Choosing Border Work

Abstract

Assuming that research, the creation of knowledge, influences local power and authority and may in fact contribute to changing power relationships between First Nations and non- First Nations peoples and institutions, is it a paradox for a non-Native researcher to enter a social arena— a Native education centre dedicated to Indian control o f Indian education— and to profess to contribute to the struggle for control, through research? In a retrospective on just such a research project, Haig-Brown conceptualizes her place in the struggle for In­dian control as being on a border that demarcates a wider struggle related to land and to a First Nations definition of people's relationship to land. A subsidiary struggle is for recogni­tion of the legitimacy of First Nations' conceptual ordering of research priorities and of First Nations voice in the articulation of research findings. Haig-Brown reviews the detail of research design, entry into the research "field," the nature of an ethnographer's relation­ ships with the people who provide information, and the choosing of strategies for making generalizations and for reporting the experience. Those discussions are tangential border positions for a triangulated focus on questions about the legitimacy and adequacy of eth­nographic research in such a situation.