QETMAD with First Nations Considerations: National Reconciliation Week
Image Credit: Emma Walke
National Reconciliation Week is an important time for Australians to unite and consider their shared responsibility to build a country that genuinely values and takes meaningful steps to acknowledge First Nations ways of being and doing. For Reconciliation Week, we would like to share this blog from ARTD Partner and Chief Evaluator, Andrew Hawkins, featuring some reflections on the important foregrounding of First Nations principles in evaluation from the perspective of a non-First Nations person.
First Nations approaches do not sit alongside mainstream evaluation as a special case; they reveal something more essential about what high-quality evaluation has always required but has not always made explicit.
At a fundamental level, the principles of “quality evaluation that makes a difference” are shared across contexts: evaluation requires clear purpose, credible reasoning, proportionate effort, and usefulness for decision-making and learning. These are not entirely culturally specific – they arise from the basic logic of making warranted judgements under uncertainty. However, First Nations perspectives deepen and extend these principles by insisting that evaluation is not only a technical exercise in evidence and inference, but a relational and moral practice grounded in authority, responsibility, and continuity.
What First Nations principles add is a sharper account of legitimacy. Evaluation is not just about assembling evidence, but about who has the right to define what matters, to interpret meaning, and to judge whether a difference has been made. Knowledge is not treated as universally available or freely interpretable: it is situated, sometimes restricted, and often inseparable from the relationships through which it is shared. This means that authoritative knowledge – such as that held by Elders or embedded in community experience – may carry greater weight than formal data, particularly where data is thin, misleading, or unable to capture what is most important. In this way, First Nations perspectives expand the concept of rigour to include not only methodological strength, but also cultural authority, relational accountability, and fidelity to place and community.
Bringing these perspectives into evaluation does not displace other traditions, including scientific approaches, but repositions them. Scientific methods, professional expertise, and quantitative data remain valuable tools for strengthening reasoning, testing claims, and informing decisions. However, they do not sit above other forms of knowledge as the ultimate arbiter of truth. Instead, they operate within a broader framework in which judgements must also be legitimate, authorised, and meaningful to those whose lives are affected. Evaluation, on this view, is not simply the application of methods to generate evidence; it is the disciplined practice of forming sound judgements in the right relationship to people, place and purpose.
Seen this way, First Nations principles do not narrow evaluation – they enrich it. They point to evaluation as a practice that speaks to a higher order than technical knowledge alone: one that integrates reasoning with responsibility, evidence with authority, and judgement with care. The knowledge sort is of a different nature, deeper, less combative, more holistic. This does not reject science but situates it within a wider conception of knowing and deciding well. This recognises the need for epistemic justice that pays attention to the varied sources of valid evidence and awareness of the lenses through which any evaluation is conducted. The result is not a different kind of evaluation for a specific context, but a more complete account of what it means for any evaluation to be truly of high quality and to make a difference.
Finally, it is critical in seeking common ground and to learn from First Nations people, not to go too far. I am still on a learning pathway and thank Nicole Tujague for offering guidance on a draft and pointing me towards the study of epistemic justice. It was a profound moment for me to consider the observation that there is a fine balance on the continuum between Exoticising → acknowledging → resonating with → and disappearing Indigenous knowledges.
