It Just Works Better

Overview

The Interview

Gladys Rowe: Tansi, greetings. I’m excited to share space today with Dr. JoLee Sasakamoose. She is an Anishinaabe Associate Professor in Educational Psychology and Counselling at the University of Regina. She is an Indigenous methodologist who utilizes community- and participatory-based research approaches, showing up with a strength-based trauma-informed decolonizing lens to engage Indigenous peoples in defining health and healthy communities. She explores the intergenerational effects of historical trauma and traditional healing methods as protective factors with Indigenous peoples. She utilizes neuro-decolonization, contemplative mind-body practices in the promotion of health. She has received funding from many national institutes and has worked in collaboration with First Nation communities. She co-authored the Indigenous cultural responsiveness theory to direct research that improves the health of Indigenous peoples in Saskatchewan.

Good morning, JoLee. So good to have you here!

JoLee Sasakamoose: Thank you for inviting me. It’s good to be here.

Gladys: Great. Before we begin, I wondered if you wanted to start with a brief intro to who you are and where you’re showing up from.

JoLee: Sure. My name is JoLee Sasakamoose, and I’m sitting in Treaty Four in Regina, Saskatchewan, right now in the freezing cold weather and snow. <laughs> I work in treaty areas Four and Six, and I’m also from Ontario and Michigan, so I’m from all over really.

Gladys: So many places to call home. I’ve definitely experienced that, too. Can we start with you telling us about how you came into the work of Indigenous evaluation?

JoLee: Sure, I started doing evaluation work in 1988, which was – I calculated this morning – over 30 years ago. I was a freshman in college when my mentor, Eva Menefee (she’s Oneida) brought me on as a counsellor in the Michigan Indian Leadership Program, which was a program that brought youth from out of community into Michigan State University for a week in the summer to expose them to culture and college enrichment skills. My first evaluation experience was just out of curiosity doing an evaluation of students and counsellors to see what their experience was like. And then each year it got more robust, and eventually around 2002 it became the topic of my dissertation, which was a much more comprehensive evaluation experience. I would not have probably even gone into a PhD program or been interested in research if it hadn’t been for that experience as a freshman in college seeing what research could do. I don’t know that I would’ve defined it as Indigenous evaluation back then, but it certainly was an evaluation of an Indigenous-run and -founded program, and the evaluation was created by us. But it was certainly Western in that it was a pre-test/post-test design survey. Even though we created the questions for it, it was still modelled on a very Western approach.

Gladys: Yeah, I’ve been reflecting lately in my conversations and work about the progression of what Indigenous evaluation means, and what it could look like as we think about working towards sovereignty or self-determination, and how it has shifted our ability to do work that’s important to our communities. To you, what does it mean to be an Indigenous evaluation practitioner?

JoLee: So I definitely am a practitioner of Indigenous evaluation, but I don’t necessarily define myself that way. I define myself as a community-based health researcher, and evaluation is often a component of the work that I do. I try to bring in health interventions and then evaluate those interventions that are happening, but I’m often brought in to other evaluations or research experiences where I’m asked to lend my expertise in different ways. I could be called in at the creation stage where I help to co-create the program design as well as the evaluation with community. Or I could be called in at the end after data’s collected so I can lend an Indigenous lens to it. So for me, I see the skillset that Indigenous evaluators bring as having multiple opportunities to intervene or disrupt or influence the evaluation experience.

Gladys: Wonderful. I love how you frame Indigenous evaluation as one of the many things that you can bring into spaces. Your way of working is showing up in community and offering the knowledge and the skills and the expertise, and some of that is Indigenous evaluation.

JoLee: I’ve been contacted by communities to come in. One community a few years ago asked me to come in and do a SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats) analysis of their family services unit, but SWOT analysis makes us cringe when we hear it. And so I thought, Why would a First Nation community want a SWOT analysis? Then I called back and started having a conversation with them, and I realized they’re trained in a Western way like many of us, and they don’t know that there are other options available. I was able to explain, Hey, we still might be able to get at the SWOT, but we could do it in a way that has much more relevance to who you are as a community and as a people. Sometimes Indigenous evaluation is simply supporting community or the group to understand that there are different ways, that we don’t always have to follow that Western approach.

