Opening the Bundle

Welcome

Tansi, greetings! My name is Gladys Rowe and I am so grateful you are here. I’m happy to be sharing this space with you today, alongside my co-editor, Taylor Wilson. Together, we are honoured and excited to be sitting in conversation with contributors, collaborators, allies, storytellers, Knowledge Keepers, and co-conspirators, and we invite you to join in.

This collection of conversations is based on a series of interviews from the first season (2022-2023) of Indigenous Insights: An Evaluation Podcast, hosted by Gladys. The podcast asks: What is Indigenous Evaluation? Who is doing this work? How are we doing this work, and what have we learned so far? Each episode creates space for Indigenous evaluation practitioners, leaders, researchers, and scholars to share how they’re doing their work and the challenges and insights they’ve experienced along the way.

In book form, the interviews and excerpts form a collage of practices and issues in Indigenous evaluation. Rather than offering a single, universal definition of Indigenous evaluation, this book brings together the diverse voices, experiences, and perspectives of Indigenous evaluators, Knowledge Keepers, scholars, and community leaders. It offers a loving welcome to perspectives that are multivocal, local, elusive, reciprocal, provocative, relational, process-based, and occasionally disruptive. A defining feature of Indigenous evaluation is its multiplicity, which is grounded in local relationships, histories, and ways of knowing, and provides space for dialogue, reflection, and inspiration for anyone seeking to engage in evaluation in ways that uphold Indigenous sovereignty, values, and wellbeing.

We hope that the podcast, and now this book, will feel like a deep breath and a space where you can come to listen and learn. We invite you to grab a cozy beverage and settle in as we open up our evaluation bundles to share the gifts, knowledges, and hopes that we’ve gathered in our journeys.

Let’s take a collective breath to invite grounding and intention in showing up here together.

Locating Ourselves

For many Indigenous researchers and evaluators, this work is personal. The projects, questions, methods, and meaning making are relational, iterative, and lived deeply within our hearts and spirits. We feel called to this kind of work for various reasons such as community responsibilities, personal and structural transformations, and making contributions to decolonization and resurgence. Therefore, we begin by locating ourselves.

Gladys: I am a Muskego Inninew Iskwew (which means Swampy Cree woman), and my pronouns are she/her. I’m a member of Fox Lake Cree Nation in northern Manitoba, near the Nelson and Kettle Rivers, and I also hold relations with ancestors from Ireland, England, Norway, and the Ukraine.

My name carries the visions of my grandmothers. From my granny Gladys I carry the teachings of beading, an embodied method of story and worldview. From my gramma Rita I carry the love of deep listening and witnessing, of making children feel seen and important. I am also a mother, auntie, partner, sister, daughter, niece, granddaughter, friend, evaluator, researcher, artist, poet, filmmaker, and podcaster.

My professional path was not linear. I failed out of my first year of university and doubted whether social work was right for me, yet found my way back through community-driven research. The Strengthening Families Maternal Child Health program evaluation led by Manitoba First Nations was my entry point. It was there that I learned that meaningful programs must be rooted in the voices and priorities of families.

This journey carried me through graduate school to the Winnipeg Boldness Project, to the Indigenous Learning Circle, and now to Indigenous Insights Collective. Along the way, I gathered my own bundle of teachings, mentors, and practices, guided by Elders, Knowledge Keepers, and Indigenous scholars.

Taylor: I am an Ojibwe, Cree, and Filipina woman and my pronouns are she/they. I am a member of Fisher River Cree Nation on Treaty 5 territory in Manitoba, on the southwest side of Lake Winnipeg, with connections to Peguis First Nation on Treaty 1, Fairford First Nation on Treaty 2, and to the Ilocano region of the Philippines, though I have never been there. I grew up between Fisher River and Winnipeg, and have spent most of my adult life living and working in Winnipeg, on Treaty 1 territory, the homeland of the Métis Nation. I also acknowledge the other lands that have held me on my journey: Kaurna Country, homeland of the Kaurna people of the Adelaide Plains, the ʻāina of Oʻahu, and the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territory of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam) First Nation.

