Gina Mowatt

Topic

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

School of Child and Youth Care

Date & location

• Wednesday, April 3, 2024
• 10:00 A.M.
• First Peoples House, Room 162

Examining Committee

Supervisory Committee

• Dr. Mandeep Kaur Mucina, School of Child and Youth Care, University of Victoria (Supervisor)
• Dr. Sandrina Carere, School of Child and Youth Care, UVic (Member)
• Dr. Sarah Hunt, School of Environmental Studies, UVic (Outside Member)

External Examiner

• Dr. Vikki Reynolds, Master of Counselling Program, City University, Vancouver

Chair of Oral Examination

• Dr. Matt James, Department of Political Science, UVic

Abstract

Suffering 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.