Boje (2001, p. 10) argues that intertextuality “posits its own antenarrative network, a dialogic conversation among writers and readers of texts…Intertext is a plurality, the polyphony of voices, a veritable textual system that is stereographic.” In this section, I employ intertextuality to highlight antenarrative’s connection to storied Indigenous onto-epistemologies – a connection many advocate for within the qualitative research field (Gone, 2018; Meighan & Hammine, 2026; Kubota & Motha, 2025; Peltier, 2018; Phillips & Bunda, 2018). This connection to Indigenous storytelling can be seen in:
- Boje’s reported interactions with folklore scholars at UCLA while working as a teaching professor at the Management School (Boje, 2006a).
- Boje’s[2] regular citation of Indigenous scholars and their perspectives on storytelling (e.g. Cajete, 2000; TwoTrees, 1997).
- The striking parallels between Boje and Indigenous and Aboriginal scholars’ resistance to the term “narrative” and endorsement of the term “story” (Phillips & Bunda, 2018).
Boje makes frequent reference to scholars of Indigenous storywork, citing them as influential to his theory of storytelling organizations. For instance, he draws from TwoTrees (1997) to discuss storied ontology in relation to:
-A place. ‘You recount stories at this place, and places have their own story.’
–A mind. ‘Every creation, even a story, has a life of its own. We create a story and it has a life. The stories have origins. You must tell a story with permission’ (TwoTrees, 1997; as cited in Boje, 2001, p. 6).
Boje’s recounting of TwoTrees carries important implications for his antenarrative paradigm. First, Indigenous scholarship more readily acknowledges the materiality of storytelling – not just that objects or spatial repertoires contribute to human storytelling (Canagarajah, 2021), but that non-human entities, land, water, and even stories themselves have their own storied life (see Nenquimo & Anderson [2024] for an autobiographical account). Second, Indigenous scholars forefront an ethics of storytelling often undertheorized in narrative inquiry (Dovchin et al., 2026; Meighan & Hammine, 2026). I read TwoTrees’ use of the word “permission” to not only include permission from those to whom the story belongs[3], but rather from the story itself – a perspective that transcends Western humanist conceptualizations of what stories are and who tells them. Boje (2001, p. 6), importantly, also recounts his engagement with Indigenous scholarship not only through close reading of texts, but through dialogue.
The stories live and there are penalties for getting a story wrong or telling it without permission. ‘What is the Lakota penalty for changing a story, telling a story wrong or without permission?’ [Boje] asked at a presentation by TwoTrees [1997]. ‘It is death,’ she replied. ‘Why death? ‘Because, the story in an oral culture is the entire living history of the community’ (Boje, 2001, p. 6; emphasis added).
Furthermore, Indigenous storyways have a clear influence on Boje’s understanding of living story. Boje (2014, p. 70) in fact acknowledges drawing this term from Indigenous scholars like Cajete (2000). In a Foreward to Cajete (2000, p. xii) Leroy Little Bear writes, “Storytelling is a very important aspect of Native America. It is not just the words and the listening but the actual living of the story.”
While Boje clearly cites his sources, we can question the ethics of appropriating Indigenous ways of thinking for Western academic lines of inquiry or pedagogy (Chan, 2021; Lynch & Motha, 2023; Windchief et al., 2018). The influence of many Indigenous scholars on Boje is unmistakable. He frequently analogizes narrative as a prison (Boje, 2006b) – a striking parallel to Indigenous scholars’ skepticism (if not hostility) toward the intellectualized, abstracted, institutional (if not colonial) notion of narrative. Phillips and Bunda (2018), for instance, see an air of pretention and over-intellectualization in narrative as opposed to the embodied, open-ended, grounded nature of story(ing). “Narrative implies a specified genre structure, evoking didactic primary school English classes on how to write a narrative, whereas the invitation of ‘tell me a story’ is a loose and open invitation to speak – to share your life happenings” (p. 4). In contrast, through more mocking language, Phillips and Bunda (p. 4) ask, “Do Aboriginal peoples say, “Come, sit, tell me a narrative?” Good go! The term narrative would be ridiculed and mocked as yet another white concept that has snuck its way in, to colonise, to reconfigure the freedoms inherent within Aboriginal talking spaces.”
Yet while Boje (2001) diligently acknowledges Indigenous scholarship in his development of antenarrative, none of his methodological chapters explicitly center Indigenous scholars or storywork. While Boje seems to emphasize the materiality of storytelling from a conceptual domain, the methods that he proposes (in his early work) are often limited to the textual and the discursive. In some ways, I am sympathetic with this cautious practice. Boje’s writings liberally acknowledge the impact of Indigenous scholarship on his research paradigm. Yet he also shows a hesitancy to lean on Indigenous scholarship to form decolonial or critical arguments. Boje often draws from Marx for such critical structural argumentation (Learmonth, 2004).
