ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how dominant quantitative methodologies shortchange Indigenous communities. We use Canadian and Australian examples from our own work to explore how statistical constructions of Indigeneity are played out on a terrain of racialization1 specific to Canada’s and Australia’s colonial contexts. We know from discussions with our colleagues in Aotearoa New Zealand, the continental United States, Hawaii, and those nation-states that now encompass Sami lands that the issues we identify in this chapter are directly pertinent to their own experiences and understandings of how Indigenous statistics are done. These issues are, we argue, part of the broader effects of colonialism on the investment of Indigenous identity in statistical forms, which are not specific to individual nation-states. Rather, we restrict the nation-state frame of our discussion because that is the limit of our expertise, and we do not wish to speak for other first world colonized Indigenous peoples.
