The Urban Indian Health Institute’s evaluation values

In 2018, the Urban Indian Health Institute (UIHI) developed an Indigenous Evaluation Framework grounded in four key cultural values:

1. “Community is created wherever Native people are
2. Resilient and strength-based
3. Decolonizing data
4. Centering of the community.”³ L. Polansky and A. Echo-Hawk, Building the Sacred: An Indigenous Evaluation Framework for Programs Serving Native Survivors of Violence (Seattle, WA: Urban Indian Health Institute, Seattle Indian Health Board, 2021), 5.

 
Building on these values, Indigenous practitioners working with survivors of violence emphasised that evaluation should contribute to restoring Indigenous systems of care and protection for women and girls. This led to the identification of three additional intentions to guide evaluation practices:

• Committing to working from a place of cultural values and community protections in evaluation work.
• Sharing safe, healing and effective evaluation approaches that Indigenous practitioners are creating within their own communities for the benefit of their communities.
• Engaging in reciprocity. In exchange for the gift of information and stories shared, it is the responsibility of the gatherer, the observer and the listener to care for them and to use them for the benefit of the relatives that gifted them.⁴ L. Polansky and A. Echo-Hawk, Building the Sacred: An Indigenous Evaluation Framework for Programs Serving Native Survivors of Violence (Seattle, WA: Urban Indian Health Institute, Seattle Indian Health Board, 2021), 5.