Indian Time, Walking as Mapping, and Decolonial Methodologies in Mixteco Geographies

There has been an emerging shift by Indigenous geographers and non-Indigenous researchers to integrate decolonial methodologies into research protocols to challenge the Western Cartesian production of geographic knowledge across Native and Indigenous geographies. The commitment of geographic research with Indigenous communities must be to engage in a methodology guided by Indigenous temporality and Indigenous autonomous governance structures that allow the emergence of decolonial possibilities. This article extends the use of a decolonial research approach with Indigenous communities by applying it to Oaxaca, Mexico, in an Indigenous Mixteco municipality. I use a series of salient narratives from my field work in the summer of 2022 in a pueblo Mixteco to inform a decolonial method that engages with Indigenous normative governance structure (Altamirano-Jimenez 2020), "Indian time" (Blackwell 2023a) or Indigenous temporality (Curley and Smith 2024), and walking as map-making (Sletto et al. 2021) to suggest a decolonial Mixteco methodology with pueblos Mixtecos of Oaxaca, Mexico. I suggest that it is our responsibility as researchers, whether Indigenous or non-Indigenous, to uphold Indigenous governance across these differing temporalities and geographies, even once we leave the "field site" when dependent on Western academic timelines.