Arts for Equity is a research program that explores the arts as a way of healing, disrupting, learning, and sharing for reconciliation and equity in healthcare. 

 

We are a team committed to collaborative research between Indigenous peoples and settlers to advance arts-based responses to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission Calls to Action. Inspired by these calls, we are forging new pathways to reconciliation in healthcare through Indigenous-settler collaborations and novel arts-based approaches.

 

We believe that the arts provide an alternative and inclusive language for expressing life’s experiences, engaging people’s hearts and minds, disrupting taken-for-granted assumptions, and facilitating changes of perspectives. The arts and storytelling are integral to Indigenous communities, and can foster dialogue between diverse groups of people who are on a path towards reconciliation.

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Our projects involve the following four arts-based approaches for reconciliation and health equity:

1. Arts and health initiatives for pyscho-social-spiritual care and healing with diverse patients.

2. Arts-based research for disrupting harmful narratives.

3. Arts-based educational strategies for transformative learning.

4. Arts-based knowledge translation and participatory knowledge synthesis approaches for sharing research findings in a meaningful way.

We are passionate about working collaboratively with patients, communities, healthcare partners, and colleagues to conduct respectful, responsible, relevant, and reciprocal research. Dr. Kendra Rieger also contributes as a co-investigator on colleagues’ research projects and supervises students in their work towards equity.

 

These TRC Calls for Action provide direction for addressing healthcare inequities for Indigenous peoples, and its commissioner, Honourable Justice Murray Sinclair, challenges settlers when he says: “We have described for you a mountain. We have shown you the way to the top. We call upon you to do the climbing.”(ref, p.60). Critical, participatory arts-based methods can provide “tools” for climbing Sinclair’s mountain and affect systemic change. Our website describes a series of interrelated studies to take steps in climbing this formidable mountain and promoting health equity.

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We welcome you and invite you to enter this website with humility and an intention to learn the truth about Canada’s historical and present atrocities against Indigenous peoples and move towards reconciliation.