table below:

Internal material accountabilities of lab

External material accountabilities of lab

How transparent are the internal finances of the lab? Are the salaries subject to collective bargaining in the lab? Are salaries and salary grids transparent and shared with all lab members? Are salaries freely disclosed to all prospective lab members like those applying to join the lab? Does the lab offer a livable wage to all members? Are the benefits and paid leaves of the lab such that they thoroughly support the physical and psychological well-being of the members? If answers to the above are ‘no,’ how can the policies of the lab be reviewed to make more materially accountable to lab members? How can the lab extend access to the amounts, distribution and terms and conditions of all funding contracts that the lab enters into so that more members are aware of and part of the deliberations of these relationships?

Are there collectively agreed-upon criteria for which funders the lab will accept/request funding from? How does the lab ensure that it is addressing—or at least minimizing—any conflicts of interests arising between getting money from particular funders and remaining accountable to the Indigenous communities and Indigenous data being worked with? What are mechanisms/ strategies/ tactics/ spins that can be used to extract terms and conditions of contracts from funders that more closely align with Indigenous data sovereignty and other priority principles? When working directly with Indigenous partners for a project, how transparent is the lab about how much money is involved and how it is being distributed? How does the lab materially acknowledge what Max Liboiron referred to as ‘capacity-sharing,’ from Indigenous partners to lab members, rather than just lab members supposedly doing all the capacity-building in the Indigenous communities?

Reflection questions:

1. In the context of settler colonialism and the resource dispossessions and disparities that it embodies and reproduces, how do we understand and relate to funding, funders, funded partners, Indigenous and non-Indigenous?

• What are mechanisms that could be put in place so that these reflections can inform the material relations of our work in more accountable ways?

• Epistemic accountabilities

When we speak of Indigenous data sovereignty and its assertion, we are often implicitly or explicitly speaking of mediating the relationship between settler institutions and Indigenous data. Our orientation in these dynamics is therefore primarily reactive, defensive tactic against extractive data practices of settler institutions. This involves being vigilant against violations, resisting incursions, increasing security measures, asserting rights etc. In the context of a long history and ongoing present of extractive settler-colonial data practices, this reactive defense mode is not just understandable but admirable. However, remaining in ‘fight-mode’ including in the data and knowledge realm, occludes and limits and takes away from other ways of relating and being.

Computer Scientist, Catriona Gray warns us that the data extraction critique can lead us to neglect other forms of colonial epistemic violence:

“By undertaking a broad engagement with decolonial thinking, I demonstrate the need to move beyond an examination of how every- day life is datafied to be extracted like a natural resource. I show that such analogies are inapt and occlude colonial relations reproduced through datafication. Our understanding of these processes would find a firmer footing not in historical analogy, but in our colonial present. I propose that the modality of data’s power lies not in the extraction of value as such, but in the interaction of orders of knowledge with orders of value. This re- ordering both acts as a motor of further colonial epistemic violence and creates the conditions for a new apparatus of racialized dispossession.”[7]

In the historical and ongoing context of Indigenous epistemicide—”the killing, silencing, annihilation, or devaluing of a way of knowing”[8]:

• What kinds of knowledge relations are we participating in and reproducing?
• What are the implications of the knowledges we—explicitly or implicitly—amplify and those we neglect?
• What do we understand to be Indigenous knowledge and data and how do we orient towards them respectfully and carefully?
• What are the internal knowledge relations of the lab and what are the implications of those for the outward-facing work we produce?

• Jicarilla Apache philosopher V.F. Cordova discusses the Anishnabemowin term, engwaamizin which literally translations to “tread carefully”

• “Unspoken, but understood, in that term is a whole worldview having to do with humans’ place and effect on the universe.”[9]
•  When coming into relationship with Indigenous data and Indigenous knowledges, it is crucial that we not only protect them from extraction but also that we tread carefully in what kind of epistemic footprint we are leaving behind

This requires being careful and conscious about what:

• trawlwoolway scholar Maggie Walter summarizes as our “assumptions, values and understandings of reality.”[10]
• Shawn Wilson beautifully captures as “if I didn’t believe it, I wouldn’t have seen it”[11]
• British psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist cautions, “The model we choose has the power to reveal or obscure findings and to change the meaning and interpretation of such findings as we make”[12]

Regarding the epistemological accountabilities of a lab, then, the collective orientation this requires is beautifully captured by John Dufour:

• Nakota philosopher John Dufour elaborates on “an Indigenous concern about an acceptable route of arrival at what one understands or believes”
  • “Because a belief may be regarded as a multiform disposition emerging into action and expressed in a variety of ways…, and since a belief appears to pervade one’s life or perspective, it seems to me that proper care of an concern for one’s beliefs ought to be of great significance, not only to the believer but to the community the person belongs to. The beliefs we hold could significantly contribute to fragmentation or harmonization of community. Our beliefs are therefore of social concern. It seems to follow that we ought to take care with respect to our beliefs or understandings. A belief practice thus could embody the community’s moral concern for the proper care we should take with respect to what we claim to believe and understand.”[13]

~

We hope that the above reflections and compilations provide some nourishing food for thought, and collective action.

