Spiritual Exchange: A Methodology for a Living Inquiry With All Our Relations

Abstract

Brought to life by an exchange with a crocus, we respond to our challenges with methodologies that privilege cognitive ways of theorizing and sharing together. As a Michif (Metis) woman and a woman of White settler descent, we engage in a layered dialogue across cultural understandings—what we call a spiritual exchange —guided by ethical relationality and the teachings of Spirit Gifting. The spiritual exchange offers a process to make meaning of experiences and to collaborate in ways that help us generate and live out ethical relationships. We question: How can we proceed in ways that might rehumanize the research process and honor the living earth? How might research look and feel if stories of respect, love, reciprocity, and responsibility were at the center? In this article, we offer an inquiry process that honors the act of study from an Indigenous sensibility, the multiplicity of kinetic and relational knowing, and the reanimation of the more-than-human.