“I know that sometimes people pooh-pooh quantitative data, but if you’re working in a community that, say, has to do something with water contamination or something that’s more scientific and they need quantitative data, then you need to be able to manage that as well.”
_{– JoLee}But then we also are cautious. If funding comes from a certain body, a government body that requires things to be done a certain way, then sometimes I have to enact that two-eyed seeing approach. You have to do the best of both worlds. You have to meet the needs of both. I know that sometimes people pooh-pooh quantitative data, but if you’re working in a community that, say, has to do something with water contamination or something that’s more scientific and they need quantitative data, then you need to be able to manage that as well. For me it’s not about the type of data; if we’re late in the stage of adding Indigenous components, what can we do to decolonize at this point in the stage of the game, if at all? Sometimes it’s looking at data that’s already been collected and maybe looking at it from a strength-based lens instead of a deficit-based lens. I think there are just so many things that an Indigenous evaluator can bring no matter what stage of the game that they come in.

Gladys: Definitely. We don’t know what we don’t know, and communities don’t know what they don’t know. And so often bringing in a new perspective or disrupting that Western perspective is important. And also, I appreciate you noting that quantitative data doesn’t have to be something that we can’t work with; we can work with the intention behind it and it can inform Indigenous community priorities and support our own self-determination. And so if we’re talking about something like water quality – like you said, that’s such an important topic for Indigenous communities – how do we advocate and build evidence to support a change in that area?

JoLee: Right, exactly.

Gladys: I’d love to hear, based on your 30-plus years of experience, what you think Indigenous evaluation could look like from design to implementation to end, in an ideal environment?

JoLee: The closest that I would say that I’ve participated in would be a program several years ago with the Provincial Area of Transition Houses, known as PATHs, our domestic violence shelter system. Someone reached out to me as an Indigenous scholar and asked me if I would help them co-design a domestic violence therapeutic program and create the evaluation piece for the program because I’m also a counsellor by training. In hindsight, I think that’s probably the closest I’ve gotten. And the reason I say that is because from the moment we started developing we had involvement from what I often refer to as peers. These are people with the same social determinants of health, people with lived experience, peers with lived experience. So women who had domestic violence experience were co-creating alongside Elders, scholars like myself, Indigenous scholars, trauma-informed therapists, and we all were together designing a 13-week group counselling intervention that was done from a cultural-based perspective.

And that intervention happened in three cities here in Saskatchewan on three separate occasions. We had nine groups over a two-year period, and then they had to be evaluated. Those evaluations consisted of quantitative measures, pre-test and post-test, as well as focus groups and interviews at the one-year mark after the program ended. It was very comprehensive. It was Western and Indigenous. And the reason I say it was Western as well is because it was funded by the Public Health Agency of Canada, and this funder wanted to make sure that we had some standard measures of practice, such as scales of anxiety, scales of depression, those types of measures. But with my lens, I was able to do two things. As someone who advocates for strength-based approaches, I was able to say, Okay, if we use these deficit-based measures, we will also use strength-based measures, post-traumatic growth scales, quality of life scales, cultural connectedness scales, and then we will speak to that when we do dissemination.

And when we explain why we’ve chosen both measures, I think it’s important to say, I am consciously choosing a deficit-based measure in this case and here’s why, rather than making that choice and not explaining yourself. And then of course I don’t think quantitative data alone is ever enough, which is why I’m a mixed methods researcher. Contextualizing data within story is very, very important. So that’s where the qualitative components and focus groups come in. And we even had some arts-based data collection as well. I think that it was beyond Indigenous, in terms of having Western approaches and Western researchers involved, but it was also decolonized to the extent that we could be since it was also positioned within the academy.

The other thing I would say is that it also included ceremonies. When we were working with the Elders, we got to a point in our experience together where they said, Okay, we’re ready to develop this program, but we want to go into ceremony, and we wanted to ask the ancestors for a name. And so that component happened and we had the name nato’ we ho win come out of it. Also, there’s a website you can look at, and you can see the difference in the output. Typically dissemination in a Western framework can be peer-reviewed journal articles that help the faculty or the scholar’s career. But this dissemination was really at the community level. We created a manual that could be locally adapted by any community. We created reports that were at the level of agencies, organizations.

