An Autoethnographic Account of Experiences with a Community-Based Participatory Research Project in Canada

Abstract: We discuss our personal experiences while developing a community-based participatory research project (CBPR) with Lac Seul First Nation for the purposes of recording some of their land use history and for the training of youth from the First Nation and students from our university in Archaeology, Social-Cultural Anthropology and Geography. Drawing on Geography and Anthropology literature we illustrate how both disciplines influenced our work and understandings of our professional and personal journeys. We discovered primarily that the traditional academic research phases of project design and data collection did not adequately describe the birth of the project and the subsequent information exchange. Instead, we found that the phases of research that were important were: Relationship building, Project design, Learning, Immersion/Data Collection and Activism/Shifting Perspectives.