First Person,First Peoples

Abstract

This article documents the author’s personal journey as a new evaluator traversing paradigms, continents, and timelines on a quest to discover how best to practice evaluation for the benefit of Maori people (indigenous to New Zealand). The journey has taken the author to a number of evaluation conferences in Australasia and North America, which she has used as monitoring tools to help assess both her progress and the progress of indigenous evaluation generally. The article reports on the positioning of the indigenous evaluation journey from the global perspective afforded by attendance at these conferences. As well, from an indigenous perspective, it documents the author’s insights into the social interactions and internal politics of the evaluation conference “culture.”