Research Reservations: Response and Responsibility in an American Indian Community

Community action research among the Assiniboine and Gros Ventre tribes of the Fort Belknap Indian reservation in Montana was undertaken to identify the cultural grounds for innovative mental health service delivery. As an enrolled tribal member investigating these matters in my "home" community, however, I encountered a series of challenges and limitations emerging from respondent reservations about sharing personal experiences of difficulty and distress, and the perceived means for redressing these. Focusing upon a difficult interview with a knowledgeable tribal elder, I enlist sociolinguistic analysis--the study of communicative norms governing who talks with whom about what (and under which conditions)--as one crucial means to making sense of this complex research encounter. Similar analyses would seem necessary to ensuring the cultural validity of research conclusions in cross-cultural action research more generally.