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"I think that the thing I most want you to remember is that research is a ceremony. And so is life. Everything that we do shares in the ongoing creation of our universe." (Shawn Wilson)

"Knowledge and peoples will cease to be objectified when researchers fulfill their role in the research relationship through their methodology." (Shawn Wilson)

Evaluation is Sacred

As part of our final gathering, everyone involved in the Learning Pathway reflected about the most significant changes they had experienced throughout the process, and about important learnings they would like to share with others. One experience/learning rose to the top for nearly everyone: coming to understand evaluation as sacred.

“… my view on how connected our experiences are, but also how our individual experiences shape how we approach things. So I found myself a lot of the time reflecting ‘that's not the way I thought of it’. And what really shifted for me was around the wording of sacred and how sacred the information is. And oftentimes I really attributed that sacredness to Elders and knowledge holders, and not necessarily sacred to the experience within community or that general everyday kind of evaluation, and it really shifted kind of how I viewed it: All of this information is sacred, because all of this information is so relevant. And I brought some sweet grass as an artifact, because I think it really represents the shift that I felt. So that's the most significant change, which I think is from a personal perspective, a really great opportunity for growth and connecting with community in a different way. It was a big aha moment for me. And I feel very grateful that I was there for that”. (Learning Pathway participant)

Weaving Sacred Elements throughout the Process

From our opening gathering of the Learning Pathway, we consciously invited the sacred into our shared process. We did this with the presence and teachings of respected and loved community elders and leaders, by sharing cultural practices and framing the work with cultural artifacts, by bringing African Nova Scotian and Mi’kmaw cultures together, by incorporating music into each gathering, and by exploring Africentric and Indigenous worldviews of evaluation.

Presence and teachings of respected and loved community elders and leaders

The presence of the Wisdom Circle, respected community leaders who provided guidance throughout the process, offered a foundational element of the sacred.

“The Wisdom Circle members were critical…. I feel like there are people that have been working in this field for a really long time. And it's not I'm trying to, I'm searching for the word, I'm kind of pausing because it's not credibility; it's like it's almost like community, they brought community into the work. So there was a familiarity about the people, there was a lot of respect for those three people. And I felt like the three of them were showing up for the evaluators who were participating. I just had that sense that they were really committed to the work. And I think it's, for me, I guess I seem to judge everything by, what kind of energy is it and it just always felt like having those three really generated some excitement and energy around the work. And they always had such thoughtful things to say every time they spoke, I was just soaking it up”. (Learning Pathway participant)

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“Wisdom Circle members bring in culture. I love how they always incorporated in the planning some sort of new knowledge of culture they would bring, whether it's talking about braiding or whether it's bringing in the drum or different things that we did or a Sankofa figure. It was really cool to kind of ground ourselves in that”. (Learning Pathway participant)

Sharing cultural practices and framing the work with cultural artifacts

Wisdom Circle members, facilitation team members and several participants wove culture throughout the Learning Pathway gatherings by offering their presence, opening and closing prayers, by talking about evaluation as relational, by exploring cultural artifacts and metaphors to inform evaluation thinking and framing, by leading us in talking circles and sharing circles, by telling stories, by inviting participants to share artifacts to reflect feelings and symbolize meaning, and by always modeling the importance of culture.

Our February gathering focused on framing evaluation. Wisdom Circle members led this topic by sharing cultural artifacts and guiding discussions about how the artifacts can serve as metaphors for framing our thinking about evaluation.

Jamboard sheet featuring some cultural artifacts

“The braiding concept from the cultural artifacts we discussed is staying with me. I’m thinking about how when we bring the different perspectives and organizations together it builds that beautiful braid, that connection. That is some of the most powerful stuff. I’ve never thought about evaluation that way before - that was really really cool. I think what that means is for me to understand that there are different perspectives. And when you do bring all of that together, when you allow for those different perspectives to be showcased, that it creates a beautiful evaluation that is more thorough”. (Learning Pathway participant)

Culture was a strong strand of the Learning Pathway braid, and an experience in the final gathering emphasized participants’ respect for community leaders and the significance of their presence in the process. Due to unexpected circumstances the day of our final (and only in-person) gathering, some Wisdom Circle members were not able to participate. Their presence was missed, and participants felt a gap when the community leaders could not provide closure to the overall process by holding the space and offering guidance and prayers. In the moment we couldn’t have prevented this situation; and if leadership had been shared among a larger group of community leaders, someone would have been present to hold space and provide the guidance participants needed.

Bringing African Nova Scotian and Mi’kmaw cultures together

Most participants felt that bringing African Nova Scotian and Mi’kmaw participants together to learn about each other's cultures enhanced the learning process and added an element of reverence and celebration:

“It [bringing the two cultures together] needs to be part of it. No matter what. I think it works well…I definitely would affirm for me that it was a great experience. It was a learning experience as well. So I think that was important in particular in our Nova Scotia context. I think doing that and acknowledging that value, that also respects that there's a very uniqueness here for us so I couldn't imagine having experienced it fully and not feeling a gap if bringing both cultures together wasn't there”. (Wisdom Circle member)

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“I always knew that there were similarities between the Black community and First Nation communities in Nova Scotia in particular, but through this process I’m really seeing it firsthand. It’s different struggles and different worldviews, but very similar approaches to taking on these things and cultivating your culture and reinforcing it and it's a celebration”. (Learning Pathway participant)

And this was not true for everyone:

“I feel like we spent a lot of time chatting about our own things and talking about hypothetical connection pieces, which didn't necessarily fit in for me. I wouldn't use Indigenous strategies in a Black community. So those pieces were not, although it was beautiful to watch, sometimes it felt inappropriate. I was like, I won't be reusing this, so why are we spending several hours going into these things if it's not relatable to this content? Maybe you should have said ‘If you're working in an Indigenous community, these are spiritual practices, connecting pieces, I'm not sure that everyone would have wanted to learn about Sankofa - not that it's not nice to know. But it wasn't a good use of my time in the evening. They certainly didn't guide my work in any way. But again, not that I didn't enjoy learning about it, I did. I just thought, you know, if we're going to be committing this time, I would have liked to have it be centered on the work that I was doing, that people were doing in other Black communities that I can actually relate to”. (Learning Pathway participant)

Incorporating music into each gathering

Something that came about kind of serendipitously initially and was solidly at the centre of the sacred throughout the Learning Pathway was incorporating music into each gathering... I wanted to play music to welcome people and make them feel comfortable and in their heart spaces as they joined the first gathering. I thought about playing some African or Indigenous music and I was cautioned against cultural appropriation. So I chose a solidly Canadian piece of music, To your shore by Jessie Cook. It was a good choice - several people commented on how much they enjoyed it.

In the moment I asked if someone would like to pick music for the next gathering. And it grew from there. Participants took turns choosing music to play as people were arriving and on the break for each gathering, and they talked about what the music meant to them and why they had chosen it.

They made their selections with great care and thought; a couple of times people told me they wanted to do it but needed more time to think about exactly what they wanted to play. The music represented who they were in the world. And so we built a Learning Pathway playlist together, and it is one of the artifacts of the Learning Pathway.

“You know what I liked best about those meetings? The music. I thought, yeah, that's a good way to like, learn about folks and see where they're coming from and who they are. Without getting too wordy. I liked it”. (Learning Pathway participant)

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“I thought it was so simple, but I think it's so great about everyone contributing different music and sounds like to have that playlist. I think that's a really cool product”. (Facilitation Team member)

Learning Pathway Playlist

Exploring Africentric and Indigenous worldviews of evaluation

In our January gathering we started looking at Indigenous and Africentric worldviews on evaluation, and contrasted them with a colonial definition.

