Mike Evans

Common Insights, Differing Methodologies Toward a Fusion of Indigenous Methodologies, Participatory Action Research, and White Studies in an Urban Aboriginal Research Agenda

In this article, we discuss three broad research approaches: indigenous methodologies, participatory action research, and White studies. We suggest that a fusion of these three approaches can be useful, especially in terms of collaborative work with indigenous communities. More specifically, we argue that using indigenous methodologies and participatory action research, but refocusing the object of inquiry directly and specifically on the institutions and structures that indigenous peoples face, can be a particularly effective way of transforming indigenous peoples from the objects of inquiry to its authors. A case study focused on the development of appropriate research methods for a collaborative project with the urban aboriginal communities of the Okanagan Valley in British Columbia, Canada, provides an illustration of the methodological fusion we propose.

Globalization, diet, and health: an example from Tonga

The increased flow of goods, people, and ideas associated with globalization have contributed to an increase in noncommunicable diseases in much of the world. One response has been to encourage lifestyle changes with educational programmes, thus controlling the lifestyle-related disease. Key assumptions with this approach are that peoples food preferences are linked to their consumption patterns, and that consumption patterns can be transformed through educational initiatives. To investigate these assumptions, and policies that derive from it, we undertook a broad-based survey of food-related issues in the Kingdom of Tonga using a questionnaire. Data on the relationships between food preferences, perception of nutritional value, and frequency of consumption were gathered for both traditional and imported foods. The results show that the consumption of health-compromising imported foods was unrelated either to food preferences or to perceptions of nutritional value, and suggests that diet-related diseases may not be amenable to interventions based on education campaigns. Given recent initiatives towards trade liberalization and the creation of the World Trade Organization, tariffs or import bans may not serve as alternative measures to control consumption. This presents significant challenges to health policy-makers serving economically marginal populations and suggests that some population health concerns cannot be adequately addressed without awareness of the effects of global trade.

Persistence of the Gift: Tongan Tradition in Transnational Context

A detailed ethnographic and historical analysis of how traditional Tongan values continue to play key roles in the way that Tongans make their way in the modern world.

Consumption of traditional versus imported foods in Tonga: implications for programs designed to reduce diet-related non-communicable diseases in developing countries

In Tonga as elsewhere, consumption of inexpensive, high calorie, fatty foods are associated with increases in diet-related non-communicable diseases (NCDs). Programs have been designed to educate people about dangers associated with these foods, but if consumption has increased for economic reasons (e.g., price or availability), such programs may have minimal impact, and other policy options are warranted. A quantitative questionnaire study was conducted in Tonga using a broad sample from different areas (n = 430). The survey elicited information on: preferences for, frequency of consumption of, perception of nutritional value of, and (for a subset) the availability of, 36 traditional and imported foods. People prefer traditional foods and accurately perceive these as more nutritious. However, consumption patterns do not coincide with preference or nutritional value. Policy designed to improve NCDs should, therefore, address the general linkage between economic development and detrimental consumption patterns, and promote the availably and cost competitiveness of healthier, traditional foods.

Visibility and Voice Aboriginal People Experience Culturally Safe and Unsafe Health Care

In Canada, cultural safety (CS) is emerging as a theoretical and practice lens to orient health care services to meet the needs of Aboriginal people. Evidence suggests Aboriginal peoples’ encounters with health care are commonly negative, and there is concern that these experiences can contribute to further adverse health outcomes. In this article, we report findings based on participatory action research drawing on Indigenous methods. Our project goal was to interrogate practices within one hospital to see whether and how CS for Aboriginal patients could be improved. Interviews with Aboriginal patients who had accessed hospital services were conducted, and responses were collated into narrative summaries. Using interlocking analysis, findings revealed a number of processes operating to produce adverse health outcomes. One significant outcome is the production of structural violence that reproduces experiences of institutional trauma. Positive culturally safe experiences, although less frequently reported, were described as interpersonal interactions with feelings visibility and therefore, treatment as a “human being.”

