The following resources are provided as templates for protocol
documents for projects involving linguists, anthropologists, or other
academics who may wish to do research in aboriginal communities.
These templates are intended as a starting point for you to work from
to develop your own protocol documents. Please feel free to download
them, add the name of your community or organization, and amend the
documents as needed to make them appropriate for your particular
project. The FPHLCC cannot guarantee the legal effect of a First
Nations community or organization completing, adapting, and using the
templates, and recommends that any user obtain legal advice on the use
of these agreements in the particular circumstances they are
considering.
Many thanks to the
Heiltsuk Cultural Education Centre and the
Language Revitalization In Vancouver Island Salish Communities project for sharing their protocol documents for the development of these templates!
For further information on protocols for language projects, check out the Australian
Guide to Community Protocols for Indigenous Language Projects. (PDF)
An Indigenous researcher's perspective is provided by Linda Tuhiwai Smith of the International Research Insitute for Mäori and Indigenous Education, in her book Decolonizing Methodologies.
Research Evaluation Checklist
A suggested checklist of questions for evaluating research proposals
that will involve researchers interviewing or working with elders and
community members. You may want to consider these and other questions
before you decide to approve a researcher’s proposed project.
Guidelines for Researchers
A suggested set of guidelines to make sure that the relationship
between visiting researchers and host aboriginal communities is fair,
open, and clearly documented. If you adopt these guidelines, or a
modification of them, researchers should be made aware of them as soon
as they approach you about a potential research project.
Sample Contract
between an aboriginal community or organization and a researcher or institution.
Sample Memorandum of Understanding
between an aboriginal community or organization and a researcher or institution.
These types of agreements are intended to make sure that information
collected by visiting researchers is shared with your community and
used for the benefit of the community, and not taken away and left
inaccessible in a library or archive. (The information gathered by
researchers might include field notes, audio and/or video recordings,
research papers and publications produced from the research, or other
documents.) These kinds of agreements may also include a formal
statement that certain aspects of your language, culture, or teachings
are sacred and not to be documented or witnessed by people from outside
the community.
Participant Consent Forms
These can be adapted for use as consent forms for elders and community
members who will be sharing their knowledge for a research project.
Consent forms are a way of formally documenting that the people taking
part in a research project understand what the project is about and
what they will be asked to do, and give permission for their knowledge
to be used for the project.
The General
version of the Participant Consent Form is a basic template for
developing this kind of form. A more specific form template for Language Revitalization
projects is also provided. This version could be used when elders or
fluent speakers are going to be interviewed, recorded, or videotaped by
a researcher for a language revitalization project.