I was raised by my grandparents, a medicine woman and a chief, both of whom carried strength and wisdom that continue to guide me. My kookum taught me how to connect to the land and to who I am as an ikwe. My mooshum showed me what it meant to live a life of service to family, friends, and community. Despite the realities of intergenerational trauma and colonialism, I was surrounded by strong and resilient people. My family continues to inspire me to keep going, even when this work feels difficult.

I often describe myself as a learner, a listener, and a helper. These roles remind me that my responsibilities are not about holding expertise alone but about being open to relationship, humility, and reciprocity.

My path into this work has been full of turns. I once thought I would become a doctor, believing medicine was the best way to help my people, but I struggled within the sterility of the biomedical field. I found myself drawn instead to courses and conversations centered on people, relationships, and community. After graduation, I began doing evaluation in my home community, which led me to a master’s degree, then to the Winnipeg Boldness Project, where I met the people who would then introduce me to Gladys, and later to research and evaluation work with the First Nations Health and Social Secretariat of Manitoba. Now I am undertaking my PhD research, continuing to walk a path that feels both challenging and deeply necessary.

Looking back, I know I could not have done this work without the relationships and people who have walked with me. The land, and the Indigenous, African, and Filipina matriarchs, scholars, Elders, and Knowledge Keepers who shared their stories, extended kindness, and offered mentorship, have carried me forward. They remind me that this work is never done alone.

What is Indigenous Evaluation?

Much of the work that both of us have done and hope to continue is about creating spaces for Indigenous persons and Peoples to show up, be seen, and be heard, because we know whose voices are in the conversation matter, whose priorities are driving the work matters, and how we agree to do this work matters. These principles are true, whether you’re talking about evaluation, social work, research, education systems or systems change. We are supported in our belief that Indigenous evaluation is a field on the cusp of meaningful growth; contributors to the podcast and this volume sense a responsibility and opportunity to shape and share that change, to remember that the term encompasses a range of evaluative activities, and that it is springing up independently in many communities.

Evaluation contributes to the broader space of knowledge production within societies. Decisions about where to allocate resources are often predicated on research and evaluation processes. What is identified as a best practice will most likely be supported through allocation of resources. What gets funded gets evaluated, and what gets evaluated gets funded. In that allocation of resources, it is beneficial to know whether resources make a difference (positively or negatively). In evaluation, which is the assessment of program offering and delivery, we see whether programs work as intended with the target population and consider reasons. Many decisions about programs and funding have been and are being made using colonial values and methods, often without making visible the assumptions that drive the decision making. Evaluation helps us understand value – and Indigenous evaluation asks us to examine the assumptions of what is valued as we do evaluation.

Indigenous evaluation is not new; it draws on traditional capacities and skills. What is new is the opportunity to model interdependent shifts, such as the shift from deficit- to strengths-based assessment and the shift from mainstream Euro-Western evaluation’s emphasis on extraction and its pose of neutrality to evaluation that helps communities and supports reconciliation, Indigenous resurgence, and other sociopolitical and cultural reckonings.

All contributors to this volume believe that evaluative perspectives must move away from a standpoint on evaluation that is aligned with colonizing, settler values, that is extractive and intrusive in relation to its subjects, that imposes theories and frameworks from the top down, that identifies deficits and weaknesses, that is paternalistic and controlling even when it is benevolent in nature, that is answerable to funding bodies, and that is harmful. The mainstream perspective pathologizes and perpetuates negative stereotypes about Indigenous people, divorces data from context in its drive for objectivity, and posits the researchers as separate from the subjects of study and as the rightful owners of knowledge.

An Indigenous-centered framework of evaluation is a turning inside out of traditional evaluation; it tends to be more qualitative and strengths-based, develops locally and is responsive to shifts in community feeling, and offers communities sustained funding for programs that benefit them, as well as data ownership and control. It is undertaken with adherence to the principles of Indigenous self-determination. Furthermore, because Indigenous Peoples have experienced harm in research, Indigenous evaluation counters distrust by building long-term relationships featuring mutual reciprocity and respect. This critical intervention makes visible and challenges underlying assumptions and unconscious structures informing evaluative frameworks, and it imagines alternatives. The occasional emphasis on spirit, dreams, visions, and artistic creation is not incidental, nor is it rhetorical flourish; it is an essential component of Indigenous evaluation because it allows us to imagine what Indigenous Peoples might become.