Aboriginal organizational response to the need for culturally appropriate services in three small Canadian cities

• Summary: This component of a larger participatory qualitative case study investigated how urban Aboriginal human service organizations respond to the needs of the growing Aboriginal populations residing in three small cities in the Interior region of British Columbia, Canada. The study focused specifically on the challenges that the organizations experienced in delivering health and social services, and in facilitating access to mainstream services. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with eight senior administrators from seven urban Aboriginal organizations. • Findings: Participants reported numerous barriers to delivering adequate and culturally appropriate services. Their organizations were challenged to provide a complex array of services to a culturally diverse urban Aboriginal population. Moreover, these organizations operated in turbulent economic, institutional and political environments, which presented additional challenges in several areas: recruiting and retaining qualified Aboriginal staff; securing funding; meeting different and conflicting accountability requirements; using political influence; and linking with both mainstream organizations and local Aboriginal communities. • Applications: Fundamental tensions between the existing specialized and expert-based, mainstream system and Aboriginal service providers’ holistic approach to well-being are apparent. Implications for future research, policy and practice needed to promote the development of culturally appropriate and responsive services are discussed.

Reflections on Being, and Becoming, Metis in British Columbia

2This article focuses on the use and meaning of the term Metis and on how different meanings have different consequences for people. We do not pre-define the term as forcing closure at the outset does no service to understanding the issues involved. 3 The history of the nineteenth-century fur trade colony of Red River near present-day Winnipeg, in Rupert’s Land as a whole, and across the St. Lawrence-Great Lakes fur trading system based in Montreal has been interpreted as a Metis experience by a great number of scholars. These include Girard ( 1945), Sprage and Frye (1983), Peterson and Brown (1985), Foster

Searching for social justice in GIScience publications

ABSTRACT Maps are explicitly positioned within the realms of power, representation, and epistemology; this article sets out to explore how these ideas are manifest in the academic Geographic Information Science (GIScience) literature. We analyze 10 years of literature (2005–2014) from top tier GIScience journals specific to the geoweb and geographic crowdsourcing. We then broaden our search to include three additional journals outside the technical GIScience journals and contrast them to the initial findings. We use this comparison to discuss the apparent technical and social divide present within the literature. Our findings demonstrate little explicit engagement with topics of social justice, marginalization, and empowerment within our subset of almost 1200 GIScience papers. The social, environmental, and political nature of participation, mapmaking, and maps necessitates greater reflection on the creation, design, and implementation of the geoweb and geographic crowdsourcing. We argue that the merging of the technical and social has already occurred in practice, and for GIScience to remain relevant for contributors and users of crowdsourced maps, researchers and practitioners must heed two decades of calls for substantial and critical engagement with the geoweb and crowdsourcing as social, environmental, and political processes.

Relocating a sense of place using the participatory Geoweb: the historical document database of the Métis nation of British Columbia

The interactive capability and ease of use of Geoweb technologies suggest great potential for Aboriginal communities to store, manage, and communicate place-related knowledge. For the MA©tis, who have a long history of dispossession and dispersion in Canada, the Geoweb offers an opportunity in realizing the desire to articulate a coherent sense of place for their people. This paper reports on a community-based research project involving the University of British Columbia (UBC) and the MA©tis Nation of British Columbia (MNBC) – the political body representing the MA©tis people in BC. The project includes the creation of a Geoweb tool specifically designed to facilitate the (self) articulation of a MA©tis community in contemporary BC. It examines how Geoweb technologies have been used to create a participatory, crowd-sourced Historical Document Database (HDD) that takes meaning through the interface of a map. The paper further explores how the data contributed by members of the MA©tis community have been used to capture, communicate, and represent community memories in the dispersed membership. It concludes by examining challenges that have emerged related to platform stability and institutional relations related to the ongoing sustainability of the HDD.

Salmon as Symbol, Salmon as Guide: What Anadromous Fish can do for thinking about Islands, Ecosystems and the Globe

Studies of islands have emerged as a unique and vital focus of research over the last couple decades. Works like Hau’ofa’s 1994 ‘Our Sea of Islands’ have moved us quite systematically towards the study of islands, underlining the dynamic connectedness between terrestrial and marine environments, and between individual islands and elsewhere. By tracing the many and varied ways that salmon (and other actants) connect oceans, islands, and other land forms in an ongoing inter-species dialogue, we can move the discourse one step further, and dissolve islands into a multispecies dialogue made in movement. Such a strategy opens up some insights on the inter-connectedness of islands and others.