As you develop and grow as a student, a scientist and a scholar, it’s important to reflect on your citational practices. Whose knowledge contributions are you including in your scholarship and citing? Are you only citing famous, established scholars and ignoring emerging and/or diverse voices? Recognizing Indigenous oral tradition as a way of knowing and reproducing knowledge is an important part of decolonizing scholarship.

Citing Indigenous Elders and Knowledge Keepers 

While the official APA citation style guide provides guidelines for citing Indigenous Elders and Knowledge Keepers as personal communication, NorQuest College has developed the following templates for citing Indigenous Elders and Knowledge Keepers (CC BY-NC 4.0) in the spirit of wahkôhtowin and reconciliation, and we thank them for sharing their template.

For information on the development of these templates and how to use them in practice, please see: Lorisia MacLeod (2021). More Than Personal Communication: Templates for Citing Indigenous Elders and Knowledge Keepers. KULA: Knowledge Creation, Dissemination, and Preservation Studies 5, no. 1. https://doi.org/10.18357/kula.135.

For more information on citation politics and relations, see X̱wi7x̱wa Library’s citing page, from which this practice guidance has been copied. For example, the Critical Indigenous Research Toolkit created in 2021 by Xwi7xwa Library staff in collaboration with staff at other UBC libraries provides background about UBC projects related to Critical Indigenous Literacy.

Unlike other personal communications, Elders and Knowledge Keepers should be cited in-text and in the References list.

In-text Citation

For example:

Delores Cardinal described the nature of the… (2004).

OR

The nature of the place was… (Cardinal, 2004).

Corresponding References List Entry Format

For example:

Cardinal, D., Goodfish Lake Cree Nation. Treaty 6. Lives in Edmonton. Oral teaching. personal communication. April 4, 2004.

Note: If you would like to approach an Elder or Knowledge Keeper for teachings, remember to follow protocol or if you are unsure what their protocol is, please ask them ahead of time.

Adaptations

Material in this section has been adapted from Decolonizing Citations by Bronwen McKie, University of British Columbia. Centre for Teaching, Learning and Technology, licensed by Creative Commons-Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 and Xwi7xwa – Distance Research by Xwi7xwa Library, licensed by Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License and APA Citation Style Guide by UBC Library, licensed by Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.

References

Justice, D. H. (2018). Why Indigenous Literatures Matter. Wilfrid Laurier University Press.

APA Citation Style Guide. (November 23, 2021). UBC Library. https://guides.library.ubc.ca/apacitationstyle/indigenousknowledge 

Lorisia MacLeod. (2021). “More Than Personal Communication: Templates for Citing Indigenous Elders and Knowledge Keepers.” KULA: Knowledge Creation, Dissemination, and Preservation Studies 5, no. 1. https://doi.org/10.18357/kula.135

McKie, B. (2020, October 22). Decolonizing Citations. University of British Columbia. Centre for Teaching, Learning, and Technology. http://dx.doi.org/10.14288/1.0396037

Xwi7xwa – Distance Research. (March 4, 2022). UBC Library. https://guides.library.ubc.ca/distance-research-xwi7xwa