Traditional methods of imparting knowledge are known as yarning to Australian Aboriginal Elders and talking circles to North American First Nations peoples. Yarning is a relational methodology for transferring Indigenous knowledge. This article describes an emerging research methodology with yarning at its core, which provides respect and honour in a culturally safe environment. Yarning is highly structured, with protocols and principles providing participants control over the process and their stories. The methodology is embedded in a yarning space, which is framed by six protocols and seven principles. The protocols are gift, control, freedom, space, inclusiveness and gender specificity, and the principles are reciprocity, responsibility, relationship, dignity, equality, integrity and self-determination—to protect participants, stories and data. This is ensured through respectful and honouring relationships, responsibility and accountability between participants. The key camps in which the yarning journey is segmented are the Ancestors, protocols, principles, connections, data, analysis, processing and reporting, and the wider community.

In this article, we open up Yarning as a fundamentally relational methodology. We discuss key relationships involved in Indigenous research, including with participants, Country, Ancestors, data, history, and Knowledge. We argue that the principles and protocols associated with the deepest layers of yarning in an Indigenous Australian context create a protected space which supports the researcher to develop and maintain accountability in each of these research relationships. Protection and relational accountability in turn contribute to research which is trustworthy and has integrity. Woven throughout the article are excerpts of a yarn in which the first author reflects on his personal experience of this research methodology. We hope this device serves to demonstrate the way yarning as a relational process of communication helps to bring out deeper reflection and analysis and invoke accountability in all of our research relationships.

In this article, we invite you into conversation about Yarning with Country. We contemplate the question: How do we work within a relational methodology with Country as a primary participant? We are interested in the practice of relating intentionally with Country: the ontological orientation and visceral receptivity which is required. This contemplation includes considering how we exist in relationship with Country, how we learn from and with Country, and how we cultivate respectful, reciprocal, and accountable relationships with Country. We choose to share this process with you as a conversation between people and with Country because that is the way this kind of sharing takes place: in person, in real time, in Place, between beings. Our contention in this article is that human beings would benefit from a more engaged, communicative relationship with Country; we suggest that this requires honing our skills of listening, respecting, sharing, and letting be.

This paper reflects on research undertaken as part of a Doctor of Philosophy, focusing on the restoration of contemporary Aboriginal men's dignity. These reflections centre on how the research participants began to train this researcher in decolonising research practices. Personal discovery and growth, as well as developing strong, ethical and reciprocal relationships, are core to doing decolonising research. Yarning as methodology and art as a method of communicating research are presented as ways of building such relationships and promoting personal transformation in research. Key lessons from this research are shared and demonstrate that for this researcher, the greatest act of decolonising research started with addressing his own mindset, which led to the realisation that Indigenous Australia no longer wishes to be studied or seen as requiring someone to lift them up.

This article explores the development of an Aboriginal basket-weaving theoretical-methodological framework developed as part of a doctoral study that explores Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander teachers’ aspirations towards school leadership in Australia. Aboriginal basket weaving framed as theory-methodology is positioned through the cultural lens of Indigenous and post-structural theoretical frameworks. Connected and relational ontology is woven through the methodologies of storying and yarning that are held by the basket-weaving theoretical framing yet to be enacted in the fieldwork and analysis. This article is a first look at the framework developed by the lead author in concert with her doctoral supervisors.