What is Indigenous evaluation, then? Indigenous evaluation means learning about transformation, learning about success, learning about shifts to support healing, wellness, and thriving at individual organizational and community levels in a way that is rooted in Indigenous knowledges, Protocols, ways of gathering, insights, making sense, and telling learning stories. Further, Indigenous evaluation is ensuring that what works for Indigenous Peoples, organizations, and communities is resourced in a way that ensures long-term sustainability, that is baked into the way that we do things each and every day. In Indigenous evaluation’s radical forms, the line between researcher and community member is blurred: research subjects are researchers and their experiences in evaluation and with cultural values shape decisions about community goals and how best to meet them. Its primary motivation is not control or efficiency or even knowledge, but loving wisdom that “feels like home,” to quote Marissa Hill below.

Indigenous evaluation asks: Whose priorities shape the work? Whose voices drive decisions? What does success mean in this community? Does this program or activity support wellbeing, decolonization, and resurgence? Is it inspired by love for Indigenous Peoples and lands?

Indigenous evaluation requires time: time to build relationships, to build capacity, to build new foundations, to support inquiries into success, making meaning, and sharing stories. Indigenous evaluation takes intention to begin and maintain the work in a good way, in a way that is rooted in Protocols and ceremony that take care of the spirit of the work in alignment with local knowledges. Indigenous evaluation is subjective. It understands that there are multiple ways of knowing that need to inform the design. Knowledge-gathering, sense-making and sharing Indigenous evaluation requires forethought about relational accountability, shared decision-making, and data sovereignty and ownership. Indigenous evaluation requires Indigenous persons supported by Knowledge Keepers supported by community and other Indigenous evaluation practitioners to be leading this work. Indigenous evaluation requires a space for us to learn together, to share insights and challenges and to support one another, to take up this work for our communities and for the generations to come.

Indigenous evaluation, and this volume, is a space to dream a new way of learning, gathering and sharing stories that can have an impact. In the podcast episodes, I sat in conversation with people who’ve been doing this work for decades and those who are relatively new to this work. I asked each of them to reflect on what aha moments or insights they’ve come to. Indigenous evaluation, in this book, posits that making visible the worldviews, values, and assumptions about knowledges and measurement can disrupt the status quo and positively impact the value of evaluation processes and products to ensure marginalized voices are placed front and center as people who make decisions and set priorities. When we start from a wholly different foundation of Indigenous worldviews and decolonial priorities, the trajectory of the future will be a newly imagined pathway, a poly-wisdom for the poly-crisis. When these interviews and excerpts are gathered, they form a critical mass testifying to the significance of Indigenous evaluation in social and health sciences and its vast potential beyond shaking up notions of value, success, and evidence. Here is potential for systems change. Indeed, contributor Dr. Nicole Bowman contends that Indigenous evaluation is “the next civil rights movement in terms of asserting sovereignty and having our voices count.”

Indigenous Resurgence

Much of the work we walk with is about Indigenous resurgence, implicitly or explicitly. Indigenous resurgence refers to the multifaceted process of Indigenous communities reclaiming, reconstructing, and reimagining their cultures, identities, and lifeways in the face of colonial disruption. As Dr. Leanne Simpson teaches, resurgence is not just political or academic; it is a lived reality and daily practice (often through grassroots activism and community-led initiatives) rooted in Indigenous knowledge systems, land and water, and in the revitalization of ceremonies and legal systems.^[1] Resurgence challenges colonial structures and fosters conditions for Indigenous life to flourish. It calls for all of us to live in awareness of Indigenous sovereignty, to consider what it means to be in good relations with land, water, kin, and one another.

From Gladys: Storytelling into the Past and Future

As I have grown into the work that I do today I have learned what it means to be a keeper of stories, to be in the role of storyteller, to be a person who helps draw forward stories that we hold as personal, familial, and communal experiences, knowledges, and wisdoms. When I began the podcast, I wanted to contribute to the unsettling of a field that needed to be challenged and to be held accountable. And I knew the stories of Indigenous evaluators developing the field were a way to do this. Now, here with readers, I am even more committed to a belief in the efficacy of stories.

No matter the medium, a good story can draw you in – decreasing the space between storyteller and listener and offering connecting threads between the two. Stories are seeds; they offer us the ability to dream into being possibilities and spaces for emergence even in the discomfort of not knowing. We each possess a gift, a seed, a piece of collective responsibility.

