Introduction

• Statistics: systematically collected numerical facts

  • They also interpret reality and influence the way we understand society

• Researchers who create statistics leave their mark on them

• Population statistics: map the contour of the social world itself and play a role in defining a nation’s concept of itself

• Due to changes in the Western social norms around gender, Person 1 on the census form can now be either a male or female adult

• Statistics describe Indigenous population profiles and geographical distribution as well as their delayed levels of educational achievement, labor market participation, health, and economic status

  • Accepted as straightforward and objective

• Census’ functions

  • Census data is used to calculate funding for Indigenous people

  • Census data can also be used by Indigenous tribes to plan the infrastructure needed to meet tribal government responsibilities

• Statistics do not just describe reality; they create it!

Three Premises

The Cultural Framework of Indigenous Statistics

• Data about Indigenous peoples both reflect and constitute the dominant cultural framework of the nation-state within which they operate

• Official statistics: operate as a powerful truth claim in most modern societies

• Indigenous populations become statistical creations based on aggregate individual-level data rather than real-world concrete groups

• Indigenous statistics are comparatively pejorative, tending toward documentation of difference, deficit, and dysfunction

• Indigenous peoples are constituted as the problem and non-Indigenous ways of life are uncritiqued

Methodologies Produce Indigenous Statistics

• Difference between methods and methodologies!

• Methodology: the active element in constituting the portrait of the realities that statistical techniques eventually create

• Methods: the research method of statistical analysis itself

• For researchers, understanding how statistics are created and deployed is crucial to be able to understand them as social constructions and therefore to be able to create alternatives

Academic Research Is a Situated Activity

• We must be aware and careful of the translation processes through which non-academic knowledge is translated into academia

• Qualitative methodologies: focus on small or localized objectives to examine them more deeply, analyzing subjective experiences with a level of contextualization and depth, often over a long period of time

• Quantitative methodologies: allows researchers to draw information from the local context, standardize it, and, removing it from context, deliver it to a central point of calculation. It tends toward the numerical and it abstracts

  • Helpful to draw conclusions about large numbers of people and broader sets of social relations

  • Problems:

    • Misses the complexity of our social relations in pursuit of broad macro-level patterns

    • Downplays the importance of “place”, central to many expressions of Indigenous people