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In this paper, we highlight the centrality of process in Indigenist community-based participatory research in music education to offer new methodological insights, using a recent investigation that employed conference as research method as a case study. From our perspective as university researchers who are non-Indigenous or Indigenous but not to the land now known as Canada, we describe in detail the process of co-creating a conference grounded in local First Nations Protocols as a research method for our most recent study with Indigenous partners, also showing how the process is related to ceremony. This knowledge creation and sharing conference involved more than 200 Knowledge Keepers, School District Indigenous leaders, and music educators in British Columbia endeavouring to effectively embed Indigenous knowledge in K-12 music classes. We highlight ways we found to be relationally accountable, including providing adequate time to arrive at consensus in all decisions; developing and maintaining trust throughout pandemic lockdowns and restrictions; and locating additional sources of funding to facilitate all Protocols, which led Indigenous participants to report feeling that the conference was a culturally safe place and non-Indigenous participants to report that they found it to be a culturally immersive experience. We became more aware that the very process of discussion and decision making that took place at the many committee and subcommittee meetings leading up to the conference was part and parcel of the ceremonial aspect of this research. Indigenous participants deemed the outcomes and effects of the research/conference credible and trustworthy because they emerged from a planning process that was culturally informed and that had been deemed ethical, legitimate, and appropriate by all planning parties through consensus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Conducting community-based participatory research (CBPR) is a complex endeavor, particularly when training non-academic community members. Though examples of CBPR training programs and protocols have been published, they often address a limited set of concepts and are tailored for university or medical school students. Here, we describe the process of developing an online CBPR training program for American Indian (United States) and Indigenous (Canada) community members to conduct multi-sited ethnographic dementia research. This program is unique in its breadth and depth, as our program covers CBPR theory, methods, practical research, and administrative skills. Significantly, this program centers Indigenous methodology, pedagogy, and processes such as two-eyed seeing, storywork, and decolonization approaches. Key to this training program is a "second-generation" approach which incorporates experiential knowledge from a prior community-based researcher and academic partners and is designed to develop CBPR capacity among community-based researchers and partnering communities. In this paper, we detail the experience of the first cohort of learners and subsequent improvement of the training materials. Unique challenges related to the specific research focus (dementia), population/setting (American Indian/First Nations communities), and technology (rural digital infrastructure) are also discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The primary objective of this systematic review was to investigate how Western focus groups and Indigenous sharing circles have been blended for the study of Indigenous children's health. The secondary objective of this study was to propose recommendations for adapting focus groups to include elements of sharing circles. This systematic review was conducted using a systematic search of original research articles published between 2009 and 2020 that (a) focused on North American Indigenous children's health and (b) used group-based qualitative methods including focus groups and sharing circles. Each of the articles was screened for relevance and quality. The methods sections were reviewed, subjected to qualitative content analysis, and codes were analyzed to identify common themes and synthesize results. We identified 29 articles, most of which followed a community-based participatory research approach. In these publications, most included a community advisory board, ethics approval was obtained, and in some cases, community members were included as research assistants. There was evidence that sharing circles and focus group methods had been blended in the recent Indigenous children's health literature. This was particularly apparent in the authors' approaches to recruitment, location, facilitation techniques, question format and reimbursement. Several groups have published results that describe approaches that successfully incorporated aspects of Indigenous sharing circles into Western focus groups, thus establishing a research method that is culturally safe and appropriate for the study of Indigenous children's health. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]