Grant: Indigenous Gender and Wellness Development Grants

With technology being used now more than ever before, it is important to understand the affects that interacting within the digital world has on young Indigenous men's health and wellness. It is known that Indigenous youth are struggling to create a salient identity in a colonized world, and this is negatively impacting their health and wellness. However, what is not known is the extent to which interactions within the digital world are contributing to this process. In this project, we will be partnering with the Aboriginal Programs and Services center at UBC Okanagan to engage young Indigenous men from the local school district in an Indigenous-led participatory project. The participants will meet as a group in open sharing circle discussions about how interactions in the digital world shape who they are as Indigenous youths and the impacts that this may have on their health and wellness. Specifically, we will be asking the group members to report what they see when exploring the digital world including what types of digital platforms they are using. The group will then critically reflect about what they see, make notes of their encounters, and return to the group the following session ready to discuss their notes. Ultimately, we will be looking to answer the question, how do digital representations of Indigenous masculinity affect their sense of self, health, and wellness? This project will be infused with Indigenous knowledge and traditions to accommodate the worldview of Indigenous peoples, where the information presented by the group members will be assessed in a critical, Indigenous masculinity, and decolonial lens. This project is a preliminary phase of an Indigenous focused community-based participatory program that will look to create guidelines for Indigenous male youth to protect their health and wellness while they use the digital world for educational/recreational purposes.