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Hello, everyone, I am Scott Young. And my name is Connie Brownotter. We are happy to be here today to talk to you about building a university that deserves Indigenous students, a participatory design approach. We want to say thanks to the Orbis Cascade Alliance for inviting us to give this presentation and for forming this whole speaker series. We're really excited to see where it goes.

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So again, I am Scott W. H Young, I am the User Experience and Assessment Librarian at Montana State University. And I'm Connie, I am a student from Montana State University. I'm a senior majoring in Human Development and Family Science, and I'm minoring in Native American Studies. And later this weekend, I will be graduating. I'm really excited about this. It's been a long time coming. So

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this is exciting.

0:56  
So we want to acknowledge where we're coming to you from today. Here is a map created by a linguist that shows the the cultural diversity of Indigenous peoples on this continent. And so right now we are in Bozeman, Montana, just a couple states over from where we're most of you are and so that's us on the map there, a different view of of our of our land. Zooming in, you can see all of the different peoples that once populated and still do populate this area. And so we want to say that we're grateful for the ancestral and Indigenous stewards of this land, and that we recognize that it's home to an incredible diversity of tribal nations. Just in Montana alone, we have the Blackfeet the Chippewa Cree, Salish & Kootenai, Apsáalooke, Northern Cheyenne, Assiniboine and A'aninin, Sioux, Little Shell Chippewa. So that's just Montana. And that's just our land acknowledgement. And as a white person saying a land acknowledgement, I also want to say at the same time, the limits of what I'm saying right now. So this is a great article about the limits of settlers' territorial acknowledgments. Pulling from that article: No matter how detailed and consider it a territorial acknowledgement spoken in a settler space, such as this is, it can never be more than a move to innocence, if it is not combined with concrete actions embedded in relationships of solidarity. So that's what we're trying to do today, we're trying to go beyond a statement, which is important and symbolic in its own right, but connecting it to action and solidarity that tries to create a better world for all of us. I also want to reference a recent article that just came out on High Country News, so called so you want to acknowledge the land, it's really good. It starts by saying if you want to acknowledge the land, go out in the land, stand in the land, put your feet in it, put your fingers in it, touch the soil. And so it really makes the point that a land acknowledgement is more than just a statement, it is an act in a continual act of relationship building. So we want to keep that in mind. And also to highlight the the tribes that are in your states, coming at you from Oregon, Washington and Idaho. There, there are even more tribal nations. In fact, there are hundreds of Native nations in the US. And so these are just those that are in in your areas. Thank you, Scott. So one of the things that we did to prepare for this presentation was to do a little bit of research on the Orbis Cascade Alliance. And one of the things that was kind of brought to our attention during our research phase was checking out your strategic plan, which was really awesomely made, you know, a few of the things that we pulled from it are some of these awesome quotes. Here's one from your vision statement: advancing transformative learning and research and creating equity in higher ed. Another one here was from the theme of equipping students for success. So the Alliance seeks to facilitate students equitable access to and efficient use of information resources as both consumers and creators. And then here's one of, I guess, it's kind of like a value statement that you guys carry: in all things, we will collaborate for shared benefit, value shared innovation, be intentional, and act with integrity, and respect. And so we wanted to pull these these themes out to kind of, we want this to become a relevant presentation for you, because a lot of the things we're going to be discussing today are kind of they kind of coincide with some of the the themes that you guys bring forward and your strategic plan. So here's some of the data we pulled. You guys serve over 275,000 students in all of your 37 member institutions, and you also serve Indigenous students. And I did some some of my own research on each one of your institutions and roughly calculated with the available data online—how many Native students were at each of the 37 institutions that you represent? And according to my calculations, based on the research that is provided right now, I found that there's about 2,800 Indigenous students that your alliance serves.

which represents 1% of the total student body. And, yeah, so we really wanted to include this data, so that you can understand, you know, the relevance of our topic with with your work, and to connect with the Indigenous students of the university and to help build a university that deserves even more Indigenous students. So, yeah, today, this is what we will be talking about. Yeah, so this is where we're headed today. Um, for the next 40 or so minutes, we'll talk about the principles of design, we'll look at what participation looks like in practice. And then we'll talk about the project that we've been engaged with for, for the last few years, building an Indigenous participatory design toolkit. So we'll look to define participatory design, help you understand how it works, its operations, and then how you can apply it in your own in your own context. So we want to acknowledge that this work has been funded through some internal grants that are our institution's Office of the Provost, Office of the President, as well as our library administration, and our department of Native American Studies. And in fact, Connie is a Presidential Emerging Scholar here at Montana State University. And in addition to that, a McNair Scholar and a Gates Millennium Scholar. So we're in the company of greatness. We did nearly all of this work collaboratively. And we're really happy to be here today, to share it with you.

