Although intervention research is vital to eliminating health disparities, many groups with health disparities have had negative research experiences, leading to an understandable distrust of researchers and the research process. Community-based participatory research (CBPR) approaches seek to reverse this pattern by building trust between community members and researchers. We highlight strategies for building and maintaining trust from an American Indian CBPR project and focus on 2 levels of trust building and maintaining: (1) between university and community partners and (2) between the initial project team and the larger community. This article was cowritten by community and academic partners; by offering the voices of community partners, it provides a novel and distinctive contribution to the CBPR literature.

A 4‐year qualitative study examined the influence of teaching hatha yoga, meditation, and qigong to counseling graduate students. Participants in the 15‐week, 3‐credit mindfulness‐based stress reduction course reported positive physical, emotional, mental, spiritual, and interpersonal changes and substantial effects on their counseling skills and therapeutic relationships. Students expressed different preferences for and experiences with the 3 mindfulness practices. Most students reported intentions of integrating mindfulness practices into their future profession.

Indigenous communities have long experienced exploitation by researchers and increasingly require participatory and decolonizing research processes. We present a case study of an intervention research project to exemplify a clash between Western research methodologies and Indigenous methodologies and how we attempted reconciliation. We then provide implications for future research based on lessons learned from Native American community partners who voiced concern over methods of Western deductive qualitative analysis. Decolonizing research requires constant reflective attention and action, and there is an absence of published guidance for this process. Continued exploration is needed for implementing Indigenous methods alone or in conjunction with appropriate Western methods when conducting research in Indigenous communities. Currently, examples of Indigenous methods and theories are not widely available in academic texts or published articles, and are often not perceived as valid.

The purpose of this article is to share lessons learned from implementing community-based participatory research (CBPR) in Indian Country that may be generalizable to other medically underserved communities. CBPR is currently included in multiple grant announcements by the National Institute of Health and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, but information about this methodology vs traditional research methodology is often misleading. This article addresses some common mistakes made by academic research institutes by sharing what we have learned about how CBPR can be implemented in a respectful manner. The majority of tribal Nations prefer, if not mandate, that CBPR be used in most proposed studies involving their communities today.