Gwalxyee’enst: Love and Refusal as Felt Research with Gitxsan Youth

dc.contributor.authorMowatt, Gina
dc.contributor.supervisorMucina, Mandeep Kaur
dc.date.accessioned2024-05-02T20:32:41Z
dc.date.available2024-05-02T20:32:41Z
dc.date.issued2024
dc.degree.departmentSchool of Child and Youth Care
dc.degree.levelDoctor of Philosophy PhD
dc.description.abstractSuffering caused by historical and ongoing settler colonial violence in Indigenous bodies, communities, Nations and territories cannot be addressed by neoliberal western narratives of healing or wellness. Drawing on felt Indigenous feminist and queer theory, this dissertation engages the question: how we can do ethical and liberatory research with Indigenous youth relating to wellness and self-representation? This research centres an arts- and community-based project on Gitxsan homelands, in Northern British Columbia, conducted in partnership with Kinship Rising, a SSHRC funded community-engaged research project focused on Indigenous youth reclamation and wellbeing. The central themes of this research, which inform and are informed by workshops with Gitxsan youth and community members, are community reclamations of power, agency, groundedness, joy, resistance, refusal and love, based on an anti-colonial and liberatory framework. This project engaged 100 Gitxsan elementary school children in applied workshops and arts-based activities to support the creation of a large outdoor mural to honour the Gitxsan Nation’s pride, connection and resurgence at the elementary school. Calling for Indigenous felt arts-informed processes in research, this dissertation brings into question reductive, neoliberal approaches to Indigenous youth wellness by analysing dominant discourses of individualized and depoliticised healing; and instead centers Indigenous youth resistance, joy and continuity in the face of colonial violence.
dc.description.scholarlevelGraduate
dc.identifier.urihttps://hdl.handle.net/1828/16474
dc.languageEnglisheng
dc.language.isoen
dc.rightsAvailable to the World Wide Web
dc.subjectneoliberalism
dc.subjecthealing
dc.subjectresistance
dc.subjectrefusal
dc.subjectliberatory
dc.subjectresearch
dc.subjectIndigenous
dc.subjectdecolonization
dc.titleGwalxyee’enst: Love and Refusal as Felt Research with Gitxsan Youth
dc.typeThesis

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