Honouring the Past, Pace and Ways of Knowing: How to co-create space for Indigenous ways of knowing and being

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Indigenous elders, community members and scholars have long called for greater reliance on culturally relevant ways of knowing and doing. In this global webinar series, our aim is to learn effective ways for putting evidence at the centre of everyday life. Now, in partnership with the Indigenous Health Learning Lodge (IHLL) at McMaster University, the fifth session in our series aims to co-create space for discussions about Indigenous rights and ways of knowing and where there may be synergies with efforts to put evidence at the centre of everyday life.

The key question we will address is: How do we co-create space for the inclusion of Indigenous self-determining process when we are putting evidence at the centre of everyday life? In answering this question, we will consider ways to honour the past work that’s been carried out, match the pace required for building trusting relationships and apply Indigenous ways of knowing.

• Honouring the past – How can we better rely on existing Indigenous evidence that was created by Indigenous scholars and in partnership with Indigenous communities?
  
• Matching the pace – How can we build trust and relationships with Indigenous communities to support the co-creation of new evidence by and with them relying on processes, and the pace, that respects Indigenous self-determination, rights, perspectives and ways of knowing and doing?
  
• Applying Indigenous ways of knowing – How can we co-create the spaces where Indigenous peoples’ voices leads the way, with diverse oral history and worldviews passed on through teachings and stories over a millennia.  
  

Recent history has well-documented processes that are instrumental to honouring this past, pace and ways of knowing. Take for example the First Nations data principles of ownership, control, access and possession (the OCAP principles) and the International Indigenous Data Sovereignty Interest Group developed the CARE Principles for Indigenous Data Governance (with CARE capturing the first letters of collective benefit, authority to control, responsibility, and ethics). These principles were designed in response to the FAIR guiding principles for open data (with FAIR capturing findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable). The goal is that stewards and users of Indigenous data will be ‘FAIR’ and ‘CARE.’ Such evidence- related rights should be understood as part of a much broader set of rights established through the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

In partnership with IHLL, this webinar is part of the series hosted by three groups working together to ‘put evidence at the centre of everyday life,’ including Cochrane (the world’s largest producer of evidence syntheses and home to the Cochrane Consumer Network), the Global Commission on Evidence to Address Societal Challenges (with one if its three implementation priorities being ‘putting evidence at the centre of everyday life,’ which is being overseen by the Citizen Leadership Group), and the World Health Organization’s Evidence-informed Policy Network (EVIPNet) with its work on Citizen Engagement in Evidence-informed Policymaking.

Hosts

• Global Evidence Commission and the Indigenous Health Learning Lodge
• Clifford Mushquash, Advisor, Indigenous Engagement, McMaster Health Forum

Speakers

• Jennifer Walker, Haudenosaunee member of the Six Nations of the Grand River, Lead of the research hub at the Indigenous Health Healing Lodge, and associate professor at McMaster University
• Bernice Downey, a woman of Ojibwe and Celtic heritage, a medical anthropologist, retired nurse, researcher and the inaugural Associate Dean of Indigenous Health at McMaster University
• Other speakers to be confirmed

Series Description

Citizens frequently make decisions where evidence would be helpful but face many challenges in doing so—from too much or inaccessible information to the deliberate spread of misinformation. This webinar series titled, Putting evidence at the centre of everyday life: A global webinar series for citizen leaders and citizen-serving NGOs, pushes past the rhetoric about engaging citizens in evidence-informed decision-making and zeroes in on actionable ways to help citizen leaders and those who serve them, e.g., non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and governments – from finding reliable information to knowing which types of questions to ask to making evidence-based choices the default or easy option, and more. While these are early days in understanding ‘what works’ in putting evidence at the centre of everyday life, this global webinar series will identify what is going well that needs to be systematized and scaled up, and what gaps should be prioritized to fill, and to work with government policymakers and citizen-serving NGOs, among others, to push for these improvements.

This webinar series takes place between June 2023 and October 2024:

• Session I. The big picture – Putting evidence at the centre of everyday life (Jun 2023)

• Session II. Citizen-backed evidence – Engaging citizens in providing evidence synthesis and support (including for evidence-informed policy-making) (Aug 2023)

• Session III. Battling the bunk – Bringing evidence and citizen engagement to bear in addressing misinformation (Nov 2023)

• Session IV. Pushing past platitudes – from co-design to holding leaders to account for achieving real system transformation felt by real people in everyday life (Feb 2024)