Module 1: Ethical and Legal Considerations
Urban Indigenous Governance Practices
Utility, Self-voicing, Access, and Inter-relationality (USAI) Research Framework
The Ontario Federation of Indigenous Friendship Centres developed the Utility, Self-voicing, Access, and Inter-relationality (USAI) Research Framework. The National Association of Friendship Centres’ Urban Aboriginal Knowledge Network uses both the OCAP® Principles and the USAI Research Framework to inform its guiding ethical principles. If you are working with an Indigenous Friendship Centre, we suggest connecting early about which ethical research principles they use.
Principle I: Utility
Research needs are based on community priorities.
- Research inquiry is practical, relevant, and directly benefits communities.
- Research findings are immediate resources that benefit communities and build local capacity.
- Generated knowledge must be useful and relevant to communities and people involved in research activities.
- Communities decide on nature of actions that follow research activities.
Principle II: Self-voicing
Research, knowledge, and practice are authored by communities that are fully recognized as knowledge creators and Knowledge Keepers.
- Knowledge production, authorship, and dissemination constitute a political process to decolonize Indigenous Knowledges and practices.
- All community voices frame research reality; all research activities are self-determined; all research findings are authored by communities.
- Research goes beyond “inclusion” and “engagement”; communities construct and author their Knowledge and define their own actions.
Principle III: Access
Research fully recognizes all local Knowledge, practice, and experience in all their cultural manifestations as accessible by all research authors and Knowledge Keepers.
- Local knowledge, lived experience, community narratives, personal stories, and spiritual expressions are reliable and valid forms of authored research, both as researched reality and methods to understand and relate to it.
- Research is part of everyday life; it is never static or finished; it speaks everybody’s language; it is situated in the present, supported by the past, and contemplates the future.
- No mediators or cultural translators are needed to interpret or validate local knowledge, actions, and reflections.
Principle IV: Inter-relationality
Research is historically situated, geopolitically positioned, relational, and explicit about the perspective from which knowledge is generated.
- Research takes place within the complex web of interconnected relationships and encompasses all stages of life.
- All knowledge and all practice are situated within all relations; there is no objective knowledge or neutral praxis.
- There is always an historical context to Indigenous knowledge and praxis, which are inseparably linked to Indigenous identity and all its interrelated socio-political expressions.
Learner notes
CARE Principles for Indigenous Data Go