There is something worth pausing over in the way certain bodies move through Indigenous spaces with such confidence. Not the confidence of the soldier or the administrator. We recognise that choreography, have named it, built entire archives around its documentation. No, this is something softer. A confidence that presents as uncertainty, as learning, as being in process. A confidence that says: I am here to help, even as it settles into position.
Begin with a simple observation: the woman at the ethics committee meeting who opens her presentation by acknowledging country, by positioning herself as a learner, by describing her commitment to relationality and reflexivity. Her theoretical framework draws on Indigenous methodologies. Her language is careful. She has clearly read the right books, attended the right workshops. She describes her research partnerships, her consultations, her ongoing dialogue with community. The committee approves her proposal. She leaves with permission to proceed.
What has just happened?
At first glance: due diligence. Ethical research. The machinery of the contemporary university attempting to operate responsibly, to not repeat past harms. The researcher has demonstrated awareness. She knows she enters contested ground. She has prepared herself with knowledge of how to tread lightly.
But stay with this scene a moment longer. Sit with what has been authorised. The woman will now go into community. She will build relationships, and let us trust these will be genuine relationships, warm and reciprocal in their daily texture. She will learn things. She will be taught things. These things will become data. The data will become chapters. The chapters will become a thesis. The thesis will become a doctorate. The doctorate will become a position. The position will become a career. The career will unfold across decades: publications, promotions, invitations to speak, grants to continue the work.
And the community that taught her? What accumulates there?
This is not a rhetorical question meant to imply nothing accumulates. Sometimes there are genuine exchanges, real collaborations, material benefits. But if we are honest, and this essay proceeds from a commitment to a certain kind of difficult honesty, we must ask about proportion. We must ask about what travels where, and what remains.
Consider how peculiar it is that we have developed an entire vocabulary for this work. Positionality. Reflexivity. Relationality. Each term signals something important: an attention to standpoint, an awareness of one's own formation, a commitment to connection rather than extraction. These are not meaningless words. They gesture towards ethics, towards trying to do things differently than they were done before.
And yet.
And yet there is something worth examining in how these terms function. They have become credentials in themselves, markers of having done the internal work. To speak fluently in this register is to demonstrate one belongs to a particular knowledge class, one that takes seriously the politics of research, the histories of violence, the ongoing structures of colonialism. One signals: I am not naive, I am not like the anthropologists of old, I understand my complicity.
But what does this understanding do? What work does it perform?
Here is where we must slow down, because something subtle happens. The acknowledgement of complicity can become the very thing that permits continued participation. To say 'I acknowledge I am positioned as a settler' or 'I recognise I benefit from ongoing colonisation' costs nothing if the acknowledgement itself becomes sufficient. If the speech act substitutes for material change. If naming the problem allows one to proceed as if the naming resolved it.
There is almost a ritual quality to it. The researcher positions herself. She acknowledges her privilege. She describes her commitments to working differently. And having performed this ritual, she can proceed with the research. The positioning functions like a ticket: it grants entry. It says, I have paid my dues in the currency of self-awareness, now I may continue.
But to where? To what? For whom?
Watch how the language works. 'This is uncomfortable for me.' 'I'm sitting with my complicity.' 'I'm learning to recognise my privilege.' The discomfort itself becomes a kind of labour, a kind of work that deserves recognition.
And it is work, of a sort. Self-examination is not nothing. Confronting one's own formation within structures of domination requires something. But we might ask: compared to what? Compared to whose labour?
The Indigenous elder who takes time to explain, again, what has already been explained to researchers before. The community member who sits through another consultation, another partnership meeting, another co-design session. The Indigenous research assistant who does the cultural translation, the relationship-building, the navigation between worlds. The Indigenous colleague who provides the emotional labour of making the researcher feel okay about her learning process. There is an asymmetry here worth dwelling on. The researcher's discomfort is productive. It leads to growth, to publications about reflexive practice, to conference presentations on doing research differently. It generates value. It advances careers. The discomfort becomes something to write about, something that demonstrates depth of engagement.
