"You Actually View Us as the Experts in Our Own System": Indigenous–Academic Community Partnership

Background: The literature on community-engaged research provides important principles to guide research partnerships, but concrete descriptions of the complexities involved in developing, navigating, and maintaining such partnerships are lacking.

Objectives: To describe and assess a longstanding, complex research partnership between Indigenous and academic pharmacogenetic research partners, with attention to co-learning and capacity building lessons learned.

Methods: Descriptive thematic analysis of 11 semistructured interviews with interdisciplinary research partners situated at Indigenous and academic settings.

Results: Lessons learned included the need for explicit negotiation around mentoring expectations, and discussion on advisory and staff roles. Partners need to be aware not only of the structures, policies, and hierarchies within each partner institution, but also the tacit value commitments and understandings entailed in their different missions.

Conclusions: This study highlights that the concept of "bidirectional" learning as it is usually presented in the literature fails to capture the complexity of how partnerships work.