Like the previous axiom’s question—Why collect narratives of pain?—we ask nonrhetorically, what knowledges does the academy deserve? Beyond narratives of pain, there may be language, experiences, and wisdoms better left alone by social science. Paula Gunn Allen (1998) notes that for many Indigenous peoples, “a person is expected to know no more than is necessary, sufficient and congruent with their spiritual and social place” (p. 56). To apply this idea to the production of social science research, we might think of this as a differentiation between what is made public and what is kept sacred. Not everything, or even most things, uncovered in a research process need to be reported in academic journals or settings. Contrasting Indigenous relationships to knowledge with settler relationships to knowledge, Gunn Allen remarks, In the white world, information is to be saved and analyzed at all costs. It is not seen as residing in the minds and molecules of human beings, but as—dare I say it?— transcendent. Civilization and its attendant virtues of freedom and primacy depend on the accessibility of millions of megabytes of data; no matter that the data has lost its meaning by virtue of loss of its human context . . . the white world has a different set of values [from the Indigenous world], one which requires learning all and telling all in the interests of knowledge, objectivity, and freedom. This ethos and its obverse—a nearly neurotic distress in the presence of secrets and mystery—underlie much of modern American culture (p. 59) As social science researchers, there are stories that are entrusted to us, stories that are told to us because research is a human activity, and we make meaningful relationships with participants in our work. At times we come to individuals and communities with promises of proper procedure and confidentiality-anonymity in hand, and are told, “Oh, we’re not worried about that; we trust you!” Or, “You don’t need to tell us all that; we know you will do the right thing by us.” Doing social science research is intimate work, worked that is strained by a tension between informants’ expectations that something useful or helpful will come from the divulging of (deep) secrets, and the academy’s voracious hunger for the secrets. This is not just a question of getting permission to tell a story through a signature on an IRB-approved participant consent form. Permission is an individualizing discourse—it situates collective wisdom as individual property to be signed away. Tissue samples, blood draws, and cheek swabs are not only our own; the DNA contained in them is shared by our relatives, our ancestors, our future generations (most evident when blood samples are misused as bounty for biopiracy.) This is equally true of stories. Furthermore, power is protected by such a collapse of ethics into litigation-proof relationships between individual and research institution. Power, which deserves the most careful scrutiny, will never sign such a permission slip.3 There are also stories that we overhear, because when our research is going well, we are really in peoples’ lives. Though it is tempting, and though it would be easy to do so, these stories are not simply y/ours to take. In our work, we come across stories, vignettes, moments, turns of phrase, pauses, that would humiliate participants to share, or are too sensationalist to publish. Novice researchers in doctoral and master’s programs are often encouraged to do research on what or who is most available to them. People who are underrepresented in the academy by social location—race or ethnicity, indigeneity, class, gender, sexuality, or ability—frequently experience a pressure to become the n/ Native informant, and might begin to suspect that some members of the academy perceive them as a route of easy access to communities that have so far largely eluded researchers. Doctoral programs, dissertations, and the master’s thesis process tacitly encourage novice researchers to reach for low-hanging fruit. These are stories and data that require little effort—and what we know from years and years of academic colonialism is that it is easy to do research on people in pain. That kind of voyeurism practically writes itself. “Just get the dissertation or thesis finished,” novice researchers are told. The theorem of lowhanging fruit stands for pretenured faculty too: “Just publish, just produce; research in the way you want to after tenure, later.” This is how the academy reproduces its own irrepressible irresponsibility. Adding to the complexity, many of us also bring to our work in the academy our family and community legacies of having been researched. As the researched, we carry stories from grandmothers’ laps and breaths, from below deck, from on the run, from inside closets, from exclaves. We carry the proof of oppression on our backs, under our fingernails; and we carry the proof of our survivance (Vizenor, 2008) in our photo boxes, our calluses, our wombs, our dreams. These stories, too, are not always ours to give away, though they are sometimes the very us of us. It needs to be said that we are not arguing for silence. Stories are meant to be passed along appropriately, especially among loved ones, but not all of them as social science research. Although such knowledge is often a source of wisdom that informs the perspectives in our writing, we do not intend to share them as social science research. It is enough that we know them. Kahnawake scholar Audra Simpson asks the following questions of her own ethnographic work with members of her nation: “Can I do this and still come home; what am I revealing here and why? Where will this get us? Who benefits from this and why?” (2007, p. 78). These questions force researchers to contend with the strategies of producing legitimated knowledge based on the colonization of knowledge. Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars of Native education have queried the dangers of appropriation of Native knowledge by mainstream research and pedagogical institutions (e.g., Castagno & Brayboy, 2008; Lomawaima & McCarty, 2006; Richardson, 2011). Lomawaima and McCarty (2006) describe the “safety zone” as ways in which Indigenous knowledges are included into even overtly antiIndian spaces such as boarding schools designed to assimilate Native children. Indigenous knowledge is made harmless to settler colonial pedagogies by relegating it to the safety zone of the margins. Troy Richardson extends this analysis by discussing “inclusion as enclosure” (2011, p.332), the encircling of Native education as part of a well-intentioned multiculturalist agenda. Such gestures, he contends, reduce the Indigenous curriculum to a supplement to a standard curriculum. Moreover, some narratives die a little when contained within the metanarrative of social science. Richardson (2011) theorizes Gerald Vizenor’s concept of trickster knowledge and the play of shadows to articulate a “shadow curriculum” that exceeds the material objects of reference—where much meaning is made in silence surrounding the words, where memories are not simply reflections of a referent experience but dynamic in themselves. “The shadow is the silence that inherits the words; shadows are the motions that mean the silence” (Vizenor, 1993, p.7). Extending Richardson’s analysis of Vizenor’s work, beneath the intent gaze of the social scientific lens, shadow stories lose their silences, their play of meaning. The stories extracted from the shadows by social science research frequently become relics of cultural anthropological descriptions of “tradition” and difference from occidental cultures. Vizenor observes these to be the “denials of tribal wisdom in the literature of dominance, and the morass of social science theories” (Vizenor, 1993, p. 8). Said another way, the academy as an apparatus of settler colonial knowledge already domesticates, denies, and dominates other forms of knowledge. It too refuses. It sets limits, but disguises itself as limitless. Frederic Jameson (1981) writes, “[H]istory is what hurts. It is what refuses desire and sets inexorable limits to individual as well as collective praxis” (p. 102). For Jameson, history is a master narrative of inevitability, the logic of teleos and totality: All events are interconnected and all lead toward the same horizon of progress. The relentlessness of the master narrative is what hurts people who find themselves on the outside or the underside of that narrative. History as master narrative appropriates the voices, stories, and histories of all Others, thus limiting their representational possibilities, their expression as epistemological paradigms in themselves. Academic knowledge is particular and privileged, yet disguises itself as universal and common; it is settler colonial; it already refuses desire; it sets limits to potentially dangerous Other knowledges; it does so through erasure, but importantly also through inclusion, and its own imperceptibility.
we ask nonrhetorically, what knowledges does the academy deserve? Beyond narratives of pain, there may be language, experiences, and wisdoms better left alone Paula Gunn Allen notes that for many Indigenous peoples, “a person is expected to know no more than is necessary, sufficient and congruent with their spiritual and social place” we might think of this as a differentiation between what is made public and what is kept sacred. Not everything, or even most things, uncovered need to be reported in academic settings. Contrasting Indigenous relationships to knowledge with settler relationships to knowledge there are stories that are entrusted to us, stories that are told to us and we make meaningful relationships with participants in our work. Doing research is intimate work, worked that is strained by a tension between informants’ expectations that something useful or helpful will come from the divulging of (deep) secrets, and the academy’s voracious hunger for the secrets. This is not just a question of getting permission to tell a story through a signature on an IRB-approved participant consent form. Permission is an individualizing discourse—it situates collective wisdom as individual property to be signed away. This is equally true of stories. Power will never sign such a permission slip. There are also stories that we overhear, because when our research is going well, we are really in peoples’ lives. Though it is tempting, and though it would be easy to do so, these stories are not simply y/ours to take. People who are underrepresented in the academy by social location frequently experience a pressure to become the n/ Native informant, and might begin to suspect that some members of the academy perceive them as a route of easy access to communities that have so far largely eluded researchers. That kind of voyeurism practically writes itself. Adding to the complexity, many of us also bring to our work in the academy our family and community legacies of having been researched. As the researched, we carry stories from grandmothers’ laps and breaths, from below deck, from on the run, from inside closets, from exclaves. We carry the proof of oppression on our backs, under our fingernails; and we carry the proof of our survivance in our photo boxes, our calluses, our wombs, our dreams. These stories, too, are not always ours to give away, though they are sometimes the very us of us.  Stories are meant to be passed along appropriately, especially among loved ones Although such knowledge is often a source of wisdom that informs the perspectives in our writing, we do not intend to share them It is enough that we know them. Kahnawake scholar Audra Simpson asks “Can I do this and still come home; what am I revealing here and why? Where will this get us? Who benefits from this and why?” Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars of Native education have queried the dangers of appropriation of Native knowledge by mainstream research and pedagogical institutions Indigenous knowledges are included into even overtly antiIndian spaces Richardson extends this analysis by discussing “inclusion as enclosure” the encircling of Native education as part of a well-intentioned multiculturalist agenda. some narratives die a little when contained beneath the intent gaze stories lose their silences, their play of meaning. The stories extracted from the shadows frequently become relics of cultural anthropological descriptions of “tradition” and difference from occidental cultures. the academy as an apparatus of settler colonial knowledge already domesticates, denies, and dominates other forms of knowledge. Academic knowledge is particular and privileged, yet disguises itself as universal and common; it is settler colonial it sets limits to potentially dangerous Other knowledges; it does so through erasure, but importantly also through inclusion