ABSTRACT
An act of respect when researching with indigenous children is recognising the community’s code of ethics, its intellectual and environmental property, and acknowledging its right to self-determination. Within India, the indigenous communities constitute over 84 million people, but their voice has been marginalised particularly in the context of education. This paper foregrounds ethical considerations when researching with indigenous groups, specifically outlining dilemmas that arose from working alongside Sabar children of Jharkhand, India. It identifies how ethnomethodological methods and participatory tools have empowered this marginalised voice, enabling multinodal expressions and access to data that other methods may not have elicited. Findings highlight children as legitimate meaning-makers of their world, as ‘beings’, and not merely ‘becomings’. The paper discusses the ethical strategies adopted in consideration of its indigenous participants that have enabled generation of data beyond barriers of language, power and privilege. It navigates the nature and practice of ethics examined in the context of indigeneity through acknowledgement of ‘paradigmatic’ and ‘situated’ ethics, and an ethic of reciprocity. It concludes the relevance of ethics of difference in postcolonial education and research.
