Date: Monday, October 13, 2025
My name is Melanie Nadeau and I am a citizen of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians. I am currently serving as Vice Chair and Associate Professor for the Department of Indigenous Health, housed within the School of Medicine and Health Sciences at the University of North Dakota.
A rad resource when working with tribal communities is the American Indian Higher Education Consortium’s Indigenous Evaluation Framework written by Dr. Joan LaFrance and Dr. Richard Nichols. Its content includes Framing Evaluation in our Communities, Weaving the Basket, Creating Knowledge, Core Cultural Values, Engaging Community in Evaluation, Creating our Story, Building the Scaffolding, Responsive Information Gathering and Planning, Implementing and Celebrating. This resource includes a bibliography, exercises, and additional readings.
In developing this Indigenous Evaluation Framework, the authors worked with stakeholders to develop guiding principles which were drawn primarily from the values, knowledge and histories of Tribal Peoples in the United States. The framework can be applied to any tribal community evaluation process and used to build evaluation capacity at the program, community and academic level.
Dr. Joan LaFrance emphasizes the importance of metaphor as a core element of Indigenous Evaluation Frameworks. In contrast to conventional Western evaluation, which often focuses on objective, data-driven measures, LaFrance and other Indigenous scholars advocate for methods that anchor evaluation in the cultural context of community. Metaphor is an important pedagogical tool for teaching Indigenous evaluation frameworks within academic settings, as it helps bridge Western and Indigenous ways of knowing. Culturally grounded metaphors contextualize complex concepts and reinforce Indigenous values by centering Indigenous ways of knowing.
Examples of how metaphors can be used as conceptual frameworks:
Using culturally grounded metaphors for teaching Indigenous Evaluation Frameworks in the academy is an effective method for building Indigenous evaluation capacity. In my IH 761: Indigenous Evaluation Frameworks course for the Indigenous Health PhD program at the University of North Dakota, students are required to develop a culturally grounded metaphor which describes a cultural process. That process is then translated to Indigenous evaluation processes. Students have created a multitude of culturally grounded metaphors, which broadly include culturally grounded teachings, art, food, dance, ceremony, structures and practices, to describe Indigenous evaluation processes.
The use of metaphor grounds the students in the diversity of the class, provides a space for learning and understanding multiple ways of knowing, and builds the students capacity to conduct evaluation in a culturally grounded way.
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