Complex Identities,Relationality,and the Art of Listening: A Journey to Understand My Positionality as a Métis Scholar

Abstract

This article traces a personal and professional journey toward understanding Métis identity and positionality as an evaluator, academic, and community member. Grounded in lived experience as a white-presenting Métis woman, reflections are provided on the complexities of identity, the tensions of belonging, and the responsibilities of engaging in research and evaluation by and with Indigenous peoples. Stories of learning, vulnerability, and resistance are woven together to highlight how intersecting identities shape both insider and outsider roles requiring accountability, reciprocity, and respect. The art of listening is emphasized, not as a neutral practice of collecting data, but as an act of relationality that can disrupt colonial hierarchies of knowledge. Ultimately, the article argues that embracing positionality, rather than obscuring it under the guise of objectivity, offers evaluators a pathway to ethical, authentic, and relationally grounded work.

Métis Identity

Fifteen years ago, I took my seat in a Native Studies class with around 100 other students. Although I was already a graduate student at the time, I had elected to enroll in the undergraduate course titled “Aboriginal Canada” in hopes of deepening my understanding of my own Indigeneity. One of my peers pointedly asked the instructor whether Métis people were not all “just mixed blood.” Dr. Chris Anderson stood at the front of the lecture hall and animatedly addressed the question, tactfully quashing the misguided equating of Métis people with “mixed race,” and speaking with pride about what it meant to be Métis. I settled into my seat feeling as though my hopes for the course had born out.

Much of my early formal understandings of Métis people were transmitted through books and classrooms. During grade school, I learned about a simplistic version of the fur trade, and how Métis people are a post-contact Nation born from the union of European men and First Nations women. Although I could not articulate my informal understandings at the time, I absorbed unspoken ideas of what it meant to be Métis by listening to and observing my family's emphasis on accountability to wellbeing, kinship, and tradition. Now, I recognize that these points of emphasis are also where I feel at home in my evaluation work.

My roots extend deeply into and around rural Alberta, Canada. I have lived in Alberta for my entire life as a citizen of the Métis Nation of Alberta; my family is also part of the Lac Ste. Anne Métis Community Association. Still, I had limited explicit appreciation for the complexity of Métis identity until I sat in Dr. Anderson's Native Studies classroom 15 years ago. The course opened a world of consideration for me as to how Métis has come to signify, in the public consciousness, a vaguely expanding racial category rather than an identity of Indigenous people with a shared sense of history and culture (Anderson, 2014). In parallel directions, reading Maria Campbell's brilliant book titled Half-breed (1973) gave me words to reflect on the ways in which Métis people field discrimination from Indigenous and non-Indigenous people in a world that operates on rigid categorizations of race and identity.

Now, as I trace my positionality as a Métis woman, I find myself tracing along the edges. I was and still am the first in my immediate or extended family to attend university. I began my higher education journey 20 years ago, as a just turned 17-year-old eager to uncritically soak up all that academia had to offer. My eagerness was tempered with apprehension about leaving home for the city. Yearning for a sense of community, I stepped into what was then called the Aboriginal Student Services Centre on campus. As I waited at the reception desk, a fellow student looked at me with a mix of curiosity and skepticism and commented, “You don’t look Native.” I smiled sheepishly and shrunk away, acutely aware of my whiteness.

I have come to refer to myself as “white-presenting” in recognition of the labels that are most often ascribed to me at first glance. As a white-presenting person, my Indigeneity is sometimes met with an (often healthy) skepticism. Similar to the experience I had in the Aboriginal Student Services Centre as an undergraduate student years ago, I recently watched with wonder and trepidation as comments rolled in on a social media post advertising a short segment that CBC Aboriginal (the Indigenous news and storytelling platform of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) had put together to mobilize knowledge about my research. Comments ranged from outright accusatory (“Look at that: another blue-eyed moniyaw [Cree word for white person] pretending to be Indian”) to supportive (“I can vouch for this woman as being Métis and I know she lives Métis values”) to dismissive (“Who cares if she's Métis as long as her research is helping people?”). Given that these experiences have taken place amidst increasing Indigenous identity fraud, especially in the world of academia (see Anderson, 2021 for a commentary on this issue), I have done my best to lean into the tensions and challenges that these conversations bring. I also recognize that these challenges have invited growth and reflection on the ways in which the labels often ascribed to me gloss over the complexities of my identity.

Complex Identities and Relationality

My intersecting physical, racial, cultural, geographical, and gendered identities have invited deep reflection in my evaluation work. As a doctoral student, my dissertation centered on evaluating a supportive housing program for teen families; as part of this work, I spent extensive time engaging with participants and being physically present at the program headquarters. I became pregnant with my first child at the time, and teen parent participants stepped into the role of being more knowledgeable and experienced than me, offering me advice about pregnancy and childbirth. We settled comfortably into mutual spaces of vulnerability and shifting power dynamics, and teen parents engaged bravely with our study, sharing their experiences of discrimination, strength, and love. I reflected on the success of our work together during a guest lecture that I delivered to an undergraduate psychology class.

