Hearts-based Education and Anti-Colonial Learning Project Team (H.E.A.L)

Title: All Our Relationships: Roles of Friendships and Geography in Developing Critical Anti-Colonial Health Humanities Teaching Tools and Places, including HARC and HEAL

Description: Partly using a storytelling and visual methodology, and extending this sentiment into “all our relationships,” we argue in this presentation that friendships and deep relationship to place (geography) need to be understood as fundamental to building and advancing a critical, politicized, anti-colonial, anti-oppressive health humanities in Canada and beyond. The paper explores the decade long development and expansion of the Health Arts Research Centre (HARC) in northern British Columbia, including its recent launch of an open-access website (HEALHealthcare) devoted entirely to arts-based anti-oppression healthcare learning tools that any clinician, activist, professional, or lay-person might be able to use in efforts to combat oppressive internal biases affecting their practice or worldview.

Presenter Bios:

Dr. Sarah de Leeuw: Sarah de Leeuