Choosing Between Asking a Question or Taking Some Other Action
What do we mean by "question" or "taking some other action"? Here some examples of each:
Examples of questions include:
 | Why did this caribou get sick? |
| Why are more salmon wormy? |
| Is the nearby abandoned military site contaminating the fish in our river? |
| Why has Hudson Bay tea changed in color and taste? |
| Are the beluga in our area contaminated? |
| Why are there more cancers? |
Examples of taking some other action include:
| running an education program in the community |
| teaching people about use of traditional medicines and healing practices |
Native people and researchers tend to come up with questions differently. Researchers tend to narrow their questions. They try to come up with questions that can be answered through research. Native people tend to make their questions broad, reflecting how so many different parts of the environment are connected.
Now that your community has listed concerns and thought about possible causes of these concerns, it's time to think about the major question you want to answer. Our challenge is to think about the big picture and at the same time ask a question that we can tackle.
We have tried to summarize what we know about contaminants and climate change to help you decide what question is most important to your community.
To review these summaries, click on "Research Summaries". You will be able to choose different topics (like freshwater fish) and see short sentences and pictures that summarize what we know.
A new window will open so that you won't lose this page. Once the Research Summary window opens, you can click on the right arrow at the bottom of the screen to see a table of contents. You can click on any of the listed items to go to a particular summary.
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Asking questions can be very expensive, takes a lot of time to get results, and often produces more questions than answers. Because there may be no clear-cut way to get an answer to your question, there may be something else you want to do. That is why we also say that you can propose to do something else that will help your community feel like it is taking effective action.
Getting Ready:
First, complete the Question or Other Action Statement in the mini-grant application.
Second, complete the "Proposed Budget"
Third, complete the "Community Commitment of People and Resources" statement.
Then, please continue with "Mini-Grant Application".
03/31/2003