There are such wide, diverse topics of research. I'll give you the example of tuberculosis and tuberculosis elimination.
From the public health side, we're still trying to understand how to talk about tuberculosis and how to identify active tuberculosis among our populations. We've done research projects. I was a part of one in Nunavut called Taima TB, where we paired public health nurses with Nunavut TB champions and went door to door in communities based on demographic information we had. They talked to people about tuberculosis and asked them if they wanted to get tested. It was done in Inuktitut and with a community sense.
That was highly effective. It was upstream public health work. The research portion of that allowed us to understand how effective it was. If we were going to spend money on TB elimination, would this be one of the ways to apply a community-based public health approach to lowering the rate over time? There's invaluable information that we gained from that. If we had just said, “Let's hire public health nurses from the south to come up and do this door to door”, we wouldn't have had the same result.
The willingness of a principal investigator to partner with Inuit—in this case, the organization I worked for at the time was Nunavut Tunngavik—and their ability to work with us on every single aspect of the project, including doing a community feast and returning results to the community in a specific way, can create a positive interaction between the community and the research project.
We have to recognize that we've had very negative interactions with research over time. Part of the construction of each one of our partnership approaches to research is destigmatizing research, being careful in the way we conduct it, having a community- and an individual-focused approach, and returning results so somebody who participated doesn't read about something that impacts them in a Globe and Mail article or hear about it at a research conference in the south.