Book Review: The Arts of Indigenous Health and Well-Being
Kayla Chambers, RP (Qualifying), ExAT, SEP® (in training), MA, BMus
Tkaronto, ON
Kayla Chambers is a white settler somatic expressive arts therapist and dancer originally from Treaty 6 and Treaty 7 territory, now based in Tkaronto (Treaty 13). She is deeply curious about presence, embodied anti-oppression, and the power of the moving, sensing, and expressive body-in-relationship to transform trauma. Alongside her education as an expressive arts therapist, Kayla draws inspiration from her graduate-level training in ethnomusicology/performance studies, as well as over twelve years of frontline community engagement, group programming, and crisis intervention experience in student affairs and emergency shelter settings. She also serves as the current President with the Board of Directors of the Ontario Expressive Arts Therapy Association. Kayla is grateful to Indigenous, Black, and global majority wisdoms and traditional healing practices which inform her relational and body-based work and ways of being-in-the-world.
Photo courtesy of University of Manitoba Press.
Like many of the writers and artists who contributed to The Arts of Indigenous Health and Well-Being, I would like to begin by situating myself. I am a cis woman descended from white Scottish/Swedish/Finnish settlers, with possible English ancestors who arrived as colonizers to Turtle Island as early as 1620. I was raised on Treaty 6 and Treaty 7 territory, among the prairies, coulees, and mountains on the traditional and sacred lands of the Siksikaitsitapi (Blackfoot), Tsuut’ina, Îyârhe Nakoda (Stoney Nakoda), Nêhiyawak (Cree), Nahkawininiwak (Saulteaux), and Metis. I currently live, create, and practice as an expressive arts therapist in Tkaronto, The Meeting Place of many diverse nations, the place in the water where the trees are standing (in Mohawk), within the Dish With One Spoon Treaty Territory, on Anishinaabe, Haudenosaunee and Wendat lands and Treaty 13 signed with the Mississaugas of the Credit.
I introduce myself in this way to share a bit about my relationship with these writings. With humility, and acknowledgement of the limits of my particular lived experience under colonialism, I welcome further conversation and feedback on the reflections ahead, especially around any misunderstandings or missed nuances. I am grateful to all that has been shared with me about relationships of reciprocity and embodied decolonization from Indigenous, Two-Spirit, and Indigiqueer knowledge keepers, artists, writers, therapists, and loved ones.
Themes of interconnection and being in good relations with both human and non-human beings are woven throughout The Arts of Indigenous Health and Well-Being as central to miyo-pimâtisiwin/mino-bimaadizwin (Nêhiyawêwin/Anishinaabemowin), ”the good life”. In turn, within many Indigenous contexts across diverse nations, arts and creative practices deepen relationality, and are often inseparable from community histories, identities, ancient and contemporary health knowledges, ceremonial practices and protocols, and models of kinship which “extend beyond the heteropatriarchal, biomedical, colonial model of kin, to transnational alliances and political organizing, to robust relationships with the land beyond colonial geographies” (p. 7).
The book is divided into four sections, which span embodiment of relationality within material culture and making practices (Part I), community expressions of health and well-being (Part II), healing individuals, nations, and the land from trauma and grief (Part III), and imagining and enacting Indigenous futurities through resisting colonial ideologies and enacting resurgence of traditional knowledge and ceremony (Part IV). Throughout, there is generous and heartfelt sharing of nation-specific cultural knowledges. This is a book I want to keep returning to, to take for walks, create art with, and share with others.
“Throughout, there is generous and heartfelt sharing of nation-specific cultural knowledges. This is a book I want to keep returning to, to take for walks, create art with, and share with others.”
The first section, Part I: Material Culture, Embodiment, and Well-Being explores examples in which material culture and embodied practices of making (from a beaded medicine pouch (MacKay), jingle dress (Akinleye), to baskets, birchbark scrolls, and rock paintings (Riley-Mukavetz), connect and invite participants into a larger “relational nexus” with ancestral and other-than-human beings (p. 7). In these chapters, I am drawn to the exquisite examples of interconnected intimacies and stories/histories embodied within material culture.
Through an Anishnaabe practice of self-directed inquiry in “What This Pouch Holds”, Gail MacKay relates to a beaded pouch and its visual rhetoric as a metaphysical subject, with power to connect her to “a deep self-knowledge as a spiritual being living a physical life in a network of social relationships” (p. 24). As an animate subject–a relational being–the pouch embodies Cree, Saulteaux, and Metis values and ways of knowing. It has energy to impact, and act upon other animate beings while contributing to the good life by reminding MacKay that “our health is in our good relations” (p. 36).