Nicky Bowman, a Mohican/Lunaape evaluator in Turtle Island, explains that Indigenous peoples see themselves as caretakers of knowledge, community, and family; being relational in interactions; and having responsibilities to all things in nature, in the spirit world, and to each other.

Bagele Chilisa and her colleagues describe emerging African indigenous evaluation approaches below as dominated by the African definition of self, relations with one another, the environment, and the living and the nonliving.

We contrasted these approaches to the Canadian Evaluation Society’s definition of evaluation:

The difference is stark to me. The colonial definition doesn’t reflect anything about who we are as people, our relationships with each other, our care and responsibility to the natural world, or our respect and love for those who came before us, or about future generations. This definition is flat, dead. It certainly doesn’t reflect anything sacred.

Naming the Sacredness of Evaluation

I think by weaving these sacred elements through our process, and by framing and discussing different phases of evaluation through African and Indigenous relational worldviews, we were touching the sacredness of evaluation. When Dr. Marlene Ruck Simmonds came to our May session as a guest speaker to talk about Africentric approaches to sensemaking (the analysis phase of evaluation) she named the whole evaluation process as sacred, and I could feel things clicking into place for people.

“Dr. Marlene, thank you for declaring the data collected sacred and embedding the data into the Nguzo Saba symbols. If the data collectors honour these principles then the stories gathered will be respected and hopefully protected with the intention of making real change”. (Learning Pathway participant)

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“My artifact [symbolizing my most significant change] is a turtle, because I'm from Turtle Island. And if you look at the shape of North America, you can trace out the pattern of the turtle. So what does that have to do with evaluation? Well, I think a lot of people here talked about how important it is to involve Elders and their wisdom. The most significant change for me through evaluation would be how sacred information is and how we treat it. Quality is more important than quantity, the information should serve our communities, should be useful information. And I've always been taught that we should think seven generations ahead of us - that we should leave a better place than what we came into. So that's how I tie in my turtle with this evaluation project. I feel like that's what we're doing. The work that we're doing here is very important for the next generations to come into this world” (Learning Pathway participant)

“But first, I'll start with the Sankofa. So I want to use the Sankofa as a learning tool to go on into the community to catch the wisdom from the people in the community. And using this as a part to build for our future, with it being generational with the information right now for the project that we're doing and moving it further into generational.

And then Nia, which is the purpose and setting the goals and the benefits for the community. So it's just not just for one community, but it's for more communities. How can we go into other communities and help them to learn how to, instead of keeping it, as you say, as one family, how can we share that information so that other people are engaging in these conversations? How is information being shared? Who's sitting around the tables, because as you mentioned, that doesn't have to be the big stakeholders, it can be just our elders, or even some younger generations because … eventually, this will be passed down.

And then the drum - I use the drum because the drum is a really important piece. Bringing people together in community, it's sacred. And it's also another piece of guidance, giving directions for which way we're going to go, what it's used for, it's used for bringing together not just for sadness, but it's communication, as Crystal had beat on the drum. And there's different ways you go hard with the in the palm, and then the outside, it just brings like, it's a symbolic piece, I think about some of the pieces around the freedom under the rail voice. There was codes, there was ways it strengthens, it strengthens communities, just sitting sometimes and just listening to the stories are really, really important. And I've been doing that a lot. And it's been bringing a lot of how I look at things through a different lens now how I know I can go back to my community, and fetch and do some great work from being around this table. The wisdom piece is really important.

The elephant - I use the elephant, because the elephant is also strength. And our strength comes from our elders in our community. And a lot of people don't know, I don't know if people are really understanding who elders are, and the strength and the wisdom that elders bring to the community. So I think using some of this language, language is really important in how it's represented. Because some children, you talk about an elder, what does an elder mean, they might not even understand they don't understand what an elder is, and the piece that is so connected to our family. So this brings in the loyalty. It's bringing some independence into the community and also, it strengthens and it empowers. So I use the elephant as that.

