Indigenous Studies Editing and Proofreading Services

A study is completed, published behind a paywall, and cited for a decade. The community whose knowledge it rests on was interviewed, thanked in the acknowledgements, and never sent the findings. Nobody behaved badly at any single step. The research was still extractive, and the paper's own methods section is where that could have been prevented or made plain.

We edit what researchers working with Indigenous communities and in Indigenous studies write — protocol and governance sections, community agreements and research agreements, ethics applications and their community components, oral history and knowledge documentation, land, treaty and rights research, language revitalisation work, policy submissions and reports to communities, and theses, articles and funding applications. Our editors work on the protocol section and what it commits to.

The protocol section is where a paper shows whether the research was done with a community or on one, and its failure is a consent paragraph that describes a signature rather than a relationship. Consent, ownership and return of findings are separate commitments and each needs stating. We work through these so consent is described at the level it was given — individual, family, council, or a formally constituted governance body — with who had authority to give it and how that was determined; so ownership of the material is stated as agreed, since data and knowledge held by a community under its own protocols cannot be described as the researcher's dataset; so restrictions on use, publication and reuse are recorded as they were agreed rather than summarised as approval; so the return of findings is described as a plan with a form and a date, because a paper in a journal is not a return of findings to anyone; so knowledge attributed to a person or family is credited as they wish, given that anonymisation can itself be a form of erasure and should be a choice; so any material subject to seasonal, ceremonial or gender-based restriction is handled as instructed and the handling noted without disclosing the content; and so benefits and authorship are described as they were allocated. Writing like this can be shown to the community it concerns.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including unpublished research, community material and knowledge subject to restriction. We are editors rather than Indigenous studies scholars or community representatives, and we offer no view on protocols, rights or the substance of any claim. What we can do is make the commitments in your protocol section explicit.