Grant: Operating Grant: Indigenous Gender and Wellness - Knowledge Sharing

Following several years of intensive discussions, oral history work, and ceremony, elders from four central Vancouver Island University Coast Salish communities share their experiences of engendering their identities, health and well-being through the traditional teachings of their ancestors in the face of colonial institutions including schools and hospitals. Using film and storytelling as powerful media, they narrate their perspectives on their life courses, how they encountered challenges to their understanding of their own identity and how their cultural teachings allowed them to engender and enact their Indigenous identities through language, ceremony, and protocols all rooted in their homelands. Coast Salish people are guided by Hulq'elh, correct ways for engaging with oneself, with others, with the land, with the language. That engagement creates a dynamic and personal process of becoming, which eschews a focus on restrictive categorizations, and envelops rather than foregrounds gender. Recognising this process enables broader community involvement in gender issues. In the end, settler-colonial constructs attempt to contain, control and systemically organize identity in a way that contradicts an Indigenous episteme of constant movement of human life on earth and is deleterious to Indigenous peoples' health. The Elders' narratives and their creative representation of engendered identities through short documentary/ animated films demonstrate this. In this Knowledge Sharing phase of the work, Elders reach out to youth and generate a dialog between the generations around enacting and embracing identity for well-being. Creating a web-based public resource library, workshops, and three additional films featuring youth and Elders sharing together are the focus of this initiative. Partners in these efforts include: Indigenous Services Canada; Parent Support Services of BC; and Kwasun Cultural Education Society.