Special Issue of the Canadian Journal of Indigenous Studies Matrilineal Indigenous Methodologies: Sovereign Knowledge Through the Mother’s Line
This Special Issue centres Indigenous matrilineal methodologies: ways of knowing grounded in kinship, ceremony, language, Country, and the sovereign authority of Indigenous women. Across nations including the Wiradjuri, Haudenosaunee, Tlingit, Hopi, Bribri, Akan, Asante, Khasi, Garo, Minangkabau, Mosuo, and Trobriand Islanders, knowledge is produced through matrilineal structures in which women are custodians, authorities, and producers of knowledge.
Despite this, Indigenous research methodology has often overlooked matrilineal foundations, instead privileging inherited colonial and ethnographic framings or universalised accounts of “Indigenous methodology” that can obscure gendered and kin-based epistemologies.
This Special Issue brings together scholarly, narrative, linguistic, and artistic contributions that articulate matrilineal methodologies as living systems of knowledge. It approaches the matrilineal not as an object of study, but as a methodological ground from which sovereign knowledge is generated.