While not all Indigenous Peoples have come out with ethical guidelines and considerations on how to work with students, staff, and their communities, the following guidelines are rather comprehensive and a good place to start. Just as with all work with communities and others, it is always best to ask how to do things correctly before making a mistake that may harm the relationship. It is much easier to ask than to do a colonial injustice or research abuse which may be hard to come back from.
Building ethical partnership
Universities, staff, faculty, and students involved in a COIL project with an Indigenous community have a responsibility to engage in building a partnership with that community in an ethical way (this may take even 12 months, and need to be done prior to the course starting). This relationship creates a space for equitable engagement in projects identified by the community as something they want and need. In partnering with a community it is vital to listen closely to community needs and the outcomes they want so that the project benefits the community in the way they would like to benefit.
Further reading on documents from community workshops on how to respect Indigenous sovereignty, needs, and ethics in partnerships:
Co-production of knowledge (CPK)
COIL projects create space for the co-production of knowledge (CPK). Co-production is the bringing of two or more knowledge systems to learn from one another and produce new knowledge that is more extensively informed from the multiple systems. It is important to note that in CPK all knowledge systems need to be considered equitably, with no one knowledge system more “right” than the others or the need to justify any knowledge system with another. These resources explain more about CPK:
- Read about CPK in this free download: Knowing Home: Braiding Indigenous Science with Western Science. Edited by Gloria Snively and Wanosts'a7 Lorna Williams
- Read about a CPK model developed in the Arctic: A framework for co-production of knowledge in the context of Arctic research
- Watch talks on how researchers are engaging with Traditional Ecological Knowledge conduct CPK: TEKTalks
- Watch this seminar on how to engage in CPK in a good way, through trust, justice, and equity: Aligning Co-Production of Environmental Knowledge with Trust, Justice, and Equity
Ethical research
Our recommended reading on ethical research:
Ethical knowledge sharing and data sovereignty
It is vital to understand ethics of sharing indigenous Knowledge online and publishing research based on the COIL projects.
Indigenous Knowledges are their own knowledge systems, based on worldviews, epistemologies, ontologies, and axiologies different from Western Science. It is important to understand this, to understand why there are specific guidelines and ethics around sharing Indigenous Knowledges. These Knowledges touch on the physical as well as spiritual worlds, and some of the Knowledge is not to be shared for broad consumption.
Sacred aspects of Knowledge may be passed down to specific people within the culture. Additionally, Indigenous Knowledge also contains intellectual property (such as proprietary information on medicinal plants) that Western Scientists and pharmaceutical companies have been taking and making billions off of without any compensation. All of this has led to a movement to call attention to Indigenous data sovereignty and governance over their Knowledge and data.
There are guidelines online that address how to respect cultural Knowledge, Indigenous ownership and control over their Knowledge and data, the FAIR and CARE principles of Indigenous data governance:
Verbal communication and language
Most Indigenous students and youth will be fluent in the language of instruction of their institution. This may be English in the US (Alaska or Canada) while in Greenland the students may speak Greenlandic and then Danish, with English as a possible third language. Universities in Russia are often taught in Russian. Sami people may speak Norwegian, Russian, Finish and Swedish, and possibly Sami as well.
When it comes to communities, there may not be as much fluency in colonizing languages like, English, Danish, and Russian. It is best not to assume that a community speaks English, or any other language, without asking. Additionally, Elders may only be fluent in their Indigenous language, and this is something important to consider when designing a COIL project. For example, is there a need to work with a translator?
Written style guides
When working with Indigenous people it is important to understand how to engage in respectful written communication. This includes understanding the history, what terms are appropriate and inappropriate, and what to capitalize.
To begin with, Indigenous is always capitalized, as is Indigenous Knowledge, and Tribes. Indigenous people (with people lowercase) is not talking about the Nation as whole, but referring to individual people who identify as Indigenous.
Useful style guides
Note that although these guides are specific to Alaska and Canada, they can be informative regarding other Indigenous Peoples in the Arctic. The best practice in regard to what to call a community or Peoples, is to just ask what is correct.