But whose comfort is being maintained in the larger sense? Who gets to remain in the space of learning, processing, developing? Who gets to be in perpetual motion towards better practice without ever arriving at a different position in the material order of things? Here we must venture into difficult territory. There is a claim often made: 'I didn't do these things. I wasn't there. I am not responsible for what happened before I was born.' This claim has a certain logical appeal. One cannot be responsible for actions one did not commit. This is foundational to our sense of justice.
But colonisation is not past tense. This is stated often enough that it has become almost banal. 'Colonisation is ongoing.' Yes, we say, we know. And then we proceed as if it is nonetheless primarily historical, something to acknowledge and learn from rather than something we are actively participating in. What if we really meant it? What if colonisation is not something that happened and whose effects continue, but something that continues to happen, is happening now, in the very moment of the research relationship? Then the researcher is not someone who arrives after the fact to help repair. She is the colonial relation, in one of its contemporary forms. Her very presence, well-intentioned, reflexive, relational, might be the continuation of the thing she claims to oppose.
This is almost unbearable to contemplate. Because if it is true, then what?
Stay with the discomfort of this question. Do not rush to the reassurance that surely, if one is thoughtful enough, careful enough, collaborative enough, it can be different. Sit with the possibility that the entire apparatus, the PhD itself, the university, the research system, the knowledge production machinery, might be structured in such a way that good intentions are insufficient. That they may, in fact, be the very thing that allows the structure to continue.
There is a history that is not often told this way: the history of care as colonisation.
The woman who took the child believed she was saving him. She saw neglect where there was different practice. She saw a child who needed rescue. She had training. She had institutional backing. She had genuine feeling, this is crucial to understand, she had love, or something she experienced as love. She believed utterly in the goodness of what she was doing.
When she took the child, she was performing care. She saw herself as giving the child opportunities. Education. Proper nutrition. Civilisation. She could not see, or could not let herself see, that she was enacting violence. That her care was destruction. This is not ancient history. The woman might have been someone's grandmother. Might have told stories, later in life, about her work with 'those poor children'. Might have believed, until death, that she did good in the world.
Now her granddaughter goes into community to do research. She knows this history, perhaps she even knows it as her family's history. She positions herself carefully. She acknowledges the harms. She commits to doing things differently. But what if the structure remains the same? What if she is still arriving to determine what knowledge matters, what gets studied, what gets written about? What if she still leaves with something, the credential, the expertise, the authority, whilst the community remains in place?
What if care is still the vehicle for extraction, just with different language?
Follow the object: the PhD.
It begins as a project, an idea, a gap in knowledge that needs filling. The gap is located in relation to Indigenous communities: their practices, their knowledges, their experiences. To fill the gap, one must go to the source. Relationships are built. Time is spent. Things are learned.
The things learned accumulate as data. Data becomes analysis. Analysis becomes chapters. Chapters become thesis. Thesis becomes degree.
And then?
The degree becomes a position. Lecturer, perhaps. Then lecturer. Senior lecturer. Associate professor. Along the way: publications, citations, expertise, authority. Invitations to speak about Indigenous issues. Positions on committees overseeing Indigenous programmes. Grant funding to continue the research.
A whole career unfolds from that initial gap in knowledge.
Now ask: where did the knowledge come from? Who created it? Who held it, maintained it, transmitted it across generations? And who now owns it, in the sense that matters to the university, who has the credential that says 'I am the expert on this'? The answer to these questions points to a transfer. Something moved from one location to another. This is not controversial to state. Research has always involved the movement of knowledge. But we might ask about the terms of the transfer. About what was given in exchange. About what compounds over time. The researcher builds a career. Achieves security. Buys a house, sends her children to university, establishes herself. And what compounds in the community? More research? More consultation? More relationships with researchers who arrive, learn, and depart with their credentials?
The Wonder of It
Here is what is remarkable, what is worth pausing over in genuine amazement: the system has found a way to make extraction feel like care. Not through force, not through obvious violence, but through the softest possible means, through learning, through relationships, through declared commitments to doing things differently.
The contemporary researcher can sincerely believe she is opposing colonisation whilst operating within its current forms. She can cite Indigenous scholars whilst taking the job an Indigenous person might have had. She can acknowledge ongoing colonisation whilst extracting knowledge from Indigenous communities for her own advancement. She can describe herself as an ally whilst occupying space, resources, positions.
