About the author, Joanne Bear:
Joanne Bear is an art therapist who has just completed her Art Therapy diploma from Vancouver Art Therapy Institute (VATI). Joanne has a social justice background, experience working in community engaged arts, and social work experience. She intends to continue working through a social justice and social activist lens in her clinical practice and works to decolonize her practice with Indigenous clients through her efforts to dismantle institutional and systemic harms, by rejecting power structures, and by incorporating spiritual and cultural supports for Indigenous individuals. She is originally from Muskoday First Nation and is of Cree descent.
Background to the Report:
In 2022, Rebecca Caines, Marissa Largo, and a team of professors from York University’s School of the Arts, Media, Performance and Design, who had been hired to work at the new Markham campus, collaborated with knowledge keeper Clay Shirt along with the Office of Associate Vice-President Indigenous initiatives to prepare an application for funding from the Academic Innovation Fund (AIF). The AIF is a fantastic fund designed to support innovative teaching at York, especially around experiential education.
The idea was to start our new program in a good way, connected to Indigenous communities and artists in the Markham area, and to help our students, staff and Faculty learn about the history of the land and the Indigenous territories the new campus is situated on through innovative education projects. The broad desire was to push back against colonizing histories and practices in education in Canada by collaborating with an Indigenous Advisory Circle and planning land-based teaching projects together that could also encourage real partnered learning and change by supporting local community priorities.
Joanne and Professor Caines have a longstanding friendship and have worked together in Saskatchewan on community-based art and research projects. Joanne was hired through the AIF as a research associate as soon as the funding was approved and has been there every step of the way. Initially, the idea had been to “scan” what other universities had done in the field of experiential education partnerships with Indigenous communities, but we quickly recognized that to research other partnerships would be outside the scope of this project, as this kind of work is necessarily localized and contextual.
Joanne suggested creating a report to ground the project in deeper understandings of healing (through her own work in art therapy), while thinking about what the priorities should be in working with youth/students and communities. We also saw this report as one way to document our activities as we worked to grow new relationships and partnerships through the emergent Indigenous Advisory Circle.
We are so grateful to her for this work and will be using this report to focus our priorities moving forward. We also hope it will be useful to others considering developing partnered projects like this. Moreover, we are thrilled that Joanne has agreed to stay on as a member of our Indigenous Advisory Circle and to continue working with us.
We gratefully acknowledge the support of York University through the Academic Innovation Fund. https://www.yorku.ca/aifprojects/