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[1] This workshop was originally developed with and received feedback from other FNIGC colleagues, hence the use of ‘we’ in this document. The ‘we’ in particular denotes Dene-Cree colleague, Kayla Boileau.

 Sadia is the Qualitative Research Officer at FNIGC. She is of Indian-occupied Kashmiri descent and currently lives and works on unceded Anishnabe territory in Ottawa.

[2] Jim Dumont, First Nations Regional Longitudinal Health Survey (RHS) Cultural Framework, February 2005. https://fnigc.ca/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/rhs_cultural_framework.pdf

[3] “From an epistemology and ontology based upon relationships, an Indigenous methodology and axiology emerge. An Indigenous axiology is built upon the concept of relational accountability. Right or wrong; validity; statistically significant; worth or unworthy; value judgements lose their meaning. What is more important and meaningful is fulfilling a role and obligations in a research relationship—that is, being accountable to your relations.”
Shawn Wilson. (2008). Research is ceremony: Indigenous research methods. Fernwood. p. 77. https://www.sjsu.edu/people/marcos.pizarro/courses/8085/s1/Wilson.pdf

[4] From Belgian psychotherapist and writer, Esther Perel’s quote “Love is at once an affirmation and a transcendence of who we are.” Quoted in Maria Popova. “The Central Paradox of Love: Esther Perel on Reconciling the Closeness Needed for Intimacy with the Psychological Distance That Fuels Desire.” themarginalian. https://www.themarginalian.org/2016/10/13/mating-in-captivity-esther-perel/

[5] Quoted in Maria Popova. “James Baldwin and Nikki Giovanni’s Extraordinary Forgotten Conversation About the Language of Love and What It Takes to Be Truly Empowered.” themarginalian. https://www.themarginalian.org/2016/04/04/james-baldwin-nikki-giovannis-dialogue/

[6] Avery Gordon. 2008. Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination. U of Minnesota P. pp. 4-5.

[7] Gray, Catriona. (2023). More than Extraction: Rethinking Data’s Colonial Political Economy, International Political Sociology. Volume 17. Issue 2. https://academic.oup.com/ips/article/17/2/olad007/7094587

[8] Patin, B., Sebastian, M., Yeon, J., & Bertolini, D. (2020). Toward epistemic justice: An approach for conceptualizing epistemicide in the information professions. Proceedings of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 57(1).

[9] Cordova, VF.(2004). “Approaches to Native American Philosophy.” American Indian Thought: Philosophical Essays. Ed. Anne Waters. p. 32.

[10] Walter, Maggie. (2023). Evaluation and the Indigenous Lifeworld: Whose purpose? Whose logic? And whose reality? Presentation at AES 23 International Evaluation Conference. https://www.aes.asn.au/images/images/stories/files/2023_Conference_Brisbane/aes23_Keynote_Walter_presentation_new.pdf

[11] Shawn Wilson. (2008). Research is ceremony: Indigenous research methods. Fernwood

[12] McGilchrist, Iain. (2023). Science and metaphysics: a family quarrel? Marginalia. https://themarginaliareview.com/science-and-metaphysics-a-family-quarrel/

[13] Dufour, John.(2004). “Ethics and Understanding.” American Indian Thought: Philosophical Essays. Ed. Anne Waters. p. 38.

Bibliography

• Cordova, VF. (2004). “Approaches to Native American Philosophy.” American Indian Thought: Philosophical Essays. Ed. Anne Waters.
• Dufour, John. (2004). “Ethics and Understanding.” American Indian Thought: Philosophical Essays. Ed. Anne Waters.
• Gordon, A. (2008). Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination. U of Minnesota P.
• Gray, Catriona. (2023). More than Extraction: Rethinking Data’s Colonial Political Economy, International Political Sociology. Volume 17. Issue 2.
• McGilchrist, Iain. (2023). Science and metaphysics: a family quarrel?
• Marginalia. Patin, B., Sebastian, M., Yeon, J., & Bertolini, D. (2020). Toward epistemic justice: An approach for conceptualizing epistemicide in the information professions. Proceedings of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 57(1).
• Popova, M. (2016) “The Central Paradox of Love: Esther Perel on Reconciling the Closeness Needed for Intimacy with the Psychological Distance That Fuels Desire.” themarginalian. https://www.themarginalian.org/2016/10/13/mating-in-captivity-esther-perel/
• Popova, M. (2016). “James Baldwin and Nikki Giovanni’s Extraordinary Forgotten Conversation About the Language of Love and What It Takes to Be Truly Empowered.” themarginalian. https://www.themarginalian.org/2016/04/04/james-baldwin-nikki-giovannis-dialogue/
• Walter, Maggie. (2023). Evaluation and the Indigenous Lifeworld: Whose purpose? Whose logic? And whose reality? Presentation at AES 23 International Evaluation Conference. Brisbane, Australia. https://www.aes.asn.au/images/images/stories/files/2023_Conference_Brisbane/aes23_Keynote_Walter_presentation_new.pdf
• Wilson, S. (2008). Research is ceremony: Indigenous research methods. Fernwood. p. 77.

First Nations Information Governance Centre is a partner with the IndigeLab Network.

This video was created as part of a three-day workshop in August 2024, coordinated by the IndigeLab Network and the Nexus Centre at Memorial University, funded by the SSHRC.