Hello! My name is Heather Sauyaq Jean Kwamboka Gordon. I am both Iñupiaq from Alaska as well as a part of a Kenyan Kisii family that I joined through marriage. I am the Owner/Principal Consultant for Sauyaq Solutions, a consulting organization supporting Indigenous Nations, organizations, and projects in research and evaluation. My evaluation work seeks to uplift Indigenous culture as a prevention and protective factor and approaches to wellbeing, highlighting how Indigenous cultural connectedness is linked to healing, educational and economic growth, and more!
Hot Tip
Due to past and ongoing colonization and the resulting trauma, evaluators need to take care in how they engage with Indigenous communities, especially youth, to not perpetuate trauma. Understanding Indigenous Knowledges, cultures, histories, and ways of communicating are key in evaluation with Indigenous communities. Evaluation with Indigenous communities needs to be led by the communities, and if the evaluator is external, they need to learn from and about the Peoples they are working with to develop a comprehensive and accurate evaluation.
Lessons Learned
When conducting an evaluation with an Indigenous community, collaborating with youth from the community promotes learning, capacity building, self-determination, agency, future leadership, and makes the evaluation more impactful as it is tailored to the community and project. Youth want to be included in projects concerning their lives and communities. Youth not only learn about evaluation, but improve the evaluation through their knowledge and ties to their community as well as through spanning boundaries across knowledge systems, having grown up learning from Elders in their communities and been educated in mainstream curricula. This also helps to use appropriate methods in gathering and interpreting data, such as talking circles (instead of focus groups) and collaborating with youth through cultural learning models like intergenerational apprenticeship.
Get involved: Knowing how to collaborate with Indigenous youth in evaluation involves learning from the youth how they want to collaborate. Consider youth community roles and how to collaborate from the start of the evaluation in planning and making decisions all the way through data collection, analysis, reporting, and dissemination. For example, in data analysis, youth may not want to sit on the computer using analysis software, but may be happy to discuss and contextualize results while engaging in connectedness with the land on a hike or in art through beading or weaving. Creating space for youth leadership, and evaluator learning, leads to high impact evaluation for the community, evaluator, project lessons learned, and even policy implications for future generations.
Rad Resources
- Check out the AEA Indigenous Peoples in Evaluation Topical Interest Group resources.
- Read about how Indigenous youth developed a tool for self-assessment as a culturally competent evaluation method, including the evaluation process and lessons learned.
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