“It Makes My Heart Smile When I Hear Them Say, ‘Hi Grandpa, We’re Home!’”: Relationality, Alaska Native Wellbeing and Self Determination in Tribal Child Protection

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Thank you for this exciting and fascinating research. The article is well written. I debated about the length and number of quotes but the more I delved into the material the more evident it became the length / number was needed. This is an important part of a larger project. There is not a title for Figurr 2.

I rarely review a paper where I do not make a number of suggestions for revision and clarity. I am not in this case.

Thank you

Author Response

Reviewer feedback and Author Responses (in bold) for: “It makes my heart smile when I hear them say, ‘Hi Grandpa, we’re home!’”: Relationality, Alaska Native Wellbeing and Self Determination in Tribal Child Protection

Our team would like to thank the reviewers for their insightful and helpful feedback. We believe their suggestions greatly strengthened this draft of the article.

Response to Reviewer 1

Thank you for your comments and review. We included a title for the Figure that you referred to.

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

I commend the authors on a beautifully written article and important work in addressing the over representation of First Nations children. There are some areas to strengthen and improve. There are several paragraphs that have captured the true essence and strengths of Indigenous families and culture as a critical response to innovate and decolonise child protection approaches. Such frameworks will likely also offer other Indigenous cultures models to consider in response over over representation of Indigenous children. Best wishes in reviewing your article and ongoing work with this project. 

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

Reviewer feedback and Author Responses (in bold) for: “It makes my heart smile when I hear them say, ‘Hi Grandpa, we’re home!’”: Relationality, Alaska Native Wellbeing and Self Determination in Tribal Child Protection

Our team would like to thank the reviewers for their insightful and helpful feedback. We believe their suggestions greatly strengthened this draft of the article.

Response to Reviewer 2

• Suggest including the current statistics of First Nations Children in Child Protection early in the article. As further context, do the authors think it might be worth mentioning that globally as a result of Colonisation, Indigenous children are over represented in child protection system such as Australia, US, NZ?

Thank you, we added a paragraph to provide this contextual dynamic of disproportionality.

▪ The critique would be strengthened using more literature on child protection and the overall importance of decolonising child protection. See Cindy Blackstock: Residential schools: Did they really close or just morph into Child welfare? and Libesman: Decolonising Indigenous Child Welfare and others. Suggest a paragraph on the over representation in child protection as part of background. Note this should also be picked up in the discussion as well as this is a key premise of your article on the importance of changing child protection systems to be culturally safe.

Thank you, we added this information to the additional paragraph we included in the introduction section.

▪ Suggest also including Indigenous scholars on methodology: Research is Ceremony (Wilson); Indigenous Methodologies (Kovach).

We added additional references like this.

▪ The diagram model page 4 has a good framework including the four outside headings. The model is busy with both deficit and strength-based language, and is not easy to follow in contrast to the second model in the article. Is it necessary to have such a busy model as it overpowers the strength and meaning of your model, and can the model be simplified?

We deleted this first Figure and kept the second one.

▪ Overuse of short paragraphs in the paper, try and avoid as it disrupts the flow of your paper.

We believe the formatting changed when our paper was added to the journal template. We reformatted it so hopefully it doesn’t appear to have several short paragraphs anymore.

▪ Reorder the quotes in several sections and try and begin with the quotes closest to the topic of child rearing practices etc. At some points the quotes are a little difficult to follow. At times this article becomes too general.

We ordered the results section to align with our methodological approach: by global themes, organizing themes and basic themes that lead up to the adapted and created NEC Piagiq Framework. I don’t believe moving the quotes and themes around would be a strategic way to portray the conclusions that we came to.

We took out a couple quotes, and shortened a couple others. Due to the limited space we have, it may seem like some statements are too general. Our style of reporting the results is more descriptive than interpretive so that it is clear how we developed the NEC Piagiq Framework.

Detailed line by line suggested feedback:

We included an additional paragraph with more citations. We added some (but not all) of the suggested references. We agree that culture is a key component of Indigenous wellbeing and will refrain from including it in the title due to the long title we already have. We are keeping the results section organized by global, organizing, and basic themes. We reformatted it so there aren’t as many short paragraphs. We don’t include references in the results section, we are being as descriptive of the direct quotes that we can, and are making some inferences based on the quotes. Hopefully all the reorganization and formatting are adequate and that our response to keeping the paper organized as it makes sense as we are setting everything up for the NEC Piagiq Framework.

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Congratulating the authors and team on your research on protecting our next generation. Well done.