Evergreen Call for Roots & Relations Submissions 

Roots & Relations, 

a Permanent Section of the Canadian Journal of Program Evaluation (CJPE)

The purpose of Roots and Relations (R&R) is to honour our lineage, grow our kinship and sustain our intergenerational legacies of Indigenous wisdom and practices in and through evaluation. R&R will work to sacredly hold traditional knowledge, celebrate and make visible culture and language utilization, protect and assert sovereignty, provide space for Indigenous voices and celebrate Indigenous wisdom and innovations in and through the lens of evaluation.

Download the information package for the Roots & Relations submission evergreen call!

To make a Roots & Relations submission, please visit the CJPE Scholar One portal.

View Roots & Relations articles in this living list of publications

About the Roots & Relations Co-editors

Larry Bremner

Larry Bremner (Métis) is a former CES national president, CES Fellow, and award winner. He established Proactive Information Services Inc. in 1984 to provide evaluation services to the not-for-profit and public sectors. He has worked across Canada in urban, rural, remote, and Indigenous communities, and throughout Europe. Larry was the driving force behind the creation of EvalPartners' global network EvalIndigenous and was its first chair. Proud of his Métis heritage, he is passionate about equity and access. Larry believes we are compelled to create a future that is inclusive, if we are to address today's crucial social, environmental, and economic issues.

Dr. Nicole Bowman

Nicole Bowman (Mohican/Lunaape), Ph.D. is a culturally responsive evaluator through the Wisconsin Evaluation Collaborative (WEC) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and her own private firm, Bowman Performance Consulting, LLC (BPC). By utilizing traditional Indigenous knowledge, systems, and culturally responsive evaluation theories/methods she builds capacity, designs studies, and builds effective and evidence based models for Tribal and non-Tribal partners nationally and globally. By working “with” people and not “on” them, her policy, evaluation, and professional practices have helped to empower and improve the capacities and strengthen the impacts from hundreds of projects nationally and internationally.

Join our community as a reviewer! 

Help nurture Indigenous voices in evaluation by sharing feedback on submissions in progress.
For more information, contact Larry at larry@proactive.mb.ca, Nicky at nicky@bpcwi.com, or Paisley at cjpe@evaluationcanada.ca.

The vision for R&R is that it will:

• Develop and sustain a welcoming and safe space for any Indigenous led contributions to be considered, discussed, reviewed, and published in order to keep evaluation decolonized and with an Indigenous focus (p. 353, Bowman, Dodge Francis, and Tyndall, 2015).

• Establish a place of Indigenous branded scholarship where Indigenous contributors can offer a diverse offering of published evaluation work that is not limited only to text submissions.

• Utilize blended model for the editorial process that incorporates a traditional Indigenous framework and review process for the purposes of curious inquiry, holistic human development, engaged learning, and kinship supports on the pathway to future publication.

• Inclusion of intergenerational relationships (youth or young adults through Elders) so the origins and purposes of R&R remains rooted in traditional knowledge and language, cultural protocols and practices, nation-to-nation (Bowman, 2019) and inclusion of Tribal/First Nation sovereignty, and Indigenous ethics as a sustainable, regenerative, and celebratory pathway for publishing representative Indigenous scholarship.

R&R submissions are aligned with the four directions of the Medicine Wheel (Bowman, 2018) that help us have a holistic and traditionally rooted perspective as we view evaluation:

• Eastern Door: Be a Good Relative. We come to the work rested and ready in ways that reflect traditional, cultural, and spiritual ways of knowing as a process where we respectfully listen and seek to understand first, then decide on best pathways together.

• Southern Door: Be of Good Mind. This is the awakening, rooting, and centering of pre-contact and post-contact Indigenous and community- centered and created knowledge and practices that are restorative, regenerative, strength based, protect the privacy, and respect the sovereignty of Indigenous nations related to data, cultural, intellectual, human, and non-human.

• Western Door: Do Good Work. This supports the development of culturally specific responsive and regenerative strategies, studies, policies, processes, and work products that align with the need for healthy, reciprocal, respectful and relevant Indigenous approaches to evaluation.

• Northern Door: Be on a Good Journey. Using the wisdom of our Ancestors and Elders, we will be grounded in traditional knowledge to celebrate and share what is working and embrace and learn from challenges. We will support walking on sacred pathways for innovative and sustainable Indigenous evaluation that inspires the next Seven Generations.

Possible topics or content addressed by the submissions includes origin stories; traditional knowledge; oral history; Indigenous theories, frameworks, ethics; working nation to nation; treaties; oral agreements, innovative approaches to Indigenous evaluation; traditional ways of sense making; sustainability; environmental stewardship; and differentiating what “wisdom” is (our Elders) vs. simply the production of more knowledge (western ways).