I argue that this constitutes a tacit acknowledgement of what Tuck and Yang (2012) calls the “settler move to innocence.” Tuck and Yang argue that within critical scholarship, decolonization has increasingly taken on an abstract and diluted definition that has strayed from its original Indigenous American project: the return of stolen land to Indigenous peoples. They ask scholars to question how “the pursuit of critical consciousness, the pursuit of social justice through a critical enlightenment, can also be settler moves to innocence — diversions, distractions, which relieve the settler of feelings of guilt or responsibility, and conceal the need to give up land or power or privilege” (Tuck & Yang, 2012, p. 10). While Boje shows a clear disdain (if not outright hostility) for late capitalism and its rampant exploitation therein, his positionality within management studies invokes Tuck and Yang’s warning. “Social justice, critical methodologies, or approaches that decenter settler perspectives have objectives that may be incommensurable with decolonization” (Tuck & Yang, 2012, p. 1).
Tuck and Yang’s argument therefore also puts the promotion of antenarrative onto ambiguous ethical footing. I cannot deny the importance of Indigenous scholars toward a theorizing of story — particularly stories connected to land or material ecologies; stories conceptualized beyond the Western logocentrism of textuality and narrative (Cajete, 2000; Chan, 2021). One could argue the ontological turn in many humanities and social science paradigms owes a great unpaid debt to the knowledge of Indigenous and colonized peoples. Yet many narrative inquiry projects do not directly engage with Indigenous communities as participants or co-researchers.
I, therefore, am yet to land on definitive answers to this ethical conundrum. Though I do urge readers to see Windchief et al. (2018) and Gone (2018) for a rich dialogue of Indigenous researchers’ perspective on the use of Indigenous epistemologies in academic research. For me, such a connection remains an ongoing tension between the acknowledgement of the irreversible influence of Indigenous thought on Boje’s (and by extension my own) thinking about storytelling, while also recognizing storytelling as not exclusive to Indigenous and Aboriginal peoples. Yet Chan (2021, p. 173) also calls researchers to “recognise that Western and Indigenous epistemologies are different in philosophy, ideology, and method…[Differences] that challenge both Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars and researchers to find a balance and work with insider-outsider relationships to the research.”
This is what makes such an acknowledgement so complex. The idea of where storytelling activities across diverse cultural cosmologies converge or diverge is not always delineable. And from the perspective of antenarrative and living story, any inscribed boundary is always renegotiated and at times even dissolved. For this reason, I also choose to refrain from discussing the critical, transformative, or decolonial potential of antenarrative storytelling – at least from my own locus of enunciation, thereby heeding Kubota and Motha’s (2025, p. 691) call to exercise “situated ethics.” For as Archibald (in Archibald & Parent, 2019, p. 16) warns, “People may have access to our stories but not know what to do with them.”
This leaves several critical questions for readers: Of the thinkers who influence your conceptual stalwarts, which ones strike problematic chords when put into reflexive relation? How do we, as thinkers, think with a diverse chorus of other thinkers while also attending to the entangled material positionalities engendered through those relations[4]? And how do we do so without siloing ourselves into fragmented, essentializing, closed discourse communities?
[1] Anonymous reviewers argue that this movement opens a layer of complexity that does not close. They also both marked it as raising “important ethical questions” and being “intellectually important.” I felt sad, however, that this section raised no sense of feeling among reviewers – particularly due to the sensitivity of this issue. I therefore left this section mostly intact as a provocation to scholars who either (1) have read little to no scholarly papers on Indigenous storytelling or (2) problematize my argument in order to (3) expose a liminal gulf between the field’s goal of centering Indigenous ways of knowing through published scholarship, the call for readers to engage with such scholarship, and the reality that many researchers do not conduct research with Indigenous communities.
[2] I also problematize Boje’s coining of the abbreviation indigenous ways of knowing (IWOK) in contradistinction with Western ways of knowing (WWOK; Boje & Rosile, 2020). While I read Boje as ahead of his time by conversing with Indigenous scholars through his long career at New Mexico State University, I read the coining of abbreviations as a step too far. This “step too far” stems not from his engagement, but his coinage of “novel” terms based on such engagement. I see the ethics of engaging with published scholarship on Indigenous onto-epistemologies as an emergent conversation in Western academic spaces. I therefore write this not to provide a definitive ethical playbook. I am still navigating these ethics myself — a self who neither identifies as an Indigenous scholar nor researches with Indigenous communities. Yet I still want to take seriously the onto-epistemological implications of the emerging significance of Indigenous research on narrative inquiry and applied linguistics. I want to, in other words, cite the works of Indigenous scholars to “twist [Applied Linguistics’] neck so it will look hard at itself” (Phillips & Bunda, 2018, p. xiii).
[3] Goffman (1974) calls this participant the principal.
[4] Or as Glissant writes with hope, “No longer would the sacrifice of a propitiating, or victim-hero be required; for we are able to untangle this web, pondering it together and recognizing ourselves side by side within it […] We will look straight at the sacred, the assumed order in the disorder of Relation, without being stricken with awe.” (Glissant, 1997, p. 55).#AntenarrativeTheory #IndigenousStorywork #QualitativeMethodology #DecolonialResearch #AppliedLinguistics
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