And then I had the lotus. So the lotus is a flower and it's actually a beautiful flower. And it grows in the mud, which it's a spiritual symbol. And it's rooted deep down into the mud. So how far do our roots go? And how do they expand? So the lotus is a beautiful flower. And it symbolizes the obstacles and a journey. It brings out the flourishes, wisdom, strengths in us and it can increase how we develop and where we want to go”.

As part of acknowledging the process as a whole and honouring the presence and sacredness of the people and energy that came together to create this experience, and with great humility and love, I am opening up my writing processes as it is unfolding to the Learning Pathway folks to weave through their thoughts, critiques, and perspectives. This feels terrifying - because I don’t want to get it’ wrong’ and freeing - because it is our story and we are all learning.

Reflection & Implications

Some potential implications for Community Psychology and evaluation about honouring the sacredness of evaluation and other processes that take place in community include:

Community leaders must be present: The presence, guidance, and teachings of respected community leaders is essential to holding space for participants in this kind of learning journey to make participants feel safe and supported, and for connecting their experiences and learnings back to culture and communities.
Build in critical reflection processes: People don’t all feel the same way about the way processes are designed, what makes them sacred, or even whether they should be sacred. It would be exceptional for everyone to want the same thing from a shared process, or to agree that they found what they were looking for from it. While it may not be possible to please everyone, we can be as explicit as possible about what we are doing, and how and why we are doing it. This may be difficult in an emergent process that is continually evolving - and we need to be honest about this. Building in continual opportunities for people to reflect on their experiences and provide feedback and input on adapting the process creates opportunities for needed conversations and is beneficial for informing the way we are doing the work.We have to accept and respect critique of the work and use it as an opportunity to learn and improve. Engaging the people involved in co-creating the process will help ensure it is meeting people’s needs, and will help people decide if the process is a good match for them.
Talk about what makes a space sacred: Some processes for inviting in the sacred may work better for some people than others. When making an intentional effort to make a space sacred, we may adopt several different processes, hoping there will be something sacred for everyone. Being explicit about trying to create a sacred space and asking people what is sacred for them would serve the intent of co-creating the space, and make it more likely that people will find what they are looking for.
Being in the presence of community is sacred: Inviting the sacred in is not only about weaving sacred elements into the spaces we share; it’s about recognizing that being in the presence of community is sacred, and that evaluation must honour that. Coming together with community members and thinking about how to improve the community, how to ask questions, what questions to ask, taking only what you need, coming together to answer the questions, figuring out what the answers mean and how they can help future generations is all sacred.

Critical Reflection Questions about Seeing Evaluation as Sacred

Some questions for Community Psychologists and evaluators to consider in relation to honouring the sacred in processes with community:

How can we have a conversation about what is sacred to the community we are working with? Do they want the space to be sacred? How do we work with communities and community leaders to put those things in place?
Who are the respected and beloved community leaders who are needed to guide this work? Who do we ask? Who should be asking? Do we have existing trusting relationships with community members and leaders to have this conversation? If not, how do we cultivate these relationships in the long term?
What do we need to put in place so people can provide their ongoing feedback and input about what they want and need to make a space sacred? How can the people involved contribute to making spaces sacred?
What can we learn from people’s critiques of the process of creating sacred spaces, and how do we learn from them and use them to improve what we are doing?
In what ways does this evaluation process honour the sacred? Do my thoughts and actions and interactions reflect the sacred? Do I/how can I understand the sacredness of evaluation? Who can do this evaluation work in a way that honours the sacred?
How does the evaluation benefit the community, honour the ancestors, and support future generations?

Here is a description of the Learning Pathway. It’s set up as a stand-alone piece so readers can refer to it easily throughout the blog series.

The main purpose of this blog series is to share learnings (and perspectives) from the Learning Pathway experience that could be valuable to others interested in transforming evaluation so that it can better serve racialized communities, and influencing the evaluation ecosystem to support racial justice.

In the blogs series we will be exploring:

Search the Learning Pathway

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