Methodology

In this chapter I attempt to outline and defend the basic features of my approach. There are two distinct, but hopefully overlapping, aspects of my method. First I acknowledge and defend my attempt to work and write as an Indigenous researcher. Here Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s pioneering work has provided me with a justification for much of what I have attempted to do (Smith, 1999). However, as we will see when we come to discuss her work in greater detail in the following chapter, her approach falls within the post-structuralist, neo-Nietzschean tradition. While sympathizing deeply with Smith’s fundamental orientation as an Indigenous woman, I have serious reservations about the post-structuralist basis to her approach. This dissatisfaction with post-structuralism has led me to the second element in my methodology. In this case, I have attempted to maintain what, I would argue, are the most helpful parts of Smith’s approach, while replacing the post-structuralism with an approach based on Roy Bhaskar’s Dialectical Critical Realism.