Storytelling preserves and adapts traditional knowledge and traditional evaluation. Storytelling is one of the most valuable contributions by program participants, and it infuses the data collection, consideration, and analysis of Indigenous evaluators. More generally, good stories help us to prioritize personal experiences, while reminding us of all our relations, connecting us to our ancestors, and also offer us opportunities for learning from one another. Brought together, stories offer a vision for a collective future.

Storytelling is a relationship-based method of sharing knowledge. Dr. Kathy Absolon describes the purpose and power of stories in re-search:

Indigenous searchers talk about storytelling as a methodology to help our people tell their stories so they can leave their mark. These stories help us to not get lost. We build on our stories and each other’s stories, and eventually our stories weave together as we share them.^[2]

Traditionally, stories have been used to share and to teach about Indigenous knowledges. Neal McLeod states that we can reflect on our own stories in relation to the stories of others around us.^[3] McLeod says that we assess and learn from similar experiences, common practices, and shared beliefs and values, bringing other stories together with our own. This merging and melding and interaction of our stories with other stories allows us to create collective memories and to assess and reflect on the relationship that we have with these collective stories.

Stories are threads that stitch us to the past. They connect us to our ancestors, and frequently provide a direct link between grandparents and grandchildren. Dr. Maggie Kovach further describes their relational value:

Stories remind us of who we are and of our belonging. Stories hold within them knowledges, while simultaneously signifying relationships. In oral tradition, stories can never be decontextualized from the teller. They are active agents within a relational world, pivotal in gaining insight into a phenomenon. Oral stories are born of connections within the world and are thus recounted relationally. They tie us with our past and provide a basis for continuity with future generations.^[4]

Stories of families are foundational to understanding who we are and where we come from. Our family stories situate us and the process of sharing our stories supports the development of inclusiveness and belonging. They are stories as a mechanism for the transmission of memory and history.

Crucially, in relation to strengthening resurgence and sovereignty, stories can support deconstruction and reconstruction of the spaces where we live through a process of remembering, visioning, and creating. Dr. Warren Cariou suggests that stories allow us to dream and implement a new future. Storytelling and life-telling are vital to cultural sovereignty, “…first because the storyteller’s act of telling the story is an affirmation of the continued value of Indigenous oral forms of knowledge, and second because the continued life of the story depends upon members of the community to do the work of remembering.”^[5]

So stories for me are these reservoirs of sovereignty that strengthen who we are as individuals, who we are as Nations, in relationship with the world around us. For me, this is why I show up in the space of Indigenous evaluation and why storytelling is central to the methods of my work. This is about creating space for Indigenous voices to reflect, express, and construct narratives that guide the evaluation process. It’s an invitation to engage in a form of knowledge generation that is not just analytical but also emotional and spiritual, with an emphasis on the power of stories to shape, transform, and imagine new futures.

So what happens when someone else defines our stories? What happens when colonizing eyes that observe the story see a vision of a world painted in colours unfamiliar and incongruent to what is being experienced? What if those eyes don’t have a context (through worldview, language, relations) for what they are seeing in front of them? It can start to feel like a bad game of telephone. You know, the game where one child starts off saying a phrase and it is passed from one ear to another, sometimes innocently transforming, sometimes a kid in the group decides to throw a wrench in the production offering something inappropriate into the circle. What emerges on the other end is a completely turned-around statement. Giggles and laughter ensue and the game starts again.

In evaluation or research with Indigenous peoples and communities there is no such innocent or innocuous ending. When the findings are tallied, reports are written, and presentations are made, if these stories are told in a way that erases complexities and nuances of experience and context, whether intentionally or not, it is harmful. Carrying on as things have always been done – repeating phrases meaninglessly or changing elements randomly – adds another brick to the structures that we are trying to tear down. So, in Indigenous evaluation, and other knowledge production activities, what are the stories that need to be told and who needs to be telling them?

