Relationality
Journal Entry: Week 5
This week, after reading Shawn Wilson’s Research Is Ceremony: Indigenous Research Methods, I found myself deeply stirred by the question: What does an Indigenous mode of research mean when studying community resilience? Wilson writes that, throughout his work with Indigenous communities, many have emphasized that a “relational way of being” lies at the heart of Indigenous identity. For Indigenous peoples, identity is not a singular, internal construct—it is grounded in relationships: with the land, with ancestors who have returned to the land, and with future generations who will also come into being through it.
Rather than seeing ourselves as individuals in relationship with others or the environment, Wilson writes that we are the relationships we hold and participate in.
As someone shaped by urban living and the rational structures of the Western sociological tradition, I paused. How do we—modern researchers, trained to distill, observe, and categorize—come close to grasping this kind of relational ontology?
But then, I thought—no, I do know what this means. I’ve lived it before.
Much like the framework I reflected on in last week’s entry—Presence–Connect–Play—I’ve come to know relationality intimately through community dance practice. The dance floor has long been my site for understanding complex intersections: of trust, care, interdependence, and timing. When we move together, we build relationships through our bodies, through space, and through rhythm. The connections are not theoretical—they are lived, felt, and constantly evolving.
Wilson’s visualization stayed with me:
"Imagine that you are a single point of light. Not like a light bulb, or even a star, but an infinitely small, intense point of light in an area of otherwise total darkness or void. Now in the darkness of this void, another point of light becomes visible... You form a relationship with that other point of light, and it is as though an infinitely thin thread now runs between you and the other..."
As more lights emerge and relationships form, a web begins to take shape—not just around you, but as you. Slowly, these threads become your physical body. Other lights form their webs, and those too take shape, until the world itself becomes visible—not as isolated objects, but as dense knots of connection, history, and context.
This metaphor rearranged something in me. It reminds me that everything I see and touch—every place I research or hope to understand—is already a thick knot of relationships: from the past, present, and future. And I, too, am one of those knots.
Wilson concludes:
"Our reality, our ontology, is the relationships. This is our epistemology. Thinking of the world as a web of connections and relationships. Nothing could be without being in relationship, without its context."
In that light, to study community resilience is not to measure outputs or isolate variables. It is to witness a living web—one built across time, space, and being. To research is to relate, and to relate is to become.
