KT Connects - Decolonizing Research: Collecting Two-Spirit Data in Culturally Affirming Ways

KT Connects - Decolonizing Research: Collecting Two-Spirit Data in Culturally Affirming Ways

Speaker - Harlan Pruden (Nehiyô/First Nations Cree) Educator - Chee Mamuk, BC Center for Disease Control

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 that in culturally safe and affirming ways, so health research(ers) are given the opportunity to do rigorous sex- and gender-based analysis that promotes science that considers biological sex and accounts for all genders in an effort to expand our collective understanding(s) within a diversity framework. This presentation examines 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.

Learning objectives:
1. Explore what and who is Two-Spirit and differences between non-Indigenous understandings, notions and ways such as LGBTQI
2. Discuss practical guidance of best practices for doing more respectful, reciprocal, relevant, and responsible (decolonizing) health research
3. 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.”

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'.

Register Here