Spiritual Exchange: A Methodology for a Living Inquiry With All Our Relations

Abstract

Brought to life by an exchange with a crocus, we respond to our challenges with methodologies that privilege cognitive ways of theorizing and sharing together. As a Michif (Metis) woman and a woman of White settler descent, we engage in a layered dialogue across cultural understandings-what we call a spiritual exchange-guided by ethical relationality and the teachings of Spirit Gifting. The spiritual exchange offers a process to make meaning of experiences and to collaborate in ways that help us generate and live out ethical relationships. We question: How can we proceed in ways that might rehumanize the research process and honor the living earth? How might research look and feel if stories of respect, love, reciprocity, and responsibility were at the center? In this article, we offer an inquiry process that honors the act of study from an Indigenous sensibility, the multiplicity of kinetic and relational knowing, and the reanimation of the more-than-human.

It’s a Matter of Trust: Ngāi Tahu Democratic Processes and Māori Pākehā Research Partnership

“…I resist the urge to distance myself by using narrative methods and step gently into a paper which may have some similarities with autoethnography, in the way that the vulnerability of each author is transparent and there is no possibility of othering (Ellis, 1999). Yet Bauvier and MacDonald (2019), encourage us to view this type of exchange as a methodology which privileges spiritual and living inquiry guided by ethical relationality.…”