Every reader comes to a text from somewhere. You have a family, a home community, a first language, a set of experiences and a set of things you have never had to think about. In most English classes those facts stay invisible. In a course built around First Nations, Métis and Inuit voices they matter from the first day, because the question 'who is asking, and why?' changes what a fair question even looks like. A student from Six Nations of the Grand River, a student whose family arrived in Mississauga last year and a student whose family has farmed in Grey County for five generations will bring different knowledge and different blind spots to the same novel. This topic shows you how to name where you stand, how to ask questions that lead somewhere, and how to plan an inquiry that treats Indigenous knowledge as knowledge rather than as decoration.
Self-location and positionality
Positionality is the position you speak from: your relationships, community, background and experience, and the knowledge and assumptions that come with them. Self-location is the practice of stating that position openly. In many First Nations, Métis and Inuit contexts, people introduce themselves through relationships before they say anything else: whose family they belong to, which community and nation they come from, sometimes their clan. That introduction tells listeners how to understand what follows and to whom the speaker is accountable. In academic writing, many Indigenous scholars begin the same way, because a claim about a community means something different coming from a member of that community than from an outsider. For your inquiry, self-location does two jobs: it tells your reader where your knowledge comes from, and it reminds you where your knowledge stops.
- Relationships. Who your people are, in the way you are comfortable sharing. You decide how much to say; nobody is owed private family details.
- Place. Where you live now and whose territory it is. Research the treaty or territory rather than guessing, because land acknowledgements are often vague or wrong.
- Connection to the topic. Whether you are writing from inside a community, from a neighbouring one, or from outside, and how you first met the topic.
- What you already know, and how. Lived experience, family knowledge, earlier reading, news coverage. Each source shapes your starting assumptions differently.
- What you do not know. The limits of your position, stated plainly. This line is often the most useful one in the whole statement.
Writing open inquiry questions
A topic is not a question. 'Residential schools in literature' or 'Inuit throat singing' is a territory to explore; an inquiry needs a question that tells you what to look for. Good inquiry questions are open, meaning they cannot be answered with yes, no or a single fact. They are focused enough to finish, they invite more than one kind of source, and they usually ask how or why rather than what. Strong questions also keep the people at the centre of the topic in view: instead of asking what happened to a community, they ask how members of that community have told, resisted or reshaped what happened.
- When did the Indian Act become law? (one fact: 1876)
- Is Indian Horse a good novel? (yes or no, opinion only)
- What do Indigenous people think about pipelines? (treats many nations as one voice)
- Why are Indigenous stories about nature? (built on a stereotype)
- How have First Nations writers responded to the Indian Act in poetry and essays since the 1960s?
- How does Richard Wagamese use hockey to explore survival in Indian Horse?
- How have Wet'suwet'en hereditary chiefs and their supporters used media to explain their position on pipelines?
- How do specific Anishinaabe writers present relationships with land and water, and how do their approaches differ?
Two-Eyed Seeing and relational knowledge
Two-Eyed Seeing, or Etuaptmumk in Mi'kmaw, is a guiding principle shared by Mi'kmaw Elder Albert Marshall of Eskasoni First Nation in Unama'ki (Cape Breton). He describes it as learning to see from one eye with the strengths of Indigenous knowledges and ways of knowing, and from the other eye with the strengths of Western knowledges and ways of knowing, then using both eyes together. The point is not to blend the two into one, or to rank one above the other, but to let each show what the other cannot. For an English inquiry this has practical consequences. An oral history recorded with a community, a memoir, a knowledge-keeper's published teaching and a scholarly article are all evidence, but they are different kinds of evidence, and you have to read each on its own terms. A related idea comes from Opaskwayak Cree scholar Shawn Wilson, whose book Research Is Ceremony (2008) argues that knowledge is made of relationships, and that a researcher is accountable to those relationships, not only to the facts.
Building an inquiry plan
- Locate yourself. Write three to five sentences on your position and its limits before you choose a question.
- Generate questions. Brainstorm at least ten, then sort them into closed and open. Keep the open ones.
- Choose and narrow. Pick one question you can answer in the time and length you have. Narrow by nation, region, time period, author or form.
- Map your sources with both eyes. List First Nations, Métis and Inuit authors and organizations first, then other scholarly, government and media sources, and note what kind of evidence each gives.
- Check protocols. Note any oral knowledge you hope to use and how you will ask permission and credit it, or decide to rely on published sources instead.
- Name your product and audience. An essay, a podcast or a presentation, and who it is for.
- Set reflection checkpoints. Plan when you will revisit your question and your self-location, because good inquiries usually change both.