ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on broad considerations for how institutional leaders, practitioners, and scholars can engage in tribal community-university partnerships (TCUPs) that foster empowerment and healing for Indigenous people and communities. It then explains how heartwork orients our collective and individual work to instill TCUPs within our respective institutions and communities. The chapter provides a brief literature review of TCUP research while recognizing the role settler colonialism has in shaping and directing TCUP. It offers individual experiences as Indigenous faculty members engaging in TCUP and implications for readers on how to engage in relational and collective practices of TCUP. Honoring the narratives coming from tribal communities means we must actively listen and pause and repeat. Honoring narratives from a heartwork approach means that we are not just engaging in a transactional process of experience sharing. Cultivating authentic TCUPs and relations is also about building a tribal community consciousness.