This is not hypocrisy, exactly. Or not only hypocrisy. It is something more interesting, more structurally embedded. The researcher is produced by the system. Her good intentions are genuine. Her theoretical awareness is real. Her relationships are heartfelt. And yet all of this can coexist with her participation in an extractive system, can even facilitate it.
The wonder is in how seamlessly this operates. How little friction there is. How one can proceed from undergraduate degree to PhD to professorship, building a career on Indigenous topics, without ever confronting the basic question: should I be here at all? That question is so rarely asked because the entire apparatus, the ethics committees, the funding bodies, the theoretical frameworks, the methodological toolkits, has been designed to answer different questions. How should you do this research? What methods should you use? How do you ensure the research is ethical?
But not: should you be the one doing it? Not: what are you taking? Not: who benefits?
Universities, for their part, have learnt to welcome this work. There is funding for Indigenous research. There are strategic plans committing to decolonisation. There are Indigenous knowledge frameworks and reconciliation statements.
And who staffs these initiatives? Who writes the strategic plans, who receives the funding, who develops the frameworks? Look at the names, the faces, the biographies. Count how many are the very researchers we are discussing, those who built careers through research with Indigenous communities, who now hold positions of authority, who now decide what counts as good decolonial practice. The institution has found a way to absorb the critique. To metabolise it. To create positions for those who can speak the language of decolonisation whilst the basic structure, who has tenure, who makes decisions, who controls resources, remains largely unchanged.
This is not a conspiracy. No one designed it this way intentionally. It emerged through a thousand small decisions, each one appearing reasonable in isolation. Hire someone with expertise in Indigenous issues. Fund research on Indigenous topics. Create a committee to oversee Indigenous programmes. Each move seems like progress. And yet the sum total is the replication of the existing order under new language. In all the reflexive positioning, all the acknowledgements of privilege, all the careful methodological descriptions, there is something that rarely appears: the simple acknowledgement that perhaps one should not be doing this work at all. Not 'I should be doing it more carefully'. Not 'I should be more collaborative'. Not 'I should be more reflexive about my positionality'. But: perhaps someone else should be doing it. Perhaps the position should not exist. Perhaps the funding should go elsewhere. Perhaps the career trajectory should not be possible.
This thought is almost unthinkable within the current system. Because to think it seriously would be to question one's own right to be where one is. To question not just how one does the work, but one's presence in the space at all. And this is where the analysis becomes truly uncomfortable. Because if we follow it through, it suggests that the most ethical move might be refusal. Not of engagement, not of responsibility, but of the position itself. The decision that this job should not be mine, this funding should go to someone else, this research should be led by others. But this would require something the system is not set up to reward: the willingness to step back. To give up the position, the project, the possibility of the career. To redirect resources rather than claiming them, even with the best intentions. And how many will do this? How many can do this, given mortgages and children's education and the precarity of life under capitalism? How many even think to do this, when everything in the system tells them they belong, they have done the work of positioning and reflexivity, they have earned the right to be here?
This essay does not end with answers. It cannot, because the questions themselves keep unfolding, keep revealing new layers of complexity.
But perhaps it can end with an invitation to wonder. To really look at what is happening when someone builds a career from Indigenous knowledge whilst Indigenous people remain underrepresented in the very institutions that credential 'Indigenous expertise'. To marvel, in a dark way, at how sincerity and extraction can coexist. To be troubled by how easy it is to participate in colonial structures whilst believing oneself opposed to them. The researcher will read this, perhaps, and nod. She already knows this. She has thought these thoughts. She has wrestled with these questions. And yet, tomorrow she returns to her research. The machine continues. The PhDs get awarded. The positions get filled. The knowledge continues to travel in one direction, transformed into credentials that travel in another.
What would it take to stop? Not to do it better, but to stop?
This is the question that haunts. Because perhaps the answer is: it would take more than anyone is willing to give.
And so we continue, troubled but proceeding, aware but not transformed, positioned but not displaced.
Wondering, always, what it would mean to actually change.