So our first sort of step into this work was framed around this question, how can we ensure that Native American undergraduate students feel welcome and empowered on our campus. But as we started to think more about this work, thinking critically, thinking about really how it lands for all the different stakeholders, we saw that this framing wasn't quite wasn't quite right. Because it's more than just creating a welcoming and an empowering campus. Because that framing is to institution-focused, and really too white-centered, it's about the people who are in power—us, speaking from my own cultural perspective, sort of making the place more welcoming and giving the power. So we wanted to kind of go beyond that framing. And so we draw inspiration from Eve Tuck and Indigenous Studies scholar in Canada, who asked this really great question at a talk a couple years ago: how do we build a university that deserves Indigenous people? And so this is kind of our way into this project at this point. And we want to encourage you to think in this way, as well. It's like, you know, we want to serve Native students, we want to bring more Native into students and our institutions. Why do we want that? And what are we asking those students to experience on the campus when we bring them into it? And so thinking about do we deserve their presence, their, their, their, their amazingness on campus? So one way we think we can answer that a little bit, at least is participation in design. So by way of definition, participatory design is a socially-active, politically-conscious, values-driven approach to co-creation. It's a way to bring together different populations and stakeholder groups, it calls for an attunement to political dynamics in support of social justice and social activism. This particular design process traces its roots to 1970s Scandinavia, where the democratic values of the region merged with trade union organizing in Norway, Sweden, and Denmark to help bosses and workers work better together. And so the theory of participation poses two essential roles, designers and users, designers are those who are professionally responsible for the design product. And users are those who will interact with the product. That's kind of where it started—on some of the trade trade union stuff was like typesetters. So they brought in new people to design like new typesetting programs. And so they wanted to work with the typesetters, with the system designers to create a tool that works for everyone. It has a really cool history. And so connecting, that's our context, you know, we swap out the designer for the librarian professional and the user for the student. And so, participatory design recognizes that that these essential roles are out there. And it attends to understand the differences between these roles and to break down any barriers that exist, and to build new connections because we're all working together, like us in a library. So library professional, we want to work with students, understand the differences, the common strengths, and come together. But there are important differences. The need for participation recognizes that there are tensions that exists between those with some form of knowledge and power and those without, or with different forms of knowledge and power. And as students and library professionals in higher ed, participatory design then becomes about seeing the imbalance between any knowledge and power where it exists, and working towards a more just balance.

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So let's talk about participatory design and Indigenous communities and what that would look like. So we'd like to highlight one example of participatory design from the field of architecture. And this project was about designing houses on the Kitimaat reserve of the Haisla First Nation. And this was done by—well, this project involved the nation along with a team of professional architects in collaboration with some researchers at the University of Victoria. And this was done back in 2009. So the participants who worked in direct collaboration, you know, they conducted interviews they did on-site design workshops. And they were driving a process of mutual learning that ultimately resulted in prototyping some new housing models. So this project responds directly to a housing crisis currently affecting First Nation communities in Canada by aiming to develop a culturally-appropriate housing type that the nation could implement in future development of housing in their community. And there was also a desire, there was a desire for support to support and empower this community in the design of its own housing. So here's an example of a floor plan. Through a series of design workshops, the architects and the nation identified three key social groups in their community: singles, elders, and extended families. And here we see a floor plan for a single person in the community. So several priorities were identified, a few of which include accessibility, particularly for elders; energy efficiency, community members were are very conscious of their utility bills; and also cultural aesthetics. There was widespread interest in incorporating some symbols, carvings, crusts and things of their their local culture, their cultural heritage into these new housing designs. So community members desired large and flexible spaces in order to accommodate some of their extended family gatherings. And, and also the preparation of foods, you know, for traditional feasting activities. And so the authors of this project state that through community consultation, housing design should accommodate traditional cultural activities, foster cultural identity, strengthen family bonds, and educate youth. This specific project highlights some of the principles of participatory design.

