Indigenous Insights: An Evaluation Podcast

Sam Bird is a citizen of Peguis First Nation, currently residing in Thunder Bay, Ontario. She is a Program Partner at the Mastercard Foundation, Canada Programs, with a focus on Youth Engagement. She’s passionate about creating systems change for Indigenous young people. Outside of work she loves to enjoy all that northwestern Ontario has to offer when it comes to hiking, canoeing, and skiing. Sam is also an emerging writer, with w...

Dr. Karen Alexander is Ojibwe from the Sault Ste Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians. She is the proud mother of four and grandmother of five. Karen’s culture as an Indigenous person is most important to her and she passes down her knowledge about how to live life ‘in a good way’ to her children and grandchildren. She has always strived to help other Indigenous people to heal and has been an addictions counselor and clinical social wor...

January O’Connor currently lives in Anchorage, Alaska. January is Tlingit and is Alaskan born and raised in Kake, Alaska. She possesses a Masters in the Arts of Teaching from the University of Southeast and a Bachelor’s in Psychology from Reed College in Portland, Oregon and is a current PhD student in University of Alaska Fairbank’s Indigenous Studies program. In her Indigenous Studies PhD, January will research indigenous evaluat...

Dr. Myra Parker is an enrolled member of the Mandan and Hidatsa tribes and serves as an Associate Professor in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Washington School of Medicine. She is currently the Director of Seven Directions which is housed in the Center for the Study of Health and Risk Behaviors within the Department of Psychiatry.

Dr. Danielle Eakins is a licensed clinical psychologist and a research scientist ...

Caroline Davis is Diné (or Navajo) originally from the Navajo Nation in Arizona. Born and raised on the reservation, she has first hand knowledge that drove her passion to work in the field of public health. Tailoring her career specifically to Indigenous Populations she found her niche in evaluation work, and considers herself an advocate for the inclusion of Indigenous research and evaluation methods in any work with all communit...

Dr. Melissa Tremblay is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Education at the University of Alberta . She is a Métis scholar, born and raised in rural Alberta. Melissa has a background in program evaluation, project management, children’s mental health, and working with Indigenous children and families using community-grounded methods. Melissa has worked in the field of evaluation for over ten years, and maintains a private eva...

Marissa Hill is a citizen of the Métis Nation of Ontario. She was born and raised in the Georgian Bay Métis Community, and has been a guest in Tkaronto since 2010. Marissa is rooted in rematriation and a reclamation of ancestral ways of knowing and being, and everything she does flows from here. Marissa is dedicated to transforming the systems and infrastructure that shape our holistic wellbeing using approaches that are rooted in ...

Vanessa Nevin is the Director of Health at the Atlantic Policy Congress of First Nations Secretariat and comes from Sipekne’katik First Nation within Mi’kmaki. Vanessa has worked for APC for nearly 14 years on Health, Indian Residential School, Elections, and Social. She also has extensive experience working with First Nations communities and organizations including Confederacy of Mainland Mi’kmaq, BC Association of Aboriginal Frie...

Aneta Cram is a doctoral candidate with the School of Health at the Victoria University of Wellington in Aotearoa. Her doctoral research explores what Indigenous evaluation frameworks currently exist, how they were developed and the impact that they are having with the communities that they were developed for in order to provide guidance to support other Indigenous communities in developing their own community-specific evaluation f...

Dr. Kim van der Woerd is the Lead for Strategy and Relations at Reciprocal Consulting, a firm co-owned by four Indigenous women and founded in 2003.

Kim is a proud member of the ‘Namgis (Numgees) Nation, and completed her PhD in Psychology at Simon Fraser University (SFU). Her dissertation research focused on a comprehensive participatory evaluation of a Federally funded First Nations substance abuse treatment centre. Kim has ove...

Abigail Echo-Hawk, MA, is an enrolled citizen of the Pawnee Nation of Oklahoma. She was born in the heart of Alaska where she was raised in the traditional values of giving, respect for all, and love.

Abigail is an auntie, sister, mother, daughter, granddaughter, and a community member who works toward building a great future for the next generations. She serves her community as the Director of Urban Indian Health Institute and E...

Dr. Melanie Nadeau, aka Dr. Mel, is an enrolled citizen of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians in Belcourt, North Dakota.  She completed both her Master’s in Public Health in community health education with a concentration in health disparities and her PhD in social/behavioral epidemiology at the University of Minnesota School of Public Health. Dr. Nadeau is a community engaged scholar and has worked more than 18 years on ...

Terrellyn Fearn is the Project Director of Turtle Island Institute, a global Indigenous social innovation think and do tank - a teaching lodge enabling transformative change. She brings wisdom and understanding of Indigenous well-being and community building through rematriation and Indigenous ways of knowing. Terrellyn’s work over the last 30 years has focused on advancing social justice and systems change in the area of health, g...

Terrellyn Fearn is the Project Director of Turtle Island Institute, a global Indigenous social innovation think and do tank - a teaching lodge enabling transformative change. She brings wisdom and understanding of Indigenous well-being and community building through rematriation and Indigenous ways of knowing. Terrellyn’s work over the last 30 years has focused on advancing social justice and systems change in the area of health, g...

Dr. Nicole Bowman is President of Bowman Performance Consulting and an Associate Scientist with the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is an Associate Editor and co-founder of Roots and Relations, a permanent section in the Canadian Journal of Program Evaluation. In 2018, Dr. Bowman received American Evaluation Association’s 2018 Robert Ingle Service Award, and was notably the youngest and first Indigenous awardee. She has served...

Dr. JoLee Sasakamoose Anishinaabe (Ojibwe) is a member of the M'Chigeeng First Nation in Ontario and an active citizen of the Ahtahkakoop Cree Nation in Saskatchewan. She is an Associate Professor in Educational Psychology and Counselling at the University of Regina. In collaboration with the First Nations communities of Saskatchewan, she co-authored the Indigenous Cultural Responsiveness Theory (ICRT), now known as the CRF, a theo...

Dr. Peter Mataira earned his doctoral degree in social policy and social work from Massey University, Albany campus in Auckland, New Zealand. He has published widely in areas of indigenous health, well-being and economic justice with particular emphasis on cultural research methodologies and social innovation and entrepreneurship. His clinical and community practice background is in mental and behavioral health, economic sustainabi...

Tammy Mudge is L'nu (Illnew), from Glooscap First Nation, a mother of four and a member of the Mi'kmaq Nation. She is the Manager of Learning and Evaluation at Every One Every Day Kjipuktuk-Halifax, a non-profit organization working to build an ecosystem of inclusive and meaningful participation in and among neighbourhoods, and a part-time faculty member at Acadia University, where she teaches Decolonizing Community Development.

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Dr. Michael Hart is a citizen of Fisher River Cree Nation and the vice-provost (Indigenous engagement) at the University of Calgary.

He held a Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Knowledges and Social Work through the University of Manitoba from 2012 to 2018. Dr. Hart also led the development of the Master of Social Work in Indigenous Knowledges program at the University of Manitoba and was the inaugural director for the program.