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Ethics for Indigenous peoples come from ancestral knowledge, from the ways we exist in creation and the ways that we are urged to respond to the whole of creation. As people grown from ancestors who we believe are always with us, we look to our own teachings to strengthen our ethics of living, being and undertaking research. These teachings still speak to us through chants, songs, stories and many other forms of belief. This chapter outlines Māori beliefs and the power of Māori belief by examining how ancestors continue to inform and speak. Research ethics are assumed to reside within a living human world, but Māori ethics includes both the seen and unseen worlds. These beliefs create a powerful challenge to the notion of sovereignty and offer powerful counterhegemonic views to racism and exploitative regimes of power. They also inform the ways that we understand ethical approaches to all our relations in the world.

This chapter looks at what it means to set out to do anthropological research with tangata whenua (New Zealanders of Māori descent; literally, ‘people of the land’), from the particular perspective of a Pākehā (New Zealander of non-Māori descent – usually European) musical anthropologist with an interest in sound-made worlds. In late 2017, Lowe was awarded funding for a conjoint PhD scholarship in anthropology at James Cook University, Australia, and Aarhus University, Denmark. However, following advice from several colleagues in Aotearoa New Zealand, Lowe decided to assess the viability of the project with his prospective Māori and non-Māori collaborators prior to officially starting his PhD candidature. Throughout this process of pre-ethics (Barrett, 2016), Lowe met with both Māori and non-Māori to discuss the proposed PhD project; a ‘listening in’ to his own socio-historical positioning as a Pākehā anthropologist within contemporary Aotearoa New Zealand. This approach to anthropological research is in response to George (2017), who argues for a new politically and ethnically aware mode of anthropology that aims to (re)establish relationships of true meaning between anthropology and Māori in Aotearoa New Zealand.

This chapter provides an overview of the volume, beginning with anecdotes from the editors. These anecdotes demonstrate the range of issues facing Indigenous scholars and researchers who choose to work with Indigenous participants and/or communities. Reference is made to Indigenous research sovereignty, honouring the immense work undertaken by previous Indigenous scholars, enabling many today to work effectively with their own people as well as other Indigenous groups. This is considered a courageous act, given the vulnerability this opens Indigenous peoples up to in terms of the change that is engendered and the criticism from external non-Indigenous researchers that has often arisen. The organisation of the volume into three parts is discussed, and this chapter ends with synopses of the following 16 chapters.