Hoopa Valley Tribe and Tribal Law and Policy Institute Research Partnership

The purpose of this planning grant is to create a tribal-research partnership between the Hoopa Valley Tribe and TLPI using practices of tribally-driven participatory research. This will be the first research partnership of its kind to be implemented in Hoopa and will examine the linkage between Hoopa’s recent legal sovereignty challenges and the tenacity of violent crime and substance abuse in the community.

Using the culturally-responsive indigenous evaluation model as an operational framework, the research design is organized under two broad goals with individual objectives and activities under each. For each goal, they will use a combination of on-site fieldwork, relationship and capacity building, community discussions, focused workgroups and content analysis to capture primarily ethnographic and archival data.

The first goal is focused on community relationship building and shared contextual understanding and involves hosting a series of introductory meetings with the tribal community to engage tribal stakeholders, learning cultural and traditional requirements, and building quality assurance and feedback loops for contextual and multi-cultural validity.

The second goal is focused on the balanced development of the research design and involves creating a tribal-centric code of research ethics, facilitating tribal workgroups, conducting an outcome yield, and hosting a final meaning-making meeting. Ethnographic data (i.e., community discussions and tribal workgroups) will be analyzed qualitatively using an inductive approach, which allows conclusions and justifications to be completely tribally- and locally-informed. Owing to the nature of this partnership and the emphasis on co-creation, all analyses will include member-checking to ensure interpretive validity of the findings.

"Note: This project contains a research and/or development component, as defined in applicable law," and complies with Part 200 Uniform Requirements - 2 CFR 200.210(a)(14).

ca/ncf