Call for Papers

Special Issue of the Canadian Journal of Indigenous Studies

Matrilineal Indigenous Methodologies: Sovereign Knowledge Through the Mother’s Line

Guest Editor: Dr Jessa Rogers (Wiradjuri) — Associate Professor and Associate Dean (Indigenous), Faculty of Education, University of Melbourne; ARC DECRA Fellow

Journal: Canadian Journal of Indigenous Studies (CJIS), University of Winnipeg — open access, no author fees

Key Dates

• Abstract / proposal submission deadline: September 2026
• Decision on abstracts: October 2026
• Full manuscript submission deadline: January 2027
• Peer review and revisions: May 2027
• Anticipated publication: Vol 3.2 Fall 2027

Abstracts of up to 250 words (including a working title and intended stream) should be sent to jessa.rogers@unimelb.edu.au by the deadline above.

Invited contributors will submit full manuscripts via the CJIS Online Journal System (OJS).

Overview

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.

The collection advances two key interventions. First, it shows that matrilineal kinship is a methodological structure that shapes authority, accountability, relationality, ceremony, and research positioning. Second, it opens comparative dialogue between matrilineal nations whose methodological traditions have too often developed in isolation, including Wiradjuri, Haudenosaunee clan-mother systems, Akan abusua-grounded research, Khasi and Garo women’s knowledge practices, and Bribri cosmologies.

At a time when Indigenous methodologies are increasingly formalised in disciplinary handbooks, articulating matrilineal methodologies is urgent. Without this specificity, they risk being absorbed into universalised frameworks that reproduce colonial patriarchal assumptions within Indigenous scholarship itself.

Rather than fixing the meaning of “matrilineal,” this Special Issue holds the concept open. We welcome contributions that interrogate, extend, or unsettle the term through research practice, Indigenous languages, lived experience, and methodological reflection, including from Melanesian contexts such as Papua New Guinea, Vanuatu, and the Solomon Islands.

This issue also contributes to Indigenous feminist scholarship by beginning from sovereignty rather than absence or recovery. It foregrounds Indigenous women as epistemic authorities whose knowledge systems are grounded in their own relational orders, not derivative of Western feminist theory or institutional validation.

Why CJIS

CJIS is uniquely positioned to host this conversation. Its requirement for author positionality aligns with the central premise of this issue: that a researcher’s relationship to knowledge is constitutive, not incidental.

Its multi-stream structure—scholarly articles, Indigenous stories and language, artistic practice, and book reviews—enables matrilineal methodologies to appear in the forms through which they are held and transmitted: narrative, language, ceremony, art, and scholarship.

Proposed Topics and Themes

We welcome contributions that engage, extend, or critically rework the following areas:

Matrilineal Foundations

• Matrilineal systems as methodological ground
• Clan, kin, and Grandmother authority in research design
• Reading colonial archives through matrilineal Lore
• Matrilineal sovereignty as methodological standpoint

Matrilineal Methodologies in Practice

• Senior women and matrilineal authority in research
• Accountability, ethics, and governance structures
• Body, embodiment, and the matrilineal archive
• Language revitalisation and women’s linguistic sovereignty
• Men’s research within matrilineal frameworks

Creative and Story-Based Methodologies

• Indigenous women’s storywork as methodology
• Weaving, song, dance, collage, photowork, and ceremony as research practice
• Visual art and the matrilineal archive
• Grandmother–Granddaughter knowledge transmission as method

Streams and Submission Requirements

This Special Issue welcomes submissions across all CJIS streams. Please indicate your intended stream when submitting your abstract.

Indigenous Stories and Language

• Narrative or story-based works centred on Indigenous ways of knowing
• Up to 1,500 words
• Author biography (100 words) and community connection statement (200 words)

Artistic Practices and Visual Culture

• Reviews of visual art, performance, exhibition, or film (up to 1,500 words), or
• Artworks, performance documentation, or film stills with artist statement (up to 150 words)
• Author biography (100 words) and community connection statement (200 words)

Book Reviews

• Up to 1,500 words
• Reviews of works on Indigenous matrilineal methodologies or related fields
• Must include summary, thematic discussion, and critical analysis
• Author biography (100 words) and community connection statement (200 words)

All submissions must be:

• Single-spaced, 12-point font
• Italics used instead of underlining
• Figures and tables embedded within the text
• Submitted in Microsoft Word, OpenOffice, or RTF format

Scholarly Articles

• Up to 8,000 words
• Abstract up to 100 words
• Discipline-appropriate referencing style (APA, MLA, Chicago, etc.)

Positionality and Review Process

In keeping with CJIS practice, all submissions must include an explicit positionality statement within the introduction, reflecting on identity, social location, and cultural background, and how these shape the research and its findings. This requirement is central to the Special Issue.

All scholarly submissions undergo double-anonymous peer review. Authors must remove identifying information from the manuscript, references, footnotes, and file properties. Self-citations should use “Author” and year. Submissions must not be previously published or under review elsewhere.

How to Submit

1. Submit an abstract (up to 250 words), including a working title and intended stream, to jessa.rogers@unimelb.edu.au by the deadline.
2. Selected authors will be invited to submit full manuscripts via the CJIS Online Journal System (OJS).
3. Submissions will proceed through CJIS peer review in collaboration with the Guest Editor and journal editors.

Enquiries

• Special Issue enquiries: jessa.rogers@unimelb.edu.au
• General CJIS editorial enquiries: CJIS@uwinnipeg.ca

As an open-access journal, CJIS is committed to Indigenous scholarship and diverse ways of knowing, and particularly encourages submissions from Indigenous scholars, Knowledge Holders, and emerging researchers.