I’m Corrie Whitmore, an Associate Professor of Health Sciences at the University of Alaska Anchorage and Past President of the American Evaluation Association. I’m a teacher of evaluation, mother of Indigenous children, and lifelong Alaskan.
I’m an “accidental evaluator” who began my evaluation career on Dena’ina Land working for a tribally owned and operated healthcare system in 2010. Simultaneously learning to be an evaluator and to be a good ally and relative, as a non-Indigenous person in Indigenous spaces, was a big project. Along the way, I learned a few things I’ll share in this post.
Lessons Learned
Show up as a human being first, and an expert second. All the advice I’d internalized about professionalism in graduate school made my life harder, when I came to work in tribal spaces. I didn’t need to impress people with my scholarly credentials or keep the discussion tightly focused on work: it was more important to show up as a person in conversation with other people, to forge connections, build trust, and find our way to working together. These days I build in time to listen and to talk about where I’m from, how I became an evaluator, and what I care about in our shared community, before trying to hone in on the details of the work.
Hot Tips
When you work in tribal communities, it’s important to recognize Indigenous people’s ownership of the data you are collecting and work you are creating. Indigenous data sovereignty means data collected in Indigenous spaces belong to the community and decisions around stewardship, access, and dissemination will be made by designated leaders.
As scholars and evaluation practitioners, we may want to present on what we do at venues like the American Evaluation Association Conference – before you submit a proposal, talk to your tribal partner/client. In my years at Southcentral Foundation I was able to – after going through a review process – share about the processes we used in our evaluations at AEA conferences (but not report most data publicly). Now that most of my tribal work is with Cook Inlet Tribal Council, I don’t report on it at conferences – that’s not what it’s for. If I believed it was important for me to publish all the work I do, I wouldn’t be the right evaluator for them; it’s critically important to agree up front on expectations around how you will be permitted (or not permitted) to share any work you participate in with others.
Rad Resources
- The Canadian Evaluation Society’s open access journal, The Canadian Journal of Program Evaluation, now includes a “Roots and Relations” section, under Indigenous leadership, intended help us all understand how to “be a good relative,” “be of good mind,” “do good work,” and “be on a good journey” in our evaluation efforts. Articles are free to access, whether or not you are a member of CES or AEA, and provide insightful guidance.
- The AEA Indigenous Peoples in Evaluation Topical Interest Group is a welcoming group within AEA where Indigenous evaluators and those working in Indigenous settings come together to improve their evaluation practices and methods. The annual business meeting and online forum are great places to listen and learn, as well as build relationships with other people working in similar contexts.
- EvalIndigenous provides a global EvalPartners network “built on a foundation of the knowledge and expertise of Indigenous peoples and allies around the world” and offers important resources for those of us interested in how evaluation is done for, with, and by Indigenous people around the globe.
The American Evaluation Association is hosting Indigenous Peoples in Evaluation (IPE) TIG week. All posts this week are contributed by members of the IPE Topical Interest Group. Do you have questions, concerns, kudos, or content to extend this AEA365 contribution? Please add them in the comments section for this post on the AEA365 webpage so that we may enrich our community of practice. Would you like to submit an AEA365 Tip? Please send a note of interest to AEA365@eval.org. AEA365 is sponsored by the American Evaluation Association and provides a Tip-a-Day by and for evaluators. The views and opinions expressed on the AEA365 blog are solely those of the original authors and other contributors. These views and opinions do not necessarily represent those of the American Evaluation Association, and/or any/all contributors to this site.