Book Title: Insights for Indigenous Evaluation

Book Description

Insights for Indigenous Evaluation is an invitation into the heart of a field that is transforming how we understand knowledge, value, and impact. Edited by Dr. Gladys Rowe, this collection grows out of Indigenous Insights: An Evaluation Podcast and gathers conversations with Indigenous evaluators, scholars, knowledge keepers, and community leaders across Turtle Island, Hawai’i, and Aotearoa. Together, their voices reveal Indigenous evaluation as a living, relational, and strengths-based practice that resists colonial frameworks and offers pathways toward resurgence and decolonial futures.

Unlike conventional evaluation, which often imposes top-down frameworks and deficit-based measures, Indigenous evaluation centers community values, relationships, reciprocity, and accountability. It asks different questions: Who defines success? Whose voices shape priorities? How do evaluations strengthen community wellbeing, self-determination, and healing? In these conversations, evaluation emerges not as a technical exercise, but as ceremony, story, and responsibility that is deeply tied to land, ancestors, and future generations.

The book is structured as a bundle of insights: eight long-form interviews and seven excerpts are interwoven with reflective commentary and discussion prompts. Each chapter highlights a different perspective, spanning health, education, governance, and community organizing. Contributors include established leaders and emerging evaluators from many Nations alongside allies and collaborators. Their stories illuminate a wide spectrum of Indigenous evaluation practices, from grassroots community-led approaches to academic and institutional contexts, while confronting tensions between communities, funders, and research systems.

Key touchstones include: long-term relationships, data sovereignty and ownership, the role of spirit and ceremony, and the transformative potential of storytelling, art, and Indigenous knowledge systems. Rather than prescribing a single framework, Insights for Indigenous Evaluation emphasizes plurality, nuance, and the “ethical space” of dialogue – what Cree scholar Willie Ermine describes as the place where diverse ways of knowing meet with integrity.

Accessible in tone and story-rich in content, the book is suitable for a wide audience: students and instructors in social work, public health, and Indigenous studies; policymakers and funders seeking to better understand Indigenous perspectives; and community members who want to see their practices reflected and valued. It complements existing texts on Indigenous research by focusing squarely on evaluation as a site of change, learning, and resurgence.

At once practical and visionary, Insights for Indigenous Evaluation is both a resource and a ceremony – one that invites readers into relationship, challenges assumptions, and opens possibilities for evaluation that honours Indigenous peoples, lands, and futures.