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Okay, and I'll talk a little bit more about what those principles are, through the presentation, we're going to kind of weave examples of the practice of participatory design with some of the underlying theory. So so that was just one example of what it looks like in practice. And so stepping back to the theory, here's what some of the more abstract values that are trying to be put into operation are. Here are the eight leading values of participatory design. And we want you to keep in mind some of the values of the Orbis Cascade Alliance, we think there's some some direct connection and some really nice overlap with bringing this design tradition into the strategic plan of the Alliance. So it begins with participation, where students transcend to a position of trusted and legitimate participant in the process of designing library services, library collections, library spaces, any sort of new service or collection or anything that a librarian creates, is, in a way, a design process. And so there's opportunity for participation. And it's more than a one-way input to be analyzed later, in a process ultimately controlled by the designer or the researcher or the librarian. Evidence and decisions are generated in genuine and sincere collaboration. Mutual learning happens when participants share perspectives and grow knowledge together. When expertise is then accepted as equal, we can involve the skills of both students and librarians. And through this process, we acknowledge that students are experts in their own situations. And that's an important one—students have really important experience and perspectives that they can bring to, to our library services. And so part of that is shared power, which means using our position to create space for other people who may be invisible or weaker in organizational power structures, really thinking critically about organizational hierarchy, which controls so much of our work. Through this process, students and professionals can create together which is really fun and rewarding. And we can work together to collaboratively shape a shared future that then we all inhabit together. The process is strongly guided by a political sense of democracy and in this context, that means the right to have a voice and then even more the right to have your voice matter in the decision-making. Especially from voices traditionally unheard, or perhaps un-listened to. And so, this leads to the final principle, which is equity. And this process can work towards towards equity by dismantling oppressive structures that we find in our work, particularly those that have been imposed by a culture of colonialization, patriarchy, whiteness, many oppressions out there to be aware of and to critically evaluate. So summing this up, the main approach in participatory design has been about paying attention to power relations and providing resources with the view to the empowerment of any groups that have been traditionally marginalized or disempowered. So again, here are the principles.

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Now we're going to talk about how we're practicing participatory design at MSU. And I'd like to talk a little bit about an early participatory design project we worked on together. In 1979, MSU had 52 Native students. And in 2019, that number has grown to 718, which accounts for approximately 3.8% of the total student population. So in just the last few years, our presence on campus has has really grown immensely. So for our design project, we worked to design a new library service to support Native students success on campus. And the participants included me, Scott, and there were three other Native students. We completed the first phase of this project back in 2017. And we did this to support and empower Native students, you know, to improve our experience at the library to explore different approaches to library design while also critically examining the power structures and decision-making processes in the library. So the actual work of the project included conducting some workshops, some interviews, we did storyboarding, we played some design games. And we also did some prototyping for the final product. And we have this awesome space in the library that's really conducive to collaborative design work. And here you can see us in one of our design workshops, and also the project aimed to identify some of the key problems that Native students faced in the library, and to co-create solutions to those problems. In order to do that, we completed a series of design exercises that allowed us to share our experiences in the library, see areas for improvement, and also develop a new service for us. So some of the design exercises were drawn from existing tools such as these vision cards. In one exercise, we selected a few cards that depicted how we viewed the library. One participant selected these three, showing that the library was a little drab, a little bland, not very inspiring. Then after this, we had we selected a few cards that showed how we wanted the library to look like. And that same participant selected these three, showing the library that's dynamic, vibrant, blossoming and full of possibility. We also utilize this the 75 tools for creative thinking. So this tool set contains many different design exercises, including