In “Baskets, Birchbark Scrolls, and Maps of Land: Indigenous Making Practices as Oral Historiography”, Andrea Riley Mukavetz considers making practices as making history, and oral history as an embodied practice beyond words and text. Such practices are key to wellness. She draws inspiration from writer Louise Erdrich, through mapping and considering stories (oral history) as ancestors which travel alongside her. In the material practice of basket weaving, from ceremonial gathering of materials (with protocols of reciprocity with the land as ancestor) Muskavetz also asks us to consider how oral history and intergenerational knowledge are held within the bodies of basket weavers (p. 54). In this way of doing oral history, “a basket has just as much intellectual usefulness as an academic article”, while enlivening health, survival, and deep connection to ancestral relations (p. 58).
When considering mapping as a way to make fragmented histories visible in decolonial ways, Mukavetz writes:
“To map, we must consider the land as a constant storying ancestor. We must also consider our own bodies in relation to the land and how this relationship affects how we make and share knowledge. We must listen to our bodies and the stories that they tell to, for, and alongside the land” (p. 44).
And asks us:
“How do we pay attention to our bodies as we navigate our research–as we tell stories–as our bodies’ stories? What happens to the making of oral history when our bodies are healthy and well? What happens to the making of oral history when our bodies are sick and dealing with trauma?” (p. 51).
As I read Muskavetz’s chapter, I ask myself how I, as a reader with my intersections, will relate to and engage in this book “review” process. Rather than extract or pull pieces of knowledge, to decontextualize and polish them up in a collection of therapeutic practice “how-tos”, I generate inquiry–questions for reflection: How am I in relationship differently after reading these chapters? How am I in relationship to materials and stories and art that are shared with me? Which knowledges am I valuing? I remind myself that healing (to the extent which is possible under ongoing colonialism) is always relational and often exists in community and beyond medical-model therapy spaces.
“As I read Muskavetz’s chapter, I ask myself how I, as a reader with my intersections, will relate to and engage in this book “review” process. Rather than extract or pull pieces of knowledge, to decontextualize and polish them up in a collection of therapeutic practice “how-tos”, I generate inquiry–questions for reflection.”
This approach is validated in the following chapter, as Adesola Akinleye draws attention to the “racist gaze” and points to and critiques the failures of the “dualist, isolated, shell-like body [which] underpins many Western narratives of health”. She writes about how such colonial fragmentation extends beyond the sensing body to also fragment families, identities, and nations (p. 72). For Akinleye, and the other authors, healing can begin through embodied connection and a reminder of shared relations through dancing, lived experience of environment, drumming, sensation, imagination, and empathy (p. 72).
Mapping, embodied relationality, and the power of animate objects reappears throughout the following chapters. Later on, in Chapter 8: “Minobimaadiziwinke (Creating a Good Life): Native Bodies Healing”, Anishnaabe drumming group Miskwaasining Nagamojig (the Swamp Singers) describe the power of “living drums” through land-, waterway-, and community- based performance interventions (p. 191). Similar to mapping, Petra Kuppers and Margaret Noodin engage in “rivering”, with curiosity around ways in which people and places can be healed through the “steady beat of songs on skins”, connecting past and present with identity and land (177). The writers share that dewagan, the Anishnaabe word for “drum”, connects to the notion of oda (“heart”), of water cycling through bodies (p. 191).
Knowing deeply the interdependence between land and body, Kuppers and Noodin ask questions similar to Mukavetz from earlier in the book:
“How can a community be healthy if the hearts and minds within it are not…how can individuals heal if the social and ecological arteries on which they depend are not sustained?” (p. 188).
This inquiry becomes especially pronounced in Chapter 9: “Body Counts: War, Pesticides, and Queer Spirituality in Cherrie Moraga’s Heroes and Saints.” In this chapter, Desiree Hellegers analyzes themes surrounding neocolonial violence and points of connection between agribusiness pesticide poisoning, violence against Indigenous farmers, homophobia, the AIDS crisis, the Vietnam War, and the War on Drugs (p. 198).
Part II of the book bridges embodied relationality into community. In “Healthy Connections: Facilitator’s Perceptions of Programming Linking Arts and Wellness with Indigenous Youth”, the writers describe ways in which community arts processes with youth supported individual healing–through relationship and through practicing traditional social skills of helping and supporting–which rippled outward to broader community healing, and back again. Offering completed projects as gifts of art to the community (such as a mask, graffiti wall, and documentary video), lead to positive recognition by adults in the community, reaffirming pride and an uplifted sense of self in the youth participants.
