Our Meeting – Learning Together: Indigenous Community Research Partnerships

Hi Everyone,

I am writing to provide an update on our meeting, Learning Together: Indigenous Community Research Partnerships.

We were fortunate to be able to gather on the unceded Algonquin Anishinaabe territory, at the Queen’s Biological Station. We met as a group of Indigenous and non-Indigenous community members and researchers in October, for three days.

Our meeting was an interactive participatory gathering about the open-access online training resource, Indigenous Community Research Partnerships, that has been developed to train non-Indigenous researchers or those on a journey of learning, to support community-driven research.

We had the guidance of an Elder and an Indigenous facilitator who supported our group. We were surrounded by beauty of the woods and lake, and were accommodated in a safe and comfortable environment far from regular routines. 

An important element of our event was to build reciprocal relationships. It was such an honour to have everyone join at the meeting. Thank you!

I really appreciated the opportunity to share meals and engage in meaningful and creative activities together. 

In this setting, we shared our views on research and learning from partnerships with community members. And, there was discussion about how to work together and move our work with the training resource forward as part of a broader agenda to decolonize academic institutions. 

Some of our conversations brought up the difficulties faced with institutional barriers, and we shared ideas and ways to deal with these barriers. 

Perhaps most important is that we discussed plans for appropriate next steps with the training resource.  We had some wonderful ideas about how to take action together to support community–driven research.

Now, we need to agree on our actions.

To help us take these next steps, the materials from our event will be put together as a report on our time together – both as a document and some form of audio-visual product. 

We (the meeting participants) will co-produce these items (document, multi-media product) and once everyone agrees, we can plan how to share our news outside our group.

Since our event, I can – more than ever before – see a time when we won’t need something like the training resource. 
One day, academic institutions will be structured to reflect person-and community-centred values, and the people at the institutions will understand how to uphold and take action to support respectful and inclusive relationships that Indigenous people define as genuine. 

Our Learning Together event has brought us closer to that time.

Best wishes,
Janet