Ethics of Response-Ability

You have encountered a “Great White Beast”, a fleeting, shapeshifting figure that performs the world as indeterminate.

The ethics involved when it comes to drawing from research paradigms that consider the world as indeterminate, intra-dependent and ontologically generative, cannot be resolved through ‘right’ ways of doing things.

Non-Indigenous researchers engaging any form of generative ontologies need to take responsibility for whichever option they choose:

1. Engaging Indigenous scholarship. Or,

2. Not engaging Indigenous scholarship.

Neither option is “innocent.” There are no "easy ways out".

In dealing with this Great White Beast, I have chosen to put a very selective body of western scholarship in dialogue with Indigenous principles of ethical engagement.

I do this to formulate ways of thinking outside of the classic western subject/object divides, while not appropriating Indigenous paradigms.

"Return" to cut 3 to start tracing the Bearwatch project.

Return to Cut 3: Wayfaring the BearWatch Project