ABSTRACT
The general trend of research into indigenous people’s lives in Aotearoa/New Zealand has been for the ‘research storyteller’ to be an outsider who gathered the stories of ‘others’, and made sense of them in terms of perceived patterns and commonalities. As a result, individuals’ stories were subsumed within those of the researcher as storyteller. The researcher has been the storyteller, the narrator and the person who decides what constitutes the narrative. Researchers in the past have taken the stories of research participants and have submerged them within their own stories, and re-told these reconstituted stories in a language and culture determined by the researcher. As a result, power and control over research issues such as initiation, benefits, representation, legitimation and accountability have been traditionally decided by the imposition of the researcher’s agenda, interests and concerns on the research process.