Of course there were also peer-reviewed articles that are starting to come out now. But it was really about making sure that the dissemination, the pieces that come out of it, supported the women, making sure that we took the findings back to the women before they were reproduced in any way, to get their feedback and to ensure that their voice was heard. That was a five-year program. That’s the most robust that I’ve seen. It happened, it was well funded, it had a large team, a hybrid of Western and Indigenous Elders. I don’t know if you’d ever have just a solid Indigenous-only evaluation. I don’t know if that’s possible in this Westernized world, but certainly this was the closest I’ve seen.

Gladys: Wow, that sounds like amazing work. There’s so many pieces that highlight the ways that values and principles are central to Indigenous evaluation practice. For example, you talked about inclusion of people with lived experiences from the beginning, and Knowledge Keepers identifying the time when they need to go into ceremony. I’m wondering if you could talk about the incorporation of values central to your practice and share examples of those in action.

JoLee: Sure. So now I actually have a framework that I operate from. It’s called the Cultural Responsiveness Framework. I believe it was in around 2015, the 74 First Nations communities of Saskatchewan (Métis weren’t included) were consulted by the Federation of Sovereign Indigenous Nations, which is FSIN, our governing body here. And they came up with a Cultural Responsiveness Framework and it was a public, tangible document. It spoke to ways in which those First Nations communities of Saskatchewan wanted things to be taken up. And then they approached me and Dr. Shauneen Pete, two Indigenous scholars, and asked us if we could develop it into a theory. They said to us, We know you academics need this and we want you to create this.

I’d never written a theory before and I was kind of stunned. What does writing a theory even mean? It took me a year to understand how to write theory and start to put it into a theoretical model. And then of course we had to take it back to the Elders and just keep working it out. But since then it’s become my scaffold for everything. I call it a scaffold because it sits there and you can position all your stuff around it. I use this in every single thing I do. I’m also a counsellor by training. I use it in my one-on-one therapy sessions. I use it if I’m creating an evaluation, I use it if I’m writing a grant, it’s the way I think about everything.

The Cultural Responsiveness Framework has three strategic directions. The first is to restore Indigenous community-based health and wellness systems. If you’re not in health and wellness, that can really be very high level. It can mean restoring Indigenous practices, Indigenous languages. Like even using the word restore is a scaffold enough. The second strategic direction is to establish that middle ground or what Willie Ermine, an Elder from Sturgeon Lake, calls that ethical space of engagement, often between Western/mainstream and Indigenous institutions, worldviews, systems. Sometimes creating that middle ground is referred to as a sacred space because that might be where ceremony happens. It might be where the two entities come together to start out in a good way, always positioning the community’s way of knowing first. So if it’s a Christian prayer, then it’s a Christian prayer. If it’s a sweat lodge, then it’s a sweat lodge. That community will determine how it wants to move forward to establish that middle ground. And the third strategic direction is transforming service delivery to be culturally responsive.

Within those three strategic directions we have four protective mechanisms, which I just love. The first is to be community-specific, locally adapted. What I love about this model is it’s built right in that you will position yourself according to the community, the community’s priorities, the community’s needs. The second component is that it’s spiritually grounded. Again, positioning it around the community’s approach to spirituality. Then the other two components of it are that it’s trauma-informed and strength-based. And those four components serve as protective mechanisms around those three strategic directions. And we can use it for anything. I use it for everything. I love it because it’s so simple. I’ve actually made a little visual model but because of Covid I haven’t taken it back to the Elders yet. I have plans to take that back and publish it as soon as we get permission.

Gladys: Wow. I love the idea of the scaffolding as the starting point for all of the work that you do.

JoLee: Everything.

Gladys: Yeah. Do you have an example of how you have placed this into practice recently?

