Caribou fur, porcupine quills, sinew, cedar, glass beads, and hides for drum- and rattle-making. These are just a few of the many materials carefully packed into handsome bags and arranged on nearly every flat surface at the Aboriginal Gathering Place (AGP) at Emily Carr University.

These “material practice kits,” more than 50 in total, are destined for Prince George. There, they’ll be distributed to participants in a series of upcoming virtual workshops. The workshops are part of the ongoing Decolonizing Healthcare System through Cultural Connections project.

“It’s been really interesting trying to conceptually picture teaching and making drums and rattles without being together, without being there with our actual hands to support them,” Brenda Crabtree, Director of Aboriginal Programs at ECU and Special Advisor to the President on Indigenous Initiatives, says. “But we’re very connected with all the folks from the Prince George community — the elders and the Indigenous artists up there. So, this is a pilot project. Our first virtual pilot material practice workshop.”

The Decolonizing Healthcare project aims to transform Indigenous people’s experiences in the BC healthcare system. In BC, as in Canada more broadly, Indigenous people of all ages experience far poorer health outcomes than non-Indigenous people. This disparity is linked both to Canada’s colonial past and to barriers, including systemic racism, which continue to permeate its healthcare system.

Decolonizing Healthcare offers a leading-edge model for dismantling these systemic and historical barriers. The project employs Indigenous-led arts and material practice as an entry-point to encourage dialogue, relationship-building, and knowledge-sharing between Indigenous people and healthcare practitioners.

Brenda heads the project alongside Caylee Raber, Director of Emily Carr’s Health Design Lab(HDL). Decolonizing Healthcare first got the go-ahead in 2019 after receiving a Systems Change Grant from the Vancouver Foundation. It was initially slated to unfold over roughly three years. But the pandemic has forced the team to make adjustments on the run.

“It’s created challenges for us because we’re so used to the hands-on approach,” Brenda says. Conducting the material practice workshops virtually was not in the original plan, she notes.

“More than anything, we love engaging with the community. So this was new and challenging for us. But I think we rose to the occasion. We’ve been really innovative with the way we put together this programming and all the resources that go along with it.”

Full article by Perrin Grauer: meaningful-connections-with-prince-george-created-virtually-through-material-practice