Date: Thursday, October 16, 2025
Hi, I’m Dr. Jeremy Braithwaite, Communications Co-Chair, Indigenous Peoples in Evaluation, American Evaluation Association; Tribal Research Specialist, Tribal Law and Policy Institute; Co-Founder, EvaluACT. Evaluation often asks communities to adapt to our methods. In Indigenous contexts, however, it is evaluators who must be prepared to adapt in real time. My colleague, Dr. Shelbi Nahwilet Meissner (Luiseño/Cupeño), and I recently conducted a policy evaluation of the Minnesota Department of Health’s Perinatal Health Strategic Plan—an experience that provided a powerful case of how refusal functions not as a barrier to data collection but as meaningful data itself—an assertion of sovereignty that can and should redirect the course of evaluation practice.
Our facilitation plan included creative activities like blackout poetry, where participants were invited to review a copy of the state’s strategic plan and literally strike through any language they did not connect with—emotionally, spiritually, relationally, or otherwise. The idea was to surface what remained as a kind of re-authored text, a community-centered critique and reimagining of the plan’s language. But the plan’s language did not resonate. While some participants began to mark up the text, most simply refused. Instead, they shifted into story, naming experiences of medical racism, criminalization, addiction, and the erasure of Indigenous priorities in state policy. Our original plan of having participants “speak back” to the strategic plan was not viable; participants needed to engage with the strategic plan on their own terms.
This refusal could have been read as failure. The planned activity didn’t “work.” But drawing on Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s articulation of a politics of refusal, we understood something else was happening. Refusal is not silence—it is an assertion of sovereignty. When participants declined to use the state’s words, they created conditions for their own words to lead.
We pivoted. Together, we generated a magnetic poetry word bank from what participants were saying: grief, trust, accountability, blood memory, we are sacred. Once this new word bank was shared on screen, participants were invited to compose their own poems. They could draw from the digital tiles, use their own language, or blend both approaches. The shift worked – participants immediately began writing, and the resulting poems were powerful, layered, and unapologetically critical of both perinatal care systems and the plan itself.
After writing, participants were invited to share their poems aloud. Many did, and the group listened with seriousness, care, and visible emotion. Several poems sparked further dialogue—deepening previous insights or surfacing new ones.
There was also confrontation. Participants challenged one another and called out the assumptions embedded in institutional care models. These tensions were not disruptive—they were generative. They pointed to the emotional labor and political clarity required to talk honestly about birthing, addiction, race, and surveillance.
For us, this moment underscores two commitments for evaluators working in Indigenous contexts:
Honoring refusal requires humility, relational accountability, and a willingness to share power. In return, it opens space for evaluation to be transformative—for communities and for us as practitioners.
For more on refusal in Indigenous feminisms, see Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom through Radical Resistance.
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