Ceremony-Based Participatory Research: An Indigenist Feminist Research Method

Overview: Authors in this workshop describe Ceremony-Based Participatory Research (CeBPR), an innovative, culturally-responsive method of engagement and partnership with Indigenous communities that is absent from the literature. This approach centers culture-based knowledge and interventions, Indigenous theories, and community advocacy within research and intervention design.Proposal text: Research that centers ceremony is a novel but important approach to research with and for Indigenous communities (Walters, 2018). Authors in this workshop describe Ceremony-Based Participatory Research (CeBPR), an innovative, culturally-responsive method of engagement and partnership with Indigenous communities that is absent from the literature. This approach centers culture-based knowledge and interventions, Indigenous theories, and community advocacy within research and intervention design.

In this workshop, a case example of CeBPR will be utilized from a project centering Indigenous health knowledge. CeBPR grounds the project in culture-centered processes that consider spirituality and cultural traditions in data collection. Examples of these strategies include: data collection waves in alignment with the seasons (González, 2000); multilevel participant consent forms emphasizing the participant’s ownership of their data and the ways the data will or will not be shared; protocols for interviews rooted in a southwestern medicine wheel model, emphasizing balance, interconnectedness, and sacred connections between body, mind, and spirit; reflexive witnessing on behalf of the researchers who share personal responses and reactions to the stories with the participants (and each other) after the stories are gathered. We prioritize these processes in building relationships for collaborative knowledge production and ownership (Wilson, 2008). We will describe how researchers designed a process based in Indigenous ceremonial process, values, and ethics. In an interactive activity, we will illustrate the interview method based on multiple levels of witnessing (Iseke, 2011), in which the storyteller is a witness to their own recollection of events, the interviewer is a witness to the process of sharing testimony, and another member of the research team is a “witness in the process of witnessing the testimonies of others” (Iseke, 2011, p.311) Within this method, we are consistent with Indigenous ways of doing by creating a circular relational space, and acknowledging that we, as the researchers, are also dynamically in relationship to the story being told (Iseke 201; Kovach, 2009; Lavallee, 2009; & Wilson, 2008).

The case example project seeks to provide a response to historically colonial processes by creating a community centered and controlled archive that emphasizes traditional Indigenous knowledge in construction and management of intellectual property, cultural artifacts, and the digital commons. Through the inclusion of ceremony and other Indigenous protocols, the recognition of the need for epistemological as well as procedural modifications to research design, implementation, and evaluation, and, often, through the utilization of Indigenous healing strategies as central to the theoretical foundation of the work, these modifications to community-based participatory research represent promising practices for research with Indigenous communities. Using CeBPR methods that engage Indigenous communities in the design, implementation, and evaluation of research projects, and are also rooted in Indigenous epistemologies has the potential to have greater and deeper outcomes for the communities that are among the most vulnerable to health disparities in the United States.