Getting Funding for Tribal Community Research Posted on February 15, 2006 Philip A. Fisher (bio) suggests questions researchers may want to ask themselves as they design tribal research and apply for grants.

Getting started doing this, I think that the best rationale comes from people who think about American Indian research from a more post-colonial perspective, which is the idea that so much has been brought into the communities and imposed outside culture on the communities that the process of doing that in and of itself has potential to bring about iatrogenic or negative effects as the result of something that's designed to be helpful. Even if the tools are useful, there is still a downside of bringing in outside kinds of ideas. That's different than just bringing things into community settings in general. It's specific to communities where there's been so much negative experience with outside cultures.

I also think, having looked at a lot of grants that are more ground-up, that it's really important to be as specific as possible about everything that is going into the grant, anything that already is clear and has been established with the community. It's going to be a storytelling intervention. OK, that's something as opposed to "We don't have any idea what it's going to be. We're going to figure that out when we get there." What is the process specifically that's going to be used to elicit information from the community?

A lot of people talk about running focus groups. Just saying you're going to run focus groups is nowhere near specific enough, and in fact in a lot of tribal communities, there are alternatives like talking circles that are more culturally appropriate for eliciting information. How measures are going to be developed, or how they're going to be adapted very specifically. What is the starting point?

I think the key for funders, the key for grant reviewers, is to not be asked to issue a blank check because you don't know all of the elements that are there, but rather to say here's everything that we know, and here's how we're going to move forward. I think also that in terms of federal funding that there are a lot of grant mechanisms that are specifically designed to be developmental, so those are, in many ways, appropriate mechanisms to the extent that you're really building from the ground up.

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