I spoke about the ways in which my pregnancy, and bringing my newborn baby to the program headquarters, had made my humanity more accessible to participants, and joked that I would not recommend going to such lengths as a participant engagement strategy. One of the students expressed in an online forum that she felt the project had been highly unethical, given her concerns about using my pregnancy and baby to manipulate trust from participants. As a psychologist initially trained in experimental research methods, I understood where the student was coming from. With no reference point for the ways in which relationality, respect, and reciprocity can be lived in and through research and evaluation (Wilson, 2008), an assumption of manipulation might be understandable. After all, program evaluators typically strive for objectivity (e.g., see Canadian Evaluation Society, 2018), which can seem incompatible with relationship-building. Parallels can be drawn between my experience of being judged or dismissed as an evaluator (seen as not “unbiased” enough and therefore not legitimate) and my experiences of being judged or dismissed as an Indigenous person (seen as not “authentic” enough).

Early on in my journey as an evaluator, I worried about what might be lost by letting go of objectivity; now, I think about what can be gained, and I wonder what might be lost if I resisted a relational approach. I recognize that objectivity and relationality need not be mutually exclusive. At the same time, I understand the discomfort that rises up in some academic spaces when the terms “relationality” and “evaluation” are paired, and I think about Indigenous researcher and clinician Janet Smylie's encouragement to use discomfort as a learning tool (Churchill et al., 2017).

Positionality as a Learning Tool and an Act of Relationship

I have gratitude for the learning tools that I have sharpened and softened along my journey as an evaluator, researcher, psychologist, and human. One of my most powerful sites of learning has been around the ways in which my positionality has helped me develop my professional and academic identity. To the extent that I understand how I see myself, I can better appreciate how others see me, and maintain awareness of the ways in which my positionality impacts my practice. In my work with Indigenous children, families, and communities, I navigate the insider-outsider lines that come with being an Indigenous person myself, and occupying the roles of academic, clinician (psychologist), and evaluator with layers of privilege wrapped up in these positions. I am aware of the ways in which my “insider” positioning, such as being Métis, coming from a “blue collar” family, and feeling as though I am not quite at home in academic spaces, make me more accessible to community partners and evaluation participants. In this way, my access to participants and their stories is facilitated, and I hold this privilege sacred. In other ways, my positioning as a doctoral-level clinician, tenured academic, and program evaluator make visible the levels of power I hold. As a result, I do not take for granted the need to establish trust with community partners, programs, and participants, nor the accountabilities that I hold to upholding relational values in my evaluation work.

As an evaluator, I initially struggled with the idea of putting my positionality on the table. I wondered, who am I to center myself and my background in evaluation projects that are not about me at all? I have come to recognize that positioning myself is not about centering myself. It is about working in relationship to people, to communities, and to ideas. The people I work with cannot trust me unless they know how and to whom I am rooted. When I make visible the intersecting pieces of my identity, I can reflect alongside my community partners on the ways in which my knowledge and understanding of evaluation has been shaped. I can reflect on the ways in which I was trained in the very knowledge systems that have been imposed on Indigenous peoples through colonization, and the responsibility this imposes on evaluators and academics to move beyond community-engaged work toward community-grounded work, and to deeply listen.

The Art of Listening

From my current vantage point along my professional and personal journey, I see listening at the core of quality evaluations. As an academic and Registered Psychologist, my earliest training was grounded firmly in experimental research methods, with a strong emphasis on striving for objectivity and unbiased approaches to research and evaluation. My conception of knowledge was grounded in a hierarchy, where academic conceptions of “valid” and “reliable” research methods were planted at the top. At that time, I would have listened in order to fit the information I was gleaning into that hierarchy. Put another way, the words I listened to were filtered strictly through my academically grounded understandings of what constitutes credible knowledge. Striving for an unbiased approach, I would have attempted to listen from the perspective of an impartial evaluator, making judgements about which pieces of information could be considered credible. At this point along my journey, I seek less to listen from the perspective of an impartial evaluator and more to listen from the perspective of a fellow human. Listening has allowed me to deepen my understanding of the harms that many Indigenous communities have been subjected to through research and evaluation; sharpened my focus on the brilliant forms of resistance that Indigenous peoples have led in response to such harms; and provided space for me to bring forth my positionality in learning how to center relationality, respect, and reciprocity as an evaluator.

As a result, the values of wellbeing and kinship that I absorbed early in life continue to guide how I approach evaluation by centering individual and community thriving, rather than reinforcing deficit-based narratives. My values are also mirrored in the ways through which I build relationships as an evaluator, centering accountability and mutual care as integral to ethical practice. I have also learned to lean into cultural traditions to inform my methods and orientation, whether through privileging storytelling as a form of knowledge-sharing, honoring community-defined measures of success, or engaging in collective reflection. These values remind me that evaluation is not a neutral or purely technical act, but a relational process through which I can link my personal understandings of Métis identity with professional commitments as an evaluator.

Closing

My positionality as an evaluator shows up in a confluence of academic, practical, historical, geographical, cultural, and gendered spaces against the backdrop of my Indigeneity. Through more deeply understanding my positionality, I have come to lean into, rather than back away from, the tensions that surface when acknowledging the influence of my identities, and therefore my values, on my evaluation work. In illuminating challenges, vulnerabilities, and points of celebration, I hope to stimulate thinking about the ways in which evaluators can embrace and make known their positionality as an act of relationship. As a Métis person, my identities may be traced along the edges of various social locations; I am grateful for this part of my positionality since, at the edges, there is space to push.