The writers and facilitators remind us of the importance of context in community arts projects. Each group process was unique to the relationships and lived experience within particular communities and while the results are not easily assessed or replicable (such as in a prescription-style program package), they are meaningful. As a facilitator in community shelter spaces, I am reminded to begin with relationship–to honour intersectional lived experience, provide safe-enough space for participants to express their creative resiliency, and to make art together.
Part III: Healing Land, Body, and Tradition offers insights on the role of long-held Indigenous traditions of healing and addressing trauma and grief, such as through the Mohawk condolence ceremony (Dragone), the healing power of the drum (Kuppers and Noodin, mentioned previously), and through the creative resistance of children engaging with soundscapes in Indian Residential Schools (IRS).
Settler ethnomusicologist Beverley Diamond begins the section with a recognition of the “doubleness of sound” through exploring the contradictory soundscapes of the IRS system. Sound, she writes, with its ephemerality and unique relational qualities can be simultaneously oppressive while also softening trauma. While sound and silence were both used in the residential schools to enforce oppressive colonial structures and ideologies, children engaged in expressive acts of resistance through various ways: choosing to think in their language (when speaking it was forbidden), connecting with the voices of ancestors through birdsong, subverting colonial songs through double meanings and parody, and through accessing moments of aesthetic pleasure and ease in music. In the post IRS era, survivors continue to engage in sonic strategies of resistance, sovereignty, and personal healing.
“The flow of healing between individuals and community, and teachings around being in good relationship continue to be shared as integral to well-being. ”
In Chapter 7: “Kissed by Lightening: Mediating Haudenosaunee Traditional Teachings through Film,” Nicholle Dragone shares teachings about grief and the Mohawk condolence ceremony - its importance historically when Peacemaker unified the five nations of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, and as a powerful ceremony for the “restoring of a grieving mind to the good mind” (p. 164). She shares that the concept of good mind starts at the beginning of the world, with Skywoman’s grandson, and is significant to Haudenosaunee identity as a reminder of responsibilities to one another to work together for balance and peace in connection to the natural world and seven generations forward and backward (pp. 150-155). The flow of healing between individuals and community, and teachings around being in good relationship continue to be shared as integral to well-being.
Later on, in Part IV: Resistance, Resurgence, and “Imagining Otherwise”, esteemed poet Louise Halfe shares her close attention, in consultation with the wisdom of six Elders and a language specialist, to the etymology of Nêhiyawêwin (the Cree language). In the generous examples she shares, Halfe demonstrates how the etymology of Nêhiyawêwin contains the foundation of teachings in the natural world, echoed in ceremonial practices and healthy ways of being in relationship. I am grateful and humbled by the richness of the teachings shared within this chapter, which are “as old as our language itself–since the beginning of time. They are elemental, derived from the wind, the fire, the rock, the earth, and all its animate and inanimate forms” (p. 223).
In the concluding chapter, “Sâkihiwâwin: Land’s Overflow into the Space-tial “Otherwise”” by Karen Recollet, language is transformed into new frameworks to think through how embodied, sonic and/or visual cultural practices, as expressions of sâkihiwâwin (“love in our actions” in Nêhiyawêwin), animate possibilities for Indigenous futurities of love, joy, and justice (p. 16).
Through “kinstillatory” relations, land and body are intimately connected. We envision land beyond the terrestrial, to boundlessly extend in multiple dimensions—to the stars and to the bottom of the ocean, and in the spaces between spaces: “ the complex and gorgeous scales of kinship that comprise the dark matter holding the stars together” (231). Through arts practices, activations (or “glyphing”) of these multi-scalar relationships with land mobilize “otherwise spaces of possibility”, finding moments to intervene in the harms of heteropatriarchal colonial violence through overflowing, and often messy radical relationality, liberation, pleasure, and love (p. 238).
There is a return to mapping again, as Recollet writes:
“Rematriative cartographies can be embodied practices whereby the health and well-being of Indigenous peoples are intimately linked to radical relationships and a consciousness of viewing land as multi-scalar–as consisting of underground rock, fire, waterways, surface waterways, and celestial cartographies” (p. 250).
We are left with more questions to carry—around landing practices, and ways in which we reworld together (p. 235). I ask myself: As we look at the night sky, how might our sensual intimacies shift? How might we be in relationship differently, beholden to Indigenous sovereignty, Black liberation, and queer abundance, after we “intentionally fall in love with that star, that mountain, or that waterway…”? (p. 250).
References
Van Styvendale, N., McDougall, J. D., Henry, R., & Innes, R. A. (2021). The arts of Indigenous health and well-being (N. Van Styvendale, J. D. McDougall, R. Henry, & R. A. Innes, Eds.). University of Manitoba Press.