The stories presented in this collection contrast those stories and stereotypes that have been allowed to set into concrete, that have forged systems such as education and social work. This is the impetus for how I show up in my work in general, and in the work of Indigenous evaluation specifically. I believe that, if we can shift how we are in relation with stories that are other than what has been normalized, socialized, and consumed, we can transform how we relate to one another. And for Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples in Canada this transformation is long overdue. Being in spaces where we can hear and build relations with new (old) stories will help to transform how we understand the relationships and accountabilities we must hold with all of our relations. Because we need to imagine new futures – and this isn’t possible with the colonizing stories that are normalized as truth. Storytelling breathes life into futures that challenges the gritty realities of colonial violence and stark inequities that allow our lives to be swept aside.

Stories of who we are and where we come from help us to see the responsibilities we hold. The stories we tell, the ones we are invited into, and even more starkly the Euro-Western colonial stories we refuse to engage with, are powerful acts of resistance.

Readers and the Structure of This Book

This book was envisioned  as a circle where Indigenous evaluators, other experts, and readers gather our evaluation bundles together to share collective wisdom to support this crucial work of transforming how knowledge is produced, what practices are held as valuable for our communities, and how we measure and talk about success in order to ensure health and wellness for generations to come. In that circle we need to show up as our whole selves. We bring with us our knowledges, our stories, our relations, our emotions, our languages.

The relationship between Gladys and interview subjects is characterized by genuine appreciation of and engagement with generous contributions. My intention is to create what Cree scholar Willie Ermine describes as an “ethical space,” a realm of interaction acknowledging and respecting diverse ways of knowing and being.^[6] The circle expands outward, facilitating relationality between contributors and editors, and finally encompasses you, the reader, in an ever-widening circle of dialogue and understanding.

We envision this book as a companion and catalyst for learning, unlearning, and action. It is intended for:

• Students – as a classroom text that encourages critical engagement with evaluation through Indigenous worldviews.
• Community practitioners – as a tool for grounding evaluation work in local values, priorities, and Protocols.
• Evaluators and researchers – as a guide for working in respectful and reciprocal ways alongside Indigenous communities.
• Policy-makers and funders – as an invitation to rethink how evaluation is defined, valued, and resourced.

You may find it useful in classrooms, community gatherings, evaluation team meetings, or personal study. However you engage with it, we encourage you to read slowly, reflect deeply, and let the stories guide you toward your own commitments and next steps.

What distinguishes this collection from specific Indigenous evaluation frameworks mentioned in the interviews is its inclusion of many more personal stories from evaluators and examples of evaluation and research than community literature can provide. It also offers a more interdisciplinary approach and covers many more Tribal Nations and First Nations than community papers can (in part because the very nature of any framework is that it is local). It enables a relatively brief overview of and introduction to the subject of Indigenous evaluation which holds any part of that subject as equal to other parts.

The positive response to the podcast from listeners affirmed the need for a resource that could be read, revisited, and used in both academic and community contexts. Through thoughtful curation, editing, and organization, these conversations have been gathered here and expanded with reflective prompts, thematic connections, and additional context, to form a book that complements the audio series while standing on its own. The discussion questions assist readers to build relationships with the material and deepen their knowledge and practice. They invite the reader to consider how they might commit to and participate in systems change, especially Indigenous resurgence.

Although this volume sets out to teach, the reading experience differs significantly from a conventional textbook: as opposed to reading based on gathering and extracting information, you will be doing relational reading that connects to personal narrative and responds to generous and repeated invitations to unlearn, to celebrate, to be creative, to feel and express love, humility, humour, and courage, to be mentored and to mentor, and to join community as an ally, co-conspirator, or partner. Like professional evaluators, who carefully solicit and review opinions and experiences from community members, readers of this volume will assemble a number of unique voices into meaningful patterns, relations, and commitments.

Good Journeys

What we are asking from each reader is that you have the courage to show up, in spite of the unknown, in spite of the enormity of the tasks we face. Bring your gifts and your energies into the circle so that stories of new possibilities will lead us, as a collective, in how to be in good relations.

Ekosi for joining us here. Reflect on what resonates, what questions arise, what possibilities are sparked. Carry those with you. The conclusion to this book, “Closing the Bundle,” contains a special set of prompts to help your growing knowledge become poetic wisdom – you can turn to these prompts now or later. Share your poetry, your stories, your reflections, your journey. Let them live in your bundle and in ours, as we walk this path of Indigenous evaluation together.

Kinanaskimotin, we are grateful to share this space with you. Until next time, be well.

Footnotes