Toward a Narrative Ethics

Drawing on experience of community-based health research with a First Nation population, I present a case for the incorporation of an ethics grounded in narrative, particularly within Indigenous community-based research (CBR). Viewing conventional bioethics’ emphasis on individual autonomy as increasingly insufficient in grappling with the complexities of research with Indigenous communities, with their often historically, socially, and culturally specific notions of kinship, intersubjectivity, and relationality, I suggest that an ethics of narrative has the potential to respond to a conventional bioethics of autonomy in ways that would be more commensurable with the ethical and lived experiences of Indigenous persons. Drawing on poststructuralist and Indigenous thought, I ultimately argue for the narrative competency to engage with and respond to the stories of sickness and health that may arise from cultural contexts other than those sedimented within Western Euro-American frameworks. Key to this endeavor is attention to and understanding of conceptions of self and community formation as multiple and diverse, marked by porosity and even the potential for ethical failure.