As organizations and communities recover from a crisis, they balance and accommodate competing value systems, complicating the process of healing and renewal. Using the Red Lake, MN public school shootings in 2005 as a focus for this case study, 246 media articles-drawn from Minnesota Public Radio, Minneapolis Tribune, New York Times, and USA Today-revealed the role of cultural variables in the renewal process. While an etic assessment of the community response to the tragedy provided evidence of renewal, particularly related to the reopening of the high school, an emic examination revealed underlying cultural tensions stemming from pre-existing conditions between the dominant White and Native American cultures that demonstrated the complexity of the renewal process.

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This study of two severely-affected, historically-marginalized communities expands current understanding of the crisis renewal theory by revealing the complexity of being prospective in the aftermath of a school shooting and following the devastation of a major hurricane. For the American Indians on the Red Lake Reservation in Minnesota and the African Americans in the Ninth Ward of New Orleans, history and group antecedents defined the crisis and complicated the sense-making process. This study proposes a model to reflect the established crisis renewal theory ( Figure 1); followed by a community model of renewal (Figure 2) as an alternative perspective.

The demographic changes in contemporary American society portend serious consequences with far-reaching implications for the future development of the country. One of the more serious challenges is in the influx of refugees and new immigrants many of whom are not acculturating as easily as in the past. Unfortunately, the use of conventional research methods in studying acculturation has not yielded many actionable solutions to the adaptation problems, nor have newcomers been engaged as co-researchers. In this longitudinal study, action research approaches of participatory and community action research as well as action inquiry were used to identify the most pressing acculturation problems and also to engage the subjects (co-researchers) in proffering practical solutions to these problems. The results provide lessons for newcomers and resettlement agencies that are interested in promoting successful integration. The use of a variety of action research approaches for each of the three phases of this project illustrates the versatility of action research in different social contexts, especially in evolving situations with different social groups.