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the building your vehicle exercise. So in this example, we applied the metaphor of a car to the library where all the component parts of the vehicle are matched to the component parts of the library. So the exercise asked us to think, draw, and discuss based on the following prompts: what is the steering wheel, who is driving, who are the passengers, what are the road conditions. And it allowed us to see that there was a perceived disconnect between the library and the students. There are many resources that the library provides. But the student who is driving this vehicle has no clue how to maneuver. That student wish that there was a way to connect with with the library resources. So this drawing allows us to see and talk about this key problem within the library, and then that that we then later pursued in the project. These and other design exercises were a way to kind of structure our creative and critical thinking to create dialogue around our experiences as students in the library at MSU. Another exercise was to create collages. Each of us, including Scott—he completed every exercise with us as a participant—created collages to represent how we wanted the library to make us feel. And here's my collage. It shows me feeling happy, confident, comfortable, relaxed, wise, strong, inspired, you know, part of a community getting help, you know, on a journey towards a goal and building relationships and moving in different directions. And so we worked toward that goal, you know, to create a library that made us feel strong and confident. We completed more exercises that pointed us toward a poster series. Here we see our prototype ideas for the poster series that could help connect Native students to the library. This poster series depicts a welcoming sequence of images that highlighted key library activities that we all agreed on as a group. We also created storyboards for our university photographer. So here's the storyboard for the poster for working with a librarian. And as you can see, I'm the model. We then transformed our prototype poster series into the real thing. And it was really important to include ourselves, Native students at MSU in the posters as representation was one of the critical problems that this poster series works to address. So these posters can be seen all around campus. Here, they're shown hanging in the American Indian Student Center. In the end, we co-created the seven-part poster series and social media campaign called #MSULib101. It was designed to create a more welcoming and confidence-inspiring library for our campus's Native students. If you want to check out the posters, you know, you can visit this your web URL, you know, take a take a picture of it, and you can check them out. They're pretty cool.

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Okay. So going further in this direction. This was a really fun project. And beyond creating the design product, the poster series, thinking about what participatory design wants to do wants to create a product, but it also wants to take a stand, the political stand, and it's a political process as much a design process. And so it wants every person to have a say in determining their own world. And so our project is just a microcosm of that world. But we tried to model it. And so we tried to bring to life some of those participatory design principles that we outlined earlier: power sharing, mutual learning, equal expertise. Our project lasted about five months. And we worked together as a group to make progress together, we produced and analyzed the design evidence, some of which Connie just just presented. And then at each point, we decided on how we wanted to proceed. And so when there were disagreements, we continued to talk through it until consensus was achieved. So for example, I'm a technology-oriented librarian. So I had kind of expected going into the project that we would create some sort of web page or some sort of technology tool that would help support Native students success. But Connie and the other participants indicated that another path forward would be more impactful. And that led ultimately to the poster series. So I tried to sort of put my own desires aside a little to create more space for us to work together to share my power as a professional, recognize that the students are experts in their own situations, they know what they need. And so through this process, I became a better librarian, because I learned to understand Connie, and the other student participants and and also an outcome was that the students became expert library users with a voice in creating library services. And so this kind of leads to the next inflection point in our project. We talked about this at a recent gathering of the Tribal College Librarians Institute, which is a professional development conference held on this campus every year. And so after, after the presentation, Dr. Loriene Roy came up and talked to me and she had some really, really good thoughts about what this project was. And she challenged me to more thoughtfully and meaningfully integrate Indigenous ways of Knowing into this design tradition. And she she really rightfully questioned why this design tradition is appropriate for Native peoples. And so during these last few years, Connie and I have been sort of inspired by this challenge to really think more critically and deeply about what a Scandinavian design tradition is doing in a Native context. And so that led us to sort of think beyond participatory design, and to think about Indigenous participatory design and what that specifically looks like. So we sort of figured broadly across disciplines, we researched other examples of participatory design in Indigenous contexts in architecture, kind of like the example we talked about at the beginning of the presentation, but lots of other fields, food systems, health sciences, we wanted to understand ourselves a little bit better how the two of us could deepen our experience and our understanding of participatory design with a view towards Indigenous histories, cultures and epistemologies. So we're back kind of in the theory section of the presentation. So we did ultimately find, we think, some really strong connections between the Scandinavian design tradition and Indigenous research methodologies. And so, for example, Indigenous researcher Bagele Chilisa writes that decolonization of research methods calls for the researched to be—the researched to participate in the research process and for researchers to be committed to an action-oriented research process in which researchers are activists dedicated to social transformation. So with a focus on shared power and co-creative participation, the tradition of participatory design finds common ground with decolonizing research approaches that seek to address historical imbalances of power and participation. Margaret Kovach, an education researcher of Plains Cree and Saulteaux ancestry, writes: the power lies with the research participant, the storyteller. So the connection points between participatory design and Indigenous research methodologies revolve around power and participation. And so that has led into our current project which we've been working on for a little bit, we presented at an Orbis Cascade event in the summer of 2019. And so this may be familiar to some of you. But we're adding some additional points in here to prompt your thinking and your your practice in this area. So we're working on what we call the Indigenous Participatory Design Toolkit.

