My Research mentor, Dr. William J. Fassbender and I's research was focused on the emergent critiques from Indigenous ontological and epistemological research on New Materialist research in regards to object-orientated ontology, and how we can use the critiques and various discourses to create a more inclusive definition of New Materialism. 

Lorenzo Veracini and Juanita Sundberg are major inspirations in navigating the areas of post-colonialist work and opening my perspectives further into how we can work towards decolonizing our academic fields with intentional techniques and redefining conceptional relationships between established fields.

My research's mode of inquiry was based on conducting a large-scale literature review by using online collaborative annotation software to share notes and annotations on our chosen research articles within a shared space. The main focus of creating this collaborative project was to begin creating a "thesaurus" of indigenous ontologies that can closely relate concepts to current new materialist thought. My mentor and I also met once a week throughout the year to discuss our notes, impressions, and reflections on the articles as well.

What we have initially found is that in New Materialist work, the surrounding sub-fields of Object-orientated Ontology, and even Academia as a whole are structured and ingrained in Settler Colonialism practices and knowledge production. That opportunity for collaboration or acknowledgment is stalled by the long-standing methods of Settler Colonialism's disregard for Indigenous thought, which is seen as "pre-modern" and lacking "sophisticated standards" of traditional Western inquiry practices. The surrounding issue is that Indigenous thought and beliefs have been the main structural underpinnings in the body of research within New Materialism, this relationship has never been acknowledged but rather just recklessly assimilated into bodies of research without any further inquiry or given any citiational acknowledgment into the matter of ontological thought and concepts from the Indigenous perspective.