Miriam Jorgensen

Indigenizing Evaluation Research: How Lakota Methodologies Are Helping "Raise the Tipi" in the Oglala Sioux Nation

At a 1998 meeting of Elders and spiritual leaders convened to consider how best to meet the needs of children and families on the Pine Ridge Reservation, the late wakan iyeska (“spiritual interpreter”) Matthew Zack Bear Shield remarked, “When we followed the Lakota ways and spiritual laws of the universe, the people flourished. Because we went away from the Lakota spiritual calendar, our people suffer and are in chaos.” 1 The spirit of Bear Shield’s remark, that the knowledge and practice of lakol wicohan (“Lakota ways”) are a means of overcoming the colonial oppression the Oglala Lakota oyate (“people”) continue to experience, resonates with an increasingly large constituency in Lakota country. Efforts to recover and actively use traditional knowledge and practices are evident in ongoing work to, for example, advance treaty rights, design interventions for families and children, create more effective institutions of governance, and address conflict and crime. Critically, these efforts also include the recovery and use of Indigenous approaches to research and evaluation, processes of knowledge creation that were once under Indigenous control but have been supplanted by Western ways of knowing promoted by the “scientific community” and non-Native government bureaucracies. This article documents a currently unfolding example of that reclamation, which originated from the desire of evaluators of the “Comprehensive Indian Resources for Community and Law Enforcement” (circle) Project to make the federally mandated evaluation as useful to the Oglala people as possible. Using the models of participatory action research and empowerment evaluation, the circle Project evaluation team has arrived at a way of working that mirrors the Lakota approach to Indigenizing Evaluation Research