DAY 4 : Harlan Pruden — Decolonizing Research: Collecting Two-Spirit Data in a Culturally Affirming Way

Centering Two-Spirit and Indigenous experiences and ways is critical for more respectful, reciprocal, relevant, and responsible health research. Two-Spirit is often equated to an LGBTQ Indigenous participant; thereby, rendering this community’s unique experience and history invisible and erasing important distinctions. This type of scholarship becomes a site of colonization. The challenge is how to collect Two-Spirit data that in culturally safe and affirming ways, so health research(ers) are given the opportunity to do rigorous sex- and gender-based analysis that promotes science that considers biological sex and accounts for all genders in an effort to expand our collective understanding(s) within a diversity framework. This presentation examines some decolonizing practices to better formulate health research, policies and programs that are relevant, respectful and mindful to Two-Spirit people and communities or in other words be a site of reconcilia(c)tion in research.