Date: Friday, October 16, 2026
Boozhoo! My name is Courtney Davis, and I am an enrolled citizen of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa, born and raised in Belcourt, North Dakota. I am currently a second-year doctoral student in the Indigenous Health program at the University of North Dakota.
In my doctoral program, we have begun to develop our identities as Indigenous and non-Indigenous researchers and evaluators. As I have lived off the reservation for over a decade, I have begun to ask myself: How do I approach community? And when evaluators say, “the community,” who are we talking about?
Urban Indians represent a large and geographically dispersed population across “Indian Country” or “Turtle Island”, —what we commonly refer to as North America. Geographic distance, however, does not necessarily mean a lack of community. Tribal communities can be connected through citizenship, family and kinship, culture and ceremony, Tribal governance, relationships to homeland, and shared experiences, even when people live hundreds of miles apart.
In research and evaluation, “community” is often operationalized through geography. We may define an area by reservation boundaries, identify participants based on where they live, or recruit people who are physically accessible to a program. These approaches may make sense logistically, but they can unintentionally narrow our understanding of who constitutes the community.
Institutional processes can further complicate these questions. Research conducted through an academic institution may require Institutional Review Board (IRB) review, while research involving Tribal communities may also require Tribal review or other forms of community oversight. These processes are important safeguards, particularly given the history of research conducted on and about Indigenous Peoples. Yet institutional approval does not, by itself, answer whether the right people have been engaged or whether the community has had meaningful influence over the work.
Community is more than a geographic location. A reservation boundary identifies a place, but it does not necessarily capture the relationships, citizenship, kinship, cultural connections, and responsibilities that connect people to their Tribal community.
Consultation and representation are not the same thing. A Tribal government may provide space and time for consultation, and a community advisory board may provide programmatic input. Individual Tribal citizens and community members also have their own voices and perspectives that researchers and evaluators must consider. Each serves a purpose.
Being Indigenous does not mean I speak for every Tribal community. I am still a guest when I visit Tribal communities other than my own. My experiences as a Tribal citizen inform how I understand evaluation, but they do not give me authority to speak for others.
Accessibility is not the same as representation. The people who are easiest to reach are not necessarily the people who should define the community, its priorities, or what meaningful engagement looks like.
The larger question may be: Who defines community? For Indigenous evaluation, that question is connected to sovereignty, self-determination, relationships, and responsibility. There may not be one definition of community that applies across Tribal Nations or Indigenous communities.
Getting to the Heart of Community: Creating a Culturally Responsive Evaluation Framework (Notah Begay III Foundation, 2020) offers a practical example of how Indigenous communities can shape an evaluation framework around their own values and definitions of success. Developed with the Zuni Youth Enrichment Project, the resource demonstrates a process for centering community priorities, cultural connections, and Indigenous ways of understanding impact.
Sometimes community is a place. Sometimes it is a relationship. Sometimes it is both. Our work begins by taking the time to understand the difference.
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