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Or otherwise known as the IPDT. We love acronyms. So let's, let's get into an overview of this toolkit. So this is a new prototype design tool that was created with and for Native students and staff. It's based on new research, a literature review, interviews, and surveys, we had to do all of that. And we have some specific goals in creating this tool. Some of the things we want to do is to address challenges and amplify strengths of Native students. We want to enhance empathy and understanding. We want to empower Native students, we want to produce new ideas for better services. And we also want to create a safe and playful space for for creative and critical thinking. So in support of those goals, we first talked with some of the key people across MSU campus, students, staff administration, both Native and non-Native. We covered a wide range of topics. Some of the topics included, you know, roles, goals, motivations, factors that both help and hinder success, some of the most helpful services on campus, some frustrations and obstacles, and also the magic button question which I'll get to in a bit. So then, based on the interviews, we created a survey that would produce even more comprehensive responses from our campus's Native student population, and I'll run through our results so that you can better understand the cross-section of Indigenous diversity at our institution, which might be similar to your own your own. So we surveyed the students who were subscribed to the American Indian Council listserv, and the survey was completely opt-in with a $50 lottery incentive gift card. We asked about age, tribal affiliation, needs and barriers of being a student, strengths as a student, as well as, again, the magic button question, which I will get to. So we got 45 complete responses, with 37 unique responses to the question of tribal affiliation, which really shows the diversity within our campus's Native community. So our first question asked about age, and age ranged from 18 to 51 years old. We also asked respondents to select from a preset list of strengths that we created based on our interviews. And the top five selections were self-determination, academic success, resilience, humor, and friends and family. The next five, top the next top five were being able to navigate among different cultures, balancing mental physical and spiritual health, cultural pride and identity, being a part of native campus communities such as TRIO, being a part of Native campus spaces, such as the American Indian Student Center. Respondents were also able to add their own short-answer responses for strengths and challenges. And these responses further informed the development of our design toolkit. Here we have gathering and preparing Indigenous foods, parenting, being a leader, relationships with faculty, and arts and crafts. Likewise, for needs and barriers, we also asked respondents to select from a preset list of challenges that we created based on our interviews. The top five were funding, self doubt, time management, cultural differences encountered when navigating within a predominantly white institution, such as MSU, and missing home and family. The next five were: feeling isolated, housing, orientation to a new and complex environment, lack of identity, and childcare. So as with the strengths, respondents were also able to add their own short-answer responses to challenges that were not included in our list. And some of those were: not fitting into the Native community, the ability to self-advocate when things seem overwhelming, also, my Native American identity is not universally accepted. So these kinds of responses also, you know, further inform the development of our toolkit. Then, of course, the magic button question. So that question was: imagine that you had a magic button that could instantly make one thing possible to improve your experience on campus? What would your magic button do? And so this was a fun question. And we did a content analysis of all the responses we got to this question and the top three were, with eight responses each: a new building, funding, and more diversity on campus. So as an example, from each category, one respondent told us that the magic button would create this new building that "having our own space for cultural values would show how much pride we have in ourselves as a Native community, and it would also show us how much MSU cares for its Native student population." For funding, one person said that they wished it would "would pay for my school, so I didn't have to work as

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much." And for diversity, another student wish that they could make "MSU as culturally diverse as a university in a major city, like Los Angeles, would be." And even more pointed that they could "stop the weird looks and rude comments from non-Native people." So we then synthesized this research evidence to produce a list of 10 challenges and 10 strengths of the MSU Native American student population. And here's some of the challenges: racism and stereotyping, cultural differences, lack of identity, housing, family care, self doubt, funding, distance, isolation, and keeping organized. Some of the strengths: campus and community spaces—campus communities and spaces, friends and family, cultural pride, navigating among different cultures, self-care, academic success, self-determination, resilience, humor, joking, leadership. 

