Methodology Matters: Designing a Pilot Study Guided by Indigenous Epistemologies

Indigenous individuals and communities have experienced historic and ongoing negative interactions with Western health care and biomedical research. To rebuild trust and mitigate power structures between researchers and Indigenous peoples, researchers can adopt Indigenous epistemologies in methodologies, such as nonhierarchical approaches to relationship. This article shares models developed to bridge Indigenous epistemologies with Western qualitative and quantitative research methods and demonstrates how these epistemologies can be used to guide the authors' development of a pilot study on traumatic spinal cord injury.