Partnership through Story: Promising Practices for Meaningful Research

There are conflicting ideas about how to develop effective research partnerships between tribal colleges and universities (TCUs) and research institutions. Central to this conflict are considerations about who benefits when partnerships are developed and how to create collaborations that center on the needs of the Native communities they are intended to serve. Traditional research partnerships developed between mainstream universities, TCUs, grassroots organizations, and Indigenous community members have historically privileged the mainstream institutions while devaluing the contributions of the others (Smith, 2012). Moreover, research partnerships across Indian Country tend to be extractive, taking knowledge from tribal communities for the benefit of predominantly non-Indigenous serving institutions (Wilson, 2008). In response to these realities, two doctoral students enrolled at North Dakota State University (NDSU), formed a partnership to address these imbalances while advancing the role of Indigenous knowledge within traditional education paradigms. These students, one Native and one non-Native, endeavored to bridge understanding related to Indigenous knowledge and worldviews with the goal of developing a partnership between NDSU and United Tribes Technical College (UTTC) where one of the students is employed. From this initial partnership emerged a planning team that sought to address these imbalances and to reimagine what partnerships in tribal communities might accomplish when TCU values, relationships, and reciprocity are at the heart of institutional partnerships. Determining where to begin when attempting to co-construct meaning about relationship-based partnerships among Indigenous and non-Indigenous people poses challenges, including the degree of shared contextual understanding about what it means to work from and within an Indigenous perspective. From this premise, faculty, staff, and students from UTTC and NDSU, along with community members such as consultants from Indigenous grassroots organizations, began a journey of learning, reflection, and discussion in the form of a book study focused on Indigenous research methodology as a starting point to foster a shared learning space.