**1. Introduction**

With rising awareness of climate change, there are increasing scholarly and governmental focuses on Indigenous and local communities' knowledges as sources for resilience [1–3]. While this long-overdue recognition is important, academic and institutional players in climate change adaptation and policy research too easily assume privilege and discretion belongs only to them and is not available to marginalized Indigenous groups. It is, perhaps, unsurprising that methodological approaches to reflect and respond to ethical engagement with Indigenous peoples are not well developed in scholarly research [4]. How to ethically involve Indigenous peoples, and even acknowledge Indigenous peoples' leadership in research demands more actions from governments and academia. Much more careful, respectful and humble attention is required if academic, policy and development practice is to address the significant capacity deficits [5] in academic and institutional settings. This paper is based on geographical and ethnographic research methods and personal experiences over the course of time as an academic while I engage with literatures in an Indigenous context (for interviewees list please see the Appendix A). Research methods adopted include participatory observation, in-depth interview and mental mapping. Drawing on geographical fieldwork with Indigenous *Tayal* people in northern Taiwan, this paper argues that understanding human-environmental relationships, natural disaster, adaptive responses and societal resilience through engagement with *Tayal* ontologies provides valuable guidance in developing decolonizing methodologies for climate change adaptation research and policy development. The *Tayal* people are an Indigenous group with a population of 92,306 as of April 2020 [6] who dwell in mountainous area, northern Taiwan (the total Taiwanese population is 23,829,964 as of October 2020). They are one of the sixteen Indigenous groups recognized by the national government in the Republic of China (ROC) in Taiwan. This paper reflects on engagement with *Tayal* people, and it mobilizes three key concepts–Country, ontological pluralism and situated

resilience—as a foundation for responding to the need to think outside the conventional frameworks of already-colonized thinking that privileges state, academic and global institutional thinking over local and Indigenous understandings of current circumstances. Through critical reflections, this paper aims to provide methodological principles that will better engage Indigenous peoples in resilience research and policy.
