S05E09: Belonging, Indigenous Evaluation, and Growing the Next Generation with Cheyenne Seneca

Cheyenne Seneca is a descendent of the Seneca Nation of Indians. She comes from a lineage of social workers, teachers, and lawyers who have dedicated their life’s work to supporting communities in Indian Country.  She grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area and her calling to serve Native people through science and storytelling was nurtured by the urban Indian community.  She has worked with urban Indian organizations, partnered with Tribal research councils, and carried out Indigenous evaluation for almost ten years.  Today, she works as an Indigenous evaluator at the Urban Indian Health Institute, a Tribal Epidemiology Center that serves urban American Indians and Alaska Natives nationally. She is committed to its mission to decolonize data for Indigenous people, by Indigenous people and has made contributions through her expertise in providing training and technical assistance in public health research and evaluation.  She is passionate about reclaiming evaluation as an Indigenous value and practice, and improving the evaluation capacity of urban Indian organizations and young people. She especially loves mentoring interns participating in the Urban Indian Health Institute’s Public Health Training Program and supporting their journeys to becoming leaders for their communities. Overview In this episode, Gladys is joined by Cheyenne Seneca, an Indigenous evaluator at the Urban Indian Health Institute, for a beautiful conversation about identity, belonging, public health, and evaluation as a practice of service to community. Cheyenne shares her journey of coming into confidence in her Indigenous identity, shaped by family stories, connection to Seneca heritage, urban Indigenous community, and formative experiences at the National Congress of American Indians, Intertribal Friendship House, Native American Health Center, and tribal research spaces. Through these relationships, she came to understand evaluation not as an extractive or judgment-based practice, but as a way of giving back, strengthening community, and carrying responsibility with care. Cheyenne reflects on her work supporting the evaluation of the Urban Indian Health Institute’s Public Health Training Program, which supports Indigenous youth, interns, and fellows in exploring public health, research, evaluation, and service. They explore the opportunity of storytelling, art, oral presentations, and culturally grounded evaluation methods as powerful ways for young people to reflect on their learning and reclaim their place in science, public health, and community leadership. This episode is an invitation to invest in Indigenous youth, build spaces of belonging, and imagine Indigenous evaluation as a practice rooted in love, cultural connectedness, mentorship, and collective futures.   Resources  Responsibility to All Relations: Indigenous Evaluation of an AIAN Public Health Workforce Development Program, Cheyenne Seneca, Benita McCarn, and Lenice Baker in the Canadian Journal of Program Evaluation.  Insights For Indigenous Evaluation Book (Open access and free online!) https://pressbooks.pub/indigenousinsightscollective/  For more visit: https://www.gladysrowe.com/podcast (Scroll to the bottom to subscribe to the newsletter!) If you are loving this podcast please leave a five star review on your favourite streaming service. If you would like to offer support please visit: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/InsightsPod