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So we took this research evidence, and we put it into a card format. And the card format is important because it's a way to summarize all of the all of what we found talking to Native students, and no-Native students and faculty. And this is this is the template that we're using in our sort of prototype form. The cards are useful in this design context, because they're a way to convey a sense of play that's important for creative and critical thinking. So I'll run through a few of what these cards look like. So we're sort of starting with our research question about building a university that deserves Indigenous students, doing research to better understand the real strengths and the real challenges that Native students face. And then creating a way to talk about that and create solutions that answer the strengths and answer the challenges. So here is what one of the cards looks like. We have the main title and Lakota and a subtitle in English, the icon is from the Noun Project, the quote, in all the cards, is drawn either from the interviews or the survey. And then the main text area summarizes all of the all the feedback that we received in this topic area from research participants. So in this example, one participant told us when I have a goal, I always strive for it. very inspiring. And our summary says, many students are focused on goals such as graduation, employment, community impact, a sense of personal sovereignty, a fire within, drives, values-based behavior. And so on the flip side, we have cards that represent some of the challenges that the students identified. And so here's one for self doubt, the quote says, sometimes I put myself down being like, I'm not good enough. Why am I even doing this? And the summary says self doubt creates barriers, it creates conflict, it takes value away, feelings of uncertainty, internal disputes, and doubts of oneself can present major obstacles to learning, engaging on campus and achieving goals. So we think it's important to highlight these challenges as something that our institutions need to be aware of and need to address. And the way our toolkit's designed is that the way we address those challenges is through the the strength. It's a strengths-based approach that the Native students themselves have identified. And so we also want to note here that the self doubt comes from racism and stereotyping, so we have a card for that, that says, My Native American identity is not universally accepted. And so what we see on our campus, and I'm sure it's not very different on your campus, racist viewpoints, hostile attitudes, and oppressive stereotypes are real challenges that Native students face, day to day tense looks, rude comments, weird vibes, can create an atmosphere that can feel at times unbearable. And those are just the microaggressions. And so thinking about creating a space where we can actually talk about that is really important for creating a space for student success. So our toolkit has 10 challenges and 10 strengths. And we also have 10 exercises, five for inquiring about about a problem or an issue kind of creating ideas, and then five for narrowing down and creating solutions or that's the kind of like services-oriented exercises. So there are a couple I'm gonna move by that quickly. To get to this, we kind of imagine the cards working together in a sequence. It's kind of like a symbiotic universe where we have the inquiring exercises and the solving exercises. And they're all based on the strengths and the challenges that the students identified themselves. And so we have all instructions for use basically on this website right here. So I'll stay on this page for a little bit because this is this is a key takeaway. Part of what we want to accomplish with today's talk is to put this tool in your hands. And so a specific product for you to use to start thinking and talking about the Indigenous student populations on your campuses, but also more broadly to kind of illuminate a path forward to kind of how you can replicate similar processes, you know, a research approach, a community approach, building relationships across campus with your, whatever sort of native student groups or organizations are on your campus, like on our campus, we have the American Indian Center, which is a really important place for Native students and staff to gather. And so, you know, I've worked over the last several years to build relationships there. And that that's part of the process is just sort of establishing that foundation to grow from. So at that URL, we have all the cards instructions for use, how to sequence the cards, we also, were available, if you want to reach out and talk more and collaborate and maybe do some of this work together. We've done a train-the-trainer kind of thing before where we travel, or remotely, to help people work through the tool. We think that's a really cool way forward. So if you're motivated for that, get in touch. And so yeah. Let's see

what the tool attempts to accomplish addressing the challenges amplifying the strengths of Native students, it's oriented for our student population, but it's at least a stepping—a first step for you in your specific contexts. It works to enhance empathy and understanding to really show what are the specific challenges that Native students face? And what are the strengths that they have that can help guide them to their own success. So empowering Native students in that, in that goal, co-designing new ideas for better services. So, librarians, we can work with administrators across campus, faculty, across campus, students, and staff, to help create a library that can help support that, that goal of Native students success. And then getting into the nitty gritty of the process. It's about creating a safe and playful space to kind of talk about these charged issues, but in a way that that creates a productive dialogue. So that's kind of what we're what we're working for here.