JoLee: Yeah, I have dozens of them. The nato’ we ho win project, the one I mentioned about intimate partner violence, was definitely one of the first. Again, that restored Indigenous cultural practices by bringing them to the women who were in the intimate partner survivor 13-week groups. It was trauma-informed because we had trauma-informed therapists. We did use some deficit-based measures, but the program itself was strength-based. We had that middle ground because we also had non-Indigenous people and we often had to come into that ethical space and really hash out some things, and it wasn’t always easy. And even in the dissemination phase, it’s been a little challenging. I actually broke away from the team because I wanted an Indigenous perspective of the findings, and I wasn’t necessarily getting that with some of the quantitative people. And then also transforming service delivery so it took into consideration what a woman who has experienced intimate partner violence is going to go through and how we might support her. We provided transportation, we provided babysitting or child minding if they had children there, we provided food. And there’s another thing that I have adapted. I like finding Western models that work for us. I’ve learned about the learning health system^[1]; I’ve been asked by the Health Authority many times to use it. The learning health system is just a really nice way of saying learn as you go, which is what we do as Indigenous people. And that learning health system approach allows us to make the change immediately, as soon as we know there’s an issue and we see that in the data coming out. We make the change right away instead of waiting till the end of the program and the findings to emerge and then making a recommendation. In the case of the nato’ we ho win women’s groups, we didn’t provide a meal on the first pilot, and we heard from the women that it was very difficult to make dinner and to get to the meeting on time. So we started to offer a meal. Now if you think about that, that seems like it’s not a big deal, but when you have three groups in three cities over three times, that’s a significant expense. So that’s thousands of dollars that you’re talking about that weren’t necessarily built in at the beginning, but it’s still very important to make those adaptations as you go. And that’s where that scaffold came in.

“In models of care I always try to include, next to the patient, a peer with lived experience who is perhaps an Elder or a Knowledge Keeper or someone who knows the culture. The third person, if there needs to be another person, would be your therapist, your physician, whatever.”
_{– JoLee}

There is one other piece I use that’s not necessarily in the scaffold: I create a lot of models of care. In nato’ he to win, the model of care was for intimate partner violence, but I’ve also created one for vaccine uptake, I’ve created one for HIV and hepatitis C. In models of care I always try to include, next to the patient, a peer with lived experience who is perhaps an Elder or a Knowledge Keeper or someone who knows the culture. The third person, if there needs to be another person, would be your therapist, your physician, whatever. It’s like a trifecta. It really has been demonstrated to me over time that experience together makes a difference. Often in our communities, if I have diabetes and I’m scared or ashamed, that peer, that person from my community who also has diabetes, is there to help and support, and that peer is a lot more helpful than some Westernized position coming in like a therapist or a doctor. That peer with lived experience is crucial in a lot of the work that I do. A lot of times people on my team want to run the focus groups or do the evaluations, but I often say that the people who should be running them are the people from the community. And then that builds their capacity. What I always try to do is make sure that whatever study we’re doing or whatever research we’re doing, we’re also building the capacity of the people alongside us so that their skills are increased as we move forward.

Gladys: Thank you for the handfuls of examples there. You talked about the ability to be responsive and to be flexible and to implement learning into action immediately. And I’ve been really thinking about how Indigenous evaluation creates impact: does our work matter? And in what ways? It sounds like the ability to be responsive has been impactful in your work.

JoLee: It’s interesting, I’m asked to review a lot of peer-reviewed articles, or look at education curriculums and programs, and even though it’s done by our own people, there might be gaps. I have a curriculum in front of me now – I won’t give too much detail – that says that it’s for the community and by the community, but I can’t see where engagement was done. I can’t. I’m looking through the documents and I’m like, Where did you engage? Who did you engage? What people on your team were Indigenous? Because that’s not clearly defined. I think that being someone who is an Indigenous evaluator or someone who has that lens, you can start to see the gaps clearly which other people might not be trained to see, whereas if you present that to a bunch of non-Indigenous people they are going to respond, Oh, this is a great curriculum! It’s awesome, it’s amazing.

But if you really have that lens on what it takes – I know what the Elders ask of us because I’ve been doing this for 30 years. They want to be sure that they’re not just called in to open a prayer and leave. There has to be some link back, and community-centred priorities are super important. And I think that where I see a lot of the trouble is with allies and non-Indigenous people who have amazing intentions taking up this work without proper engagement and consultation, and then creating programs and systems and things for us that we have no interest in because we didn’t do the creation or the co-creation, it wasn’t based on our priorities. And so sometimes I get challenged by white people or non-Indigenous people who say, Why is this happening when over here this is a bigger issue? And I say, Well, because right here is what is going on in the community. Why would they care about x if they can’t feed their kids? Why would they care about your issue if they don’t have jobs? So I think that sometimes our lenses are very different. And being able to understand if proper consultation was done, if the right people were asked the right questions, is also important. And then also knowing who your community actually is. I’ll just give an example of that. I was many years ago asked to work with a group of women in a community who had been abused in many ways; sexually, in lots of ways. And they wanted to tell their story, and Chief and Council did not. And I was challenged: You can’t do this research because Chief and Council said no. I said, But Chief and Council are not my community here; it’s these women. I was very clear that this was my community, and I dare anyone to tell anybody that you can’t go into a group of women and tell their story.

