Decolonizing research: Collecting Two-Spirit data in culturally affirming ways

Centering Two-Spirit and Indigenous experiences and ways is critical for more respectful, reciprocal, relevant, and responsible health research. Two-Spirit is often equated to an LGBTQ Indigenous participant, thereby rendering this community’s unique experience and history invisible and erasing important distinctions. This type of scholarship becomes a site of colonization.

The challenge is how to collect Two-Spirit data in a culturally safe and affirming way so health research(ers) are given the opportunity to do rigorous sex- and gender-based analysis that promotes science, considers biological sex, and accounts for all genders in an effort to expand our collective understanding(s) within a diversity framework.

This presentation will examine some decolonizing practices to better formulate health research, policies and programs that are relevant, respectful and mindful to Two-Spirit people and communities, or in other words, be a site of reconcilia(c)tion in research.

To redress historically underrepresented respondents like Two-Spirit requires an examination of survey instruments (method of collecting Two-Spirit data); who is recruiting, how is recruitment occurring, and finally the analysis of the data that will impact participation and thereby the research outcomes.

Join this 45 minute webinar on Friday, March 26 at 12 p.m. (PT)!

Register now.

This presentation will use the Mi'kmaw Elder Albert Marshall's Two-Eyed Seeing approach as a framework, where one learns to see from one eye with the strengths of Indigenous knowledges and ways of knowing, and from the other eye with the strengths of Western knowledges and ways of knowing... and learning to use both these eyes together, for the benefit of all. As most will be familiar with Western ways of doing and being, this session will only concentrate on seeing from the Indigenous 'eye'.

After this webinar, the audience will be able to:

• Explore what and who is Two-Spirit and the differences between non-Indigenous understandings, notions and ways such as LGBTQI.
• Discuss practical guidance of best practices for doing more respectful, reciprocal, relevant, and responsible (decolonizing) health research.
• Receive recently published guidance on how to collect Two-Spirit data in a culturally affirming and sensitive way – "Meet the Methods Series: 'What and Who is Two-Spirit?' in Health Research".

Speaker

Harlan Pruden (Nehiyô/First Nations Cree) works with and for the Two-Spirit community locally, nationally and internationally. Currently, Harlan is an educator at Chee Mamuk, an Indigenous public health program at the BC Centre for Disease Control. He is also a co-founder of the Two-Spirit Dry Lab, North America’s first research group/lab that exclusively focuses on Two-Spirit people, communities and/or experiences. In addition, Harlan is the managing editor of the TwoSpiritJournal.com and an advisory member for the Canadian Institutes of Health Research’s Institute of Gender and Health.

Before relocating to Vancouver in 2015, Harlan was co-founder and a director of the NYC community based organization NorthEast Two-Spirit Society. He was also a President Obama appointee to the US Presidential Advisory Council on HIV/AIDS (PACHA), providing advice, information, and recommendations to the Secretary of Health & Human Services and the White House. (In December 2018, Harlan was (happily) fired/dismissed from PACHA by Mr. Trump via Fedex.)