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So in light of our goals, we also want to highlight four specific responses to our open-ended survey question, which was, is there anything else he'd like to tell us about your experience at MSU. And so these comments kind of demonstrate our motivation for this project. One survey respondent told us that "the staff and administration really do not seem to understand Native culture and history. Listening from a position of cultural humility would be a great place to begin dialogue." So first, our non-Native administration must do better at understanding the real needs and strengths of our Native community. And another survey respondents said, "We should have more Native American opportunities to help educate people about us and our beliefs." So, second, we want our toolkit to help build new understanding of Native students through dialogue and an education driving empathy. And you know, but despite these challenges, our students are excelling. And they're succeeding. We want our toolkit to be able to address the first two comments, while also amplifying the second two, which state, "I'm loving it, despite the difficulties," and "I've loved my experience so far." So this toolkit is intended to kind of like break down the barriers between Native students and non-Native professionals by creating a safe space for structured dialogue around real problems in support of real solutions that can help Native students be successful at our institutions. And even more than that, can help build a university that deserves Native students.

38:56  
So ultimately, what are the outcomes of participatory design? Stepping back into the theoretical mode, once again, returning to Kovach, who tells us given the extractive exploitative history of research within Indigenous communities, efforts to mitigate power differential—differentials in all aspects of research are warranted, whether using an Indigenous methodological approach or not, the attention to methods should encompass both pragmatic and political considerations. So participatory design is well-suited for that. It already prompts a practical outcome and a political outcome. So for us practically, we're trying to create new ways to co-create services with and for Native students. And so we've produced this toolkit and then earlier, the poster series, those are some tangible things we've produced. But more abstractly, we're trying to elevate Native voices on campus. We're trying to challenge existing power structures and create new power structures. That's still ongoing. And ultimately, we're trying to create a more just world. So we're still we're still in a prototype phase, we're still testing. But we're really excited about where this can go. And so where we think it can be applied is thinking about non-Native participants, there's professional development programming that could produce a discussion of the needs and the strengths of Native students. Then when Native students and ative participants are present, there could be like orientation programming, like first-year orientation, to help create safe space for talking through issues and establishing some, some community early on or at any point throughout the student experience. And then bringing these populations together, Native and non-Native programming or in-class activities, working with faculty, that can allow multiple stakeholder groups to work together toward a common goal, which is Native student success. So some, some next steps, some immediate next steps for you. Just participatory design more generally, the 75 tools for creative thinking, great resource, as is Gamestorming. That's more like play oriented, less values, principles oriented, but it's a really good place to start just thinking about how this how this can work in practice. I'll put our URL back up there: lib.montana.edu/indigenous-design-toolkit. We have, we think everything you need to get started there, including our contact info. But we need to just recognize some barriers to participation. The process takes time and resources, our decision-making apparatuses are mostly set up kind of authority-oriented, top-down, that's kind of kind of the the typical paradigm. So anything that's, you know, something different from that takes effort. So, you know, it takes time to gather participants, to slow the process down, it could take weeks or months to like come to a decision. But it's the right decision because it involves the right people in a way that actually respects their dignity and their viewpoint. So, so that takes time. And it kind of depends on your institutional values and your organizational culture, whether your org will support this kind of socially-active, resource-intensive work. There's an argument to be made to do that. So, you know, we hope to have made that here to show what it can what it can produce. But there are existing and entrenched power relations that do present significant obstacles. But it's worth confronting in breaking down those barriers. Because ultimately, through participation in design, Native students are empowered as equal co-creators in higher education. And together we can build universities that deserve Indigenous students. As a postscript, I want to highlight a recent talk by Dr. Margaret Kovach, who we've referenced a couple times in this presentation. She offered these points for, guidelines basically, for how non-Native people can move into Native spaces and do research with Native people in a respectful way, that is attuned to history and is attuned to harm reduction. And so I encourage you to pause on this screen look through this list, it's really great. Go find her work, Dr. Kovach is an inspiration. And as a post-post-script,

43:10  
Oh, we'd also like to suggest some connection points between our presentation and the Alliance's strategic plan. We've highlighted we've highlighted a few key themes to prompt thinking and practice around participatory design for co-creating library services. One of your initiatives is to create a social equity committee, and also paraphrasing from your plan. You also focus a lot on collaboration, partnership, creation, and developing shared services that support students and faculty in their roles as creators. And you also want to curate collections that foster diversity and inclusion, as well as equip students for success. So we think that this culturally-aware participatory design approach can help support these goals and these themes drawn from the Alliance's strategic plan. So this, all of this information we presented so far, is relevant to you all in your institutions. So just wanted to form those connections with you all.

44:14  
And that's our presentation. Thanks for being with us. For this time, we really appreciate your attention. And we're going to join you for a live discussion right after this. So see you soon and thanks again. This was really great.

44:26  
Thank you.