So I think it’s about being able to understand who your community actually is, because it’s not always at the level of chiefs and councils, right? It’s not always there. In my university we have to go through ethics approval, and someone on the ethics board came back to me and said, Where’s the band council resolution? And I’m like, What do you know about BCRs? BCRs come at the level of the governance of the First Nation. If the First Nation wants the BCR, they’ll ask for it, but it’s not for my white institution to come back and tell me to get a BCR. It’s important to be able to navigate those pretty sticky situations, and to be strong enough to take it back to the non-Indigenous side and say, No, no, no, this is not how it’s going to happen. It has to happen this way. That can often put us in challenging situations. However, I think after 30-some years I’ve been able to navigate it enough to know where those limits are and when to back off and when to push.

Gladys: Yeah. I’m hearing a lot about relationship in what you just shared in the example of the curriculum. Telling the story of the development provides the groundwork for understanding the relationships that have come into being to develop something. As people get excited to do the work of decolonization, reconciliation, Indigenous community work, there’s a lot of danger, and I’m laughing, but it’s something that I see across so many different institutions. There are these checklists that are created about how you engage community, without actually having community in mind. And so I love that example of the BCR and the institution saying, Where is this? And you pushing back and saying, What would the purpose of that be? And actually bringing forward the relationships and defining community from the perspective of the work that you’re doing. So I’m in awe listening to all of your stories, JoLee.

JoLee: Oh, thank you.

Gladys: I want to ask about something of yours I’ve read, which is this data contemplation tool.^[2] Another really deep offering for Indigenous researchers and Indigenous evaluators. Could you talk about that tool?

JoLee: Sure. So that was co-created with my now-graduated PhD student, Carrie LaVallie, when she did her dissertation on working with Elders in addiction recovery. It came out of her work with them and our discussions about her ways of handling the data as it was coming out. And one of the things that we noticed is that there’s a lot of research coming out on Indigenous methodologies and ways to collect data, but to our knowledge at the time there was only one other article on data analysis, and it was just more of an approach. And so we made this offering on the data analysis side. It’s for after the data’s collected and you’re contemplating it and you’re thinking about it. It’s not just for Indigenous researchers, it’s for all of us.

Because I think that whenever we work with Indigenous communities, whether it’s our own or new ones (at least every one I’ve ever worked with), you’re always touched by the work, you’re touched by the people, by the culture, by the ceremonies, by the data coming out. It’s often moving, it’s attached to sometimes very difficult stories. We have to look at our positionality in that. And what does that mean? I am a Western researcher even though I am First Nations, and I have to think about my role in that data, because the way the Western academy teaches us to analyze data is to code and theme and put it into these nice little silos and basically rip it apart from the story from which it came. And Carrie and I don’t like that kind of data approach. Maggie Kovach speaks to that: Don’t decontextualize the data.^[3] What’s the point of getting our story and then just coding and theming it back into some Western thing?

It was about being able to keep the story, but also what is our role within it. Because as researchers, we don’t get asked how we feel about things. And it’s not to take the space away from community or to position the researchers’ experience first and foremost, but it’s to give the researcher a tool to understand where they sit within the data. Is their privilege in the way? Maybe they’re from that community and that’s in the way? Or maybe they bring something beautiful to the table, but it’s just to be able to have that moment of reflective reflection about it, to take that time. Often as researchers, once the data’s collected, we do the analysis, we run on, and we don’t really reflect in that data. We don’t think about it. We don’t sit in it. This is also an opportunity to take it back to the community partners or the peers or whoever your people are that you’re working with, and ask them what their thoughts are on the data.

