Date: Saturday, October 17, 2026
Tânisi, I am Dr. Gladys Rowe. I am excited to share Building a Bundle for Resurgence, a new card deck and facilitator guide created to support Indigenous and decolonial evaluation practice.
The deck emerged from years of walking alongside Indigenous communities, evaluators, practitioners, and learners who have asked: What could evaluation look like if it were rooted in our values, stories, relationships, responsibilities to land, and commitments to future generations?
It was shaped through lived experience, creative practice, community relationships, project learning, and a refusal of extractive and deficit-based approaches. An advisory circle of Indigenous evaluators, artists, storytellers, and collaborators generously contributed time, teachings, experiences, questions, and feedback to help this resource come to life. Together, they helped strengthen the language, imagery, practices, and stories carried by the cards.
The deck does not claim to represent every Indigenous worldview or approach. It carries the specific relationships and lineages of learning of its contributors. It is intentionally unfinished: an offering that can gather new meaning through the people, places, languages, and teachings it encounters.
The 44 cards are organized into four interconnected categories:
Across these categories, the deck explores Love, Wholism, Context, Collectivity, Respect, Trust, Walking Your Truth, Reciprocity, Humility, and Creativity. The cards offer invitations, teachings, practices, questions, and examples from real evaluation work. They can help people consider what values should guide an evaluation, whose knowledge and authority matter, how stories will be cared for, what relationships require attention, and how learning can support meaningful change and Indigenous resurgence. In addition to the 44 cards there are 8 blank cards so you can build the deck based on your experience.
An accompanying 88-page facilitator guide offers sample sessions and activities for personal reflection, team learning, community engagement, evaluation planning, teaching, mentoring, arts-based sensemaking, partnership mapping, and seasonal reflection. It also provides guidance for preparing and closing a space, engaging Elders and Knowledge Holders, attending to consent and Indigenous data sovereignty, and reflecting on the facilitator’s own positionality. The digital deck and guide experiences are free!
You do not need to move through the deck in order or use many cards at once. Sometimes one card is enough.
You might pull a card before a meeting, invite a team to choose one that reflects where they are, or return to the same card throughout a season. A group developing an evaluation framework might select cards representing its values, practices, questions, and stories. Participants can also create new cards grounded in their own community, land, language, and teachings.
The deck was created first and foremost for Indigenous evaluators, practitioners, learners, organizations, and communities. Non-Indigenous evaluators are invited to approach it as a mirror for examining power, positionality, responsibility, and institutional practice—not as a shortcut to doing Indigenous evaluation.
My hope is that this Bundle travels, grows, and helps us ask better questions, listen more deeply, and practice evaluation with care, courage, creativity, and joy.
Explore the free digital experience and PDF version of Building a Bundle for Resurgence card deck and facilitator guide at gladysrowe.com/deck. Printed sets will be sold at cost beginning October 15, 2026.
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