Grant: Indigenous Gender and Wellness Development Grants

Indigenous-Black (IB) communities have been recognized in the US for hundreds of years, but despite an over 400-year presence in Canada, they do not hold the same recognition. As a result of colonial legacies, ongoing structural inequities, intersectional oppression, social, and geographic displacement, and the lack of legislated claims to territory, mixed Indigenous and African diasporic communities may be dually hurt and placed at elevated risk for a variety of social and health ills, such as poverty and HIV. More than 70 000 people are living with HIV in Canada and the over-representation of Aboriginal and African, Caribbean, and Black-Canadian communities in the HIV/AIDS epidemic has been well-documented in national HIV statistics. We infer from these trends that mixed IB people experience disproportionate rates of chronic illnesses such as HIV. While there has been a paucity of national work examining the health needs of IB communities, our team's recent work revealed the need for an interdisciplinary, multi-pronged approach to appropriately address the impact of past and ongoing intergenerational colonial trauma on the mental, physical, and sexual health of IB people. As such, our team will employ oral digital storytelling, community mapping, interviews and a questionnaire to explore questions such as: What are the barriers and facilitators to the health service access and overall wellbeing of IB communities? How do IB people experience intersectional oppression along the lines of gender, race, etc. and what are the implications of this on IB people's health and HIV care service access and retention? What does a culturally-relevant health intervention focused on the sexual health needs of IB communities look like? How can narrative and arts-based approaches aid in gathering the experiences of IB communities as they map, draw, write, and speak their realities into being, contributing to national discourse about their identities and health needs?