And they often will see gaps and point them out. It’s an opportunity to go back and forth over the data. I did this with my dissertation 20 years before we wrote this data contemplation approach. I took my dissertation back to the students who had told their stories. I didn’t think they would give a crap about reading my dissertation, but they sat in my living room and each one was so touched by the stories and they read it word for word. It was fascinating to see these young people really interested in my dissertation, actually reading it because the story was intact. Reflexive reflection is what we call it. It’s a tool that gives us something to do with the data other than just theme and code. What I really love about reflexive reflection is it can be used with any data set. It could be used with quantitative data, it could be used with qualitative data. It’s a robust tool that can show the connections in the information that you’ve gathered.

Gladys: That’s beautiful. Again, it’s about relationship, right? What relationships have you built? Or what relationships are you bringing into the work? In my dissertation, I used poetry as a mechanism to reflect a relationship with the stories that I gathered. It’s an important element to be attentive to, and it transfers deeply into the evaluation work as well, I think.

JoLee: Relationships are probably the most important element. I have worked with a lot of communities, but now I try not to work with so many, especially because when you work with a community they want your presence there and they want you to spend time with them. I’m a widowed mom living in the city now. If I commit to working with 10 communities, that’s 10 locations I need to try to be in. I try to narrow my communities down. The other thing I often tell non-Indigenous researchers – especially because, fortunately or unfortunately, there’s quite a bit of grant money for Indigenous work and a lot of non-Indigenous scholars want to apply for that – I often say, When you start working with a community you should think about that as a lifelong commitment.

And they laugh, The grant’s only five years! Why would I do this for life? And I say, Because you make relationships with people. Often the work that I do might start out in one place, but then after we’ve done a year of grant together, a community says, No, JoLee, we wanna look at this. We wanna go in this direction. Now we’ve done HIV and hepatitis C, we wanna move into diabetes in this health center. Sometimes people think, How are you a researcher in HIV, hep C, and diabetes? How do you do all of that? And it’s because that’s what the community has asked. The community wants these things. I go with the flow of the community. Yes, I have to learn a whole new literature set and a whole new disease and it’s a lot of work for me, but it’s because I stay with the same communities and I try to grow with them.

I think that non-Indigenous people don’t go into it with the mindset that this can and should be a lifelong relationship. When I went into Muskowekwan to do work with them a few years ago, at one of the first community engagement sessions I met this young First Nation student and later put him and another one on my research team. They ended up getting their bachelor’s degrees, then one of them became a teacher. I’m now a reference for him. My relationships with these people go on and on and on. It’s a two-way thing. I support them, they support me. And I wish more people would think about it like that. You just don’t go in for five years. It is a long-term relationship that we should consider establishing and keeping.

Gladys: Absolutely. I like your point about being intentional about the communities that you’re working with, because you need to show up, be in the space, be meaningfully engaging in a consistent way. And I really love the stories that you shared there about the importance of relationship for an Indigenous researcher and evaluator.

When you’re thinking about your work in Indigenous evaluation is there something that is really exciting right now?

JoLee: Yes. I’ve been funded in the last couple years to do maternal care work, traditional birthing and parenting. Again, most of the things I do happen organically. During Covid, a team of matriarchs here in the Treaty Four area started taking care of Elders and those who were isolated due to health conditions. And then after about a year of that, one of our women on the ground became pregnant and Covid was still pretty active. She needed some unique care and support, and she was a younger pregnant woman, and so we just started taking care of her. You know how when Covid hit, a lot of cultural things went online that we maybe wouldn’t have put online before. I was able to attend this workshop with a doula from close to my home community in Ontario.

And she was talking about birth as a ceremony and gave me some new teachings. I thought I had had really good teachings but the couple of hours with her were transformative. And I thought, Oh my God, this is amazing. And so of course I went back to my matriarch team and I said, We should make what we’re doing with her bigger and support more women. So I wrote a grant, we got funded. And so now I’m doing maternal care and traditional birthing and parenting and it is exciting.^[4] There were some hurdles with our program being in a Western institution that I wasn’t comfortable with, so I decided with my team to move it to two new community partners. I think that’s the more appropriate space and location.

