Houghton, Joshua2025-08-292025-08-292025https://hdl.handle.net/1828/22681This project offers insights into my journey of reconnecting with my late mother’s Indigenous Sḵwx̱wú7mesh community. Through connecting with cousins, aunts, and uncles, I experienced a diverse and extended kinship network, guided by rich teachings, art, storytelling, and ceremonies. This provided a foundation for my art-based project that guided my research in understanding the value in Indigenous ways of knowing that are experienced through holistic, interconnected and fluid practice. I have utilized the art of storytelling to create a story blanket that documents my journey and reconnection to my Sḵwx̱wú7mesh roots. Combined with an audio and slideshow presentation, each blanket panel tells the story of my journey of reconnection through questions, understanding, connection, belonging, and commitments to practice. The story blanket is composed of 12 story panels made of felt, wool, buttons and thread and arranged in a linear format that documents my journey of understanding through an autoethnography approach of piecing, stitching and steeping the multilayered intersections that shape my identity as a mixed-race person, with an emphasis on my coming into my Indigeneity. In contrast to Western research paradigms of appropriation, the foundations of my research methods and ethics are rooted in Indigenous ways of knowing and being. The story blanket highlights the need for a sense of belonging to community and how community and kinship cement the foundation of Indigenous identity. Colonization has displaced many Sḵwx̱wú7mesh community members from their traditional lands and kinship systems. Finding and belonging to these systems provides a sense of self-worth and acceptance, reestablishing the diverse kinship networks within communities that foster a sense of belonging, healing, and connection.enproject