To provide the basis for critically examining CBA research with Inuit communities in northern Canada, a 2‐day workshop that brought together academic researchers and emerging scholars was held at McGill University. Participants (n = 23) were selected via their affiliation with a community‐based partnership project that combines Western and indigenous knowledge to inform adaptation policy and programming in the Canadian North, and included faculty members of varying years of experience from six Canadian universities and one Australian university (n = 8), masters and doctoral students (n = 8), graduate research assistants (n = 5), an academic based at a Northern research institution (n = 1), and one researcher in the federal government (n = 1). Students were included due to their often‐considerable fieldwork responsibilities in adaptation projects and their day‐to‐day engagement with communities. Attendees represented a variety of academic disciplines, including geography, epidemiology, population medicine, indigenous studies, engineering, and public health; have substantial experience working in the North and beyond on community‐based research, some for over 20 years and all have been working with Arctic communities for at least 1 year; have studied various risks posed by climate change; and, collectively, have worked with Inuit communities in all four Inuit regions across Canada. As such, the reflections of participants in the workshop are based upon a diversity of personal experiences gained from many projects in many different communities.