What I’m really excited about is just last week we met and we decided to change the frame to restoration of the family. I’m still getting invited to participate in HIV and hepatitis C and mental health and all these other programs, but it’s hard to be scattered across subject areas. So I’m just tying everything into family restoration, because under family restoration, mental health, addictions, HIV, motherhood, all that stuff can come into play, and for now I can focus on birth and parenting.  I want to say a piece about that, because I was asked to co-evaluate the Indigenous birth worker support program here, which was piloted in Saskatoon. I was brought in at the end, the data was already collected, I didn’t co-design the program. I didn’t even meet the women who were the Indigenous birth support workers. I just saw the data, and my influence on the report was moderate.“I put the Indigenous history in that report, and it got pulled out. I realized I’m not going to get things like that at the government level, but I ensured that I can then take that stance and I can write my own article on it.”
_{– JoLee}

I would say that I added some components to help with the Indigenous lens a bit. But I wanted to be much stronger in the front end about birthing policies and practices and reasons why we’re in the situation we’re in, birth evacuation policies, all that stuff. But I had to really toe the line. I put the Indigenous history in that report, and it got pulled out. I realized I’m not going to get things like that at the government level, but I ensured that I can then take that stance and I can write my own article on it. And that’s kind of what happened with the nato’ we ho win data as well. I wanted to take a much harder stance on some of these government policies and how they’ve influenced us. And sometimes other researchers – I don’t know if they’re afraid, I don’t know what it is – they don’t want to piss off the government.

But that’s our job. That’s our job, to tell the story of how we got where we are. I am a strength-based researcher, but I’m certainly not going to leave out the context we come from. For me, that work’s just as important work as getting the findings. It’s letting people know, We’re in this situation because of your policies, because of this behaviour, because of residential schools, because of foster care. This is where we’re at. So many people just want to tell the story from the moment they evaluate the program, not the context from which we came. I think that those are important pieces that I’m hoping to bring to this birthing work.

Gladys: Beautiful. And I have to tell you that our experiences overlap here. For my dissertation, I sat with Indigenous full-spectrum birth keepers and asked them to share stories about how they incorporate their traditional practices and support people in reproductive health.^[5]

JoLee: Oh, my gosh, I’ll have to read your dissertation.

Gladys: And their 13 stories sit in a bundle as an appendix in my dissertation because it had to be done in a way that satisfied the academy. But it’s so important to make sure that we’re using the space that we have to advocate and so that stories like that don’t get lost or dropped. We need to make sure we leave these trails so that things will change.

JoLee: Absolutely. I train a lot of healthcare providers, and in the last year I started to see the impact of my training on seasoned health professionals when they said, I wish I would’ve had this in medical school! And I’m like, Well, let’s get it into the med schools then, and I started to provide it at the med school level. Because physicians and other people often don’t have the context of why our people are plagued with certain illnesses. A lot of doctors don’t even know about the Adverse Childhood Experiences group of studies, which basically says if you have these certain kinds of traumas in your childhood, you’ll likely manifest these chronic diseases.^[6] If doctors don’t know this linkage, then how are they going to understand these situations that are going on?

And then there’s a lot of judgment. And so now you’re a healthcare provider that’s judging us because you’re seeing this chronic condition or you’re seeing addictions but you don’t know how we got here. And a lot of doctors come from other countries, they don’t know our history, and then they judge us and then they treat us badly at point of care. My goal is to offer that history and that context with ways to get us to a better place. My husband passed away because of racism in the healthcare system. I’ll be very transparent about that. I spoke with the doctor who I believe had a hand in what happened to him, and I confronted him gently and harshly about it: Had your team not behaved in this way, it wouldn’t have turned him off at the door. A lot of men are hard enough to get to the doctor, but when you turn them off because of your attitudes and behaviour, that’s not getting us anywhere. I want to generate an understanding that we’re all accountable from this point forward for all that history. We have a shared history and so then we have to have a shared understanding. And there is no excuse; just because you’re a medical doctor or you don’t come from this country, there’s no excuse for not understanding your patients and where they are and where they come from. And that’s why I work in health so much, because I feel like that’s where I see so much preventable stuff going on. If we could just get in a little earlier, we would have less people dying, including people like my own husband. So I am very passionate about it and I will probably till the day I die be committed to doing this work so that we can prevent family members from dying from something preventable because of somebody being rude at the doctor’s office or whatever the issue is, because they don’t understand the context.

