For, With, and By Mob: Nothing About Us Without Us

‘Research is probably one of the dirtiest words in the Indigenous world’s vocabulary’ states seminal scholar Professor Linda Tuhiwai Smith. In recent years Academia has increasingly aimed to redefine its relationship with First Peoples away from extractive and harmful legacies, recasting First Peoples in leadership and collaborator roles as researchers rather than always the researched. Protocols, guidelines, and procedures have been developed to ensure that academic ‘First Peoples Research’ is undertaken in a manner that prevents harm and promotes academic rigour. However, much research on First Peoples continues to be designed, lead and authored by non-Indigenous scholars, resulting in best circumstances research that misses out on First People’s expertise and insight, and in the worst examples research that mischaracterises, misinterprets, plagiarises, and misleads the discipline. This article is motivated by the ongoing and illegitimate assumptions regarding First Peoples made by academic institutions, journals, ethics committees, and researchers, especially in the business, management, and economics disciplines. This article serves as a refutation of this anti-empiricism. With a focus on the business and economics disciplines we argue that First Peoples of the Australian continent have a long history of entrepreneurship, trade and commerce that predates the oft cited theorists by millennia, yet First Peoples’ knowledges in these disciplines are too often sidelined, ignored, and fundamentally misinterpreted. As a collective of First Peoples and non-Indigenous academics working in these disciplines, we write this article to defend the territory of First Peoples business, management and economics. We provide a discussion of the decades of work from seminal First Peoples scholars who have carved out the research area of First Peoples entrepreneurship, business, management and economics, a refutation of repeated recent examples of deficit-laden research practices, and a pathway forward for academics and journals in recognising valuable First Peoples research that is for, with and by Mob. Terminology The authors of this paper are First Peoples, representing but a fraction of the diversity among our respective Nations numbering more than 650 sovereignties, in conjunction with non-Indigenous academics who have willing made a stance with us. Working across Indigenous and non-Indigenous standpoints, but led by the First Peoples authors’ perspectives, we draw a line in the sand to the extractivism of this Eurocentrically laden knowledge production which is the antitheses of nothing about us without us. Our preferred nomenclature is to utilise First Peoples. Where the literatures identify First Peoples in other ways, excluding direct quotations and naming protocols, providing the meaning and intent remains unaltered, we utilise First Peoples as an act of intellectual self-determination and academic activism. JEL Classification: B0, N0, P0