Emily Grafton and Jérôme Melançon

University of Regina

emily.grafton@uregina.ca and jerome.melancon@uregina.ca

https://orcid.org/0009-0002-7159-6158

Journal of Australian, Canadian, and Aotearoa New Zealand Studies 5 (September 2025): 7-50, https://doi.org/10.52230/TQYI3666

Abstract:

Many post-secondary academic programs, including political science, are currently undergoing decolonization processes. This is not entirely new; Deloria Jr. (1986) and Deloria Jr. and Wilkins (1999) labelled political science as the ‘midwife’ or the most appropriate disciplinary home for Indigenous studies. Recent critiques by scholars have pointed out the ongoing limitations in political science’s attention to Indigenous Peoples and politics (Ladner 2017; Wallace 2022). We argue that the field is influenced by diverse theoretical and methodological frameworks that affect the inclusion of Indigenous studies and the potential for decolonization. Using keeoukaywin or the Visiting Way (Gaudet 2019) as our methodological guide, we assess our scepticism and support for placing Indigenous studies within political science, particularly as a distinct subfield. We consider how Indigenous politics—both practiced and studied—can challenge and enrich political science, typically framed in Western terms. It may be that, with some rearrangement to make room for Indigenous epistemologies and political ontologies, political studies can be a temporary home for Indigenous studies within a hostile academia, where despite fundamental conflicts, there may be sufficient commonalities in the objects that we seek to understand to allow for cohabitation—for a time.

Keywords:

Decolonizing scholarship; Indigenous Studies; Political Science; Settler colonialism

Article