Date: Friday, October 17, 2025
Greetings, my name is Pamela McCoy Jones. I am Anishinaabe with family ties to Michipicoten First Nation and Batchewana First Nation. As Executive Director at the University of Alberta, I work to strengthen partnerships that ensure Indigenous voices shape language and cultural resurgence. I hold a BA in Native Studies from the University of Alberta, an MPA from the University of Victoria, and I am currently pursuing a Doctorate of Business Administration (DBA) at Athabasca University.
From the very beginning of a five-year language revitalization project, I knew the traditional tools for measuring ‘success’ felt hollow and disconnected from the heart of the work. This feeling was crystallized during a meeting with the project’s evaluation team. When I asked which communities we would be partnering with, they said we were to decide that later.
The implication was unsettling. We, the institution, were expected to choose a community to receive our services, rather than build a partnership from the ground up. This top-down approach, seeing communities as interchangeable endpoints for a pre-set strategy, was the major red flag I had been sensing.
I began searching for a better path, diving into academic articles and government publications. While this research was valuable, it often felt abstract. To me, the beauty of Indigenous evaluation is the centering of community values and the amplification of sovereignty. As Indigenous Peoples, we need to be leading this work and forging new ways to reach shared goals. I needed more than theory; I needed a guiding light.
That light appeared when I discovered the podcast Indigenous Insights with Dr. Gladys Rowe. Here, practitioners shared real-world experiences shaping projects around Indigenous ways of knowing. Their stories moved beyond academic principles and gave me the push to reach out to Dr. Rowe herself. Thankfully, that email led to a collaboration that has reshaped my entire approach. We are now working together on the Supporting Indigenous Language Revitalization (SILR) project, embedding an Indigenous evaluation framework at its core.
Guided by Dr. Rowe and her team, our work is no longer about proving success through numbers, but about understanding and sharing the stories of impact. For the SILR evaluation partnership, we know that Indigenous languages and teachings are not an ‘add-on’, they are the framework itself. Building an aligned framework meant understanding how the evaluation could sustain language revitalization by allowing Indigenous values to guide our partnership.
One way we lived this out was through the Story Seeds card deck, an arts-based tool that honors oral traditions and collective meaning-making. These story seeds emerged from the mid-term evaluation’s Promising Practices process, where community members, learners, and Elders identified strengths and pathways for sustaining language work. The tool brings these reflections together to deepen intentional practice and decision-making. This approach ensures that evaluation is not just a report at the end, but a living practice rooted in Indigenous knowledges and the stories that carry our futures.
This journey of learning and unlearning is far from over. To hear directly from Indigenous participants and explore the stories that guide us, I invite you to read our mid-term evaluation.
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