Gladys: Powerful. Thank you for sharing that. I’m hearing in your story the power of showing up in spaces in a good way and bringing all of your wisdom and your skills and your connections and your networks to transform health and wellness for communities. And evaluation is one small piece, but it’s also a powerful piece when we can make sure that people who are making policies, making funding decisions, creating education system curriculum, who are training doctors, can see the impact that programs, that community priorities are having towards health and wellness. It’s all so deeply connected there.

JoLee: It’s all connected. Like I said, I might get brought in at the early stages, it might be my own study, or I might be asked to evaluate data post-study. But there are things I keep in common with nato’ we ho win, like when I gave you the example of how we went into ceremony and got the name of the program. That was deeply embedded in the culture. What I did with the Indigenous Birth Support Worker evaluation, there was no culture there, I just looked at the data after; however, my process is still cultural. I pray and smudge before I write a grant or I do an evaluation or whatever it is. I bring in my culture around that, so that even if it’s missing at one end, I bring it in at another. And so I know that my process is comprehensive, that I’ve asked the proper questions.

And those questions for me are the ones in my Cultural Responsiveness Framework. Does this restore First Nations health and wellness? Is there a middle ground here for conversation between two worldviews, and is there a transformation of service delivery? So those are the questions that I ask as I mull through. Is it strength-based? Is it trauma informed? Is it locally, culturally grounded, spiritually grounded? Those kinds of questions. That’s the framework that I operate from. And so even if it wasn’t built on that, those are still the questions that I use, and my own spiritual practice, to ensure that alignment is still there. And if it’s not, then I identify the gaps.

Gladys: Absolutely. Thank you for bringing that back full circle to the scaffolding that informs everything you do. We’re nearing the end of our time together, so I’d like to ask if you have any insights to share with emerging Indigenous evaluators. Any hopes or words of wisdom that you’d like to leave with listeners?

JoLee: Yeah. I’ve noticed something in the decade that I’ve been at this institution. In my field, we actually don’t get a lot of Indigenous scholars. I have some Indigenous scholars, and we definitely have a lot of non-Indigenous scholars interested in the work.  Because I teach Intro to Research, I often will use Maggie Kovach’s Indigenous Methodologies book alongside that Western text. And because Maggie’s also from Saskatchewan, it really resonates with everyone, not just Indigenous students; it resonates with all students in the class. And what I’ve noticed is that once my students who are non-Indigenous start to learn Indigenous methods, they want to use them in their studies as well. Not in an appropriative way, but using those holistic ways of forming those relationships, the check-ins, the reflexivity, all of those pieces and parts because it just works better.

And so I often share that when I teach, especially when I do my webinars with health providers. I often say, It’s not to say that our culture’s better than anyone else’s, but our culture is very holistic and is really better for everyone’s health. It will take us all a little bit further. And the example I often give is a First Nations hospital near here, a couple hours away. Non-native people who attend that hospital seem to have better outcomes than at other hospitals. And I think that’s because of the mental, emotional, spiritual, physical connection that we look at, that whole person, that whole spirit. I find it interesting that our ways often work really, really well in research for non-Indigenous peoples. I’m not talking about appropriation; I’m just talking about holistically looking at health that way. I think that if more people started to take up this work, it would just be better all around.

Gladys: So true. I have a lot to digest and I know that listeners are going to be excited, too. I want to thank you deeply for sharing this space with me and for offering some of the insights that you’ve gathered through your journey in this work. Ekosi!

Footnotes

About the author

name: JoLee Sasakamoose, PhD (M'Chigeeng First Nation)

institution: University of Regina

website: https://www.scientia.global/dr-jolee-sasakamoose-dr-mamata-pandey-empowering-indigenous-health-the-indigenous-wellness-research-collaborative-in-saskatchewan/

A powerhouse professor, visionary leader, and fierce advocate, JoLee (M’Chigeeng First Nation) walks the tightrope between academia and community with grace and grit. She’s the mind behind culturally responsive frameworks, a champion of First Nations health sovereignty, and a tireless mentor to the next generation of Indigenous health leaders. Whether she’s untangling university red tape, amplifying youth voices in pow wow regalia clubs, or redefining practicum standards to protect her students’ futures, JoLee leads with purpose, compassion, and fire. Her calendar may be packed, her responsibilities endless — but her heart? Always grounded in community, ceremony, and care.