Grant: Fellowship - PA: First Nations, Inuit and/or Métis Health

Indigenous and allied scholars agree that effective HIV prevention for Aboriginal women must be community driven, with leadership by HIV-Positive Aboriginal Women (PAW). Three decades into the epidemic, Aboriginal women continue to be disproportionately impacted by HIV. Despite the obvious social determinants of HIV for Aboriginal women, public health approaches overwhelmingly emphasize behavioural determinants and employ a 'one-size-fits-all' approach that sacrifices cultural diversity and hinders Aboriginal self-determination. The proposed project is informed by Visioning Health I (VH I): Using the Arts to Understand Culture and Gender as Determinants of Health for HIV-Positive Aboriginal Women (PAW), a multi-site, strengths-based, culturally-grounded, arts-informed, and participatory community-based pilot project. Using a phased approach and building on the success of VH I, the goals of this study are to: 1) contribute to the nascent strengths-based literature on PAW perspectives of health, culture and gender; and 2) assess the process, preliminary outcomes, and sustainability of Visioning Health as an HIV intervention/health promotion program for PAW, using participatory Indigenous evaluation methods. Informed by a decolonizing and social determinants of health lens, and grounded in Indigenous knowledge and ceremony, as well as the GIPA (Greater Involvement of People Living with HIV/AIDS) principle, we propose an arts-informed and community-based participatory approach to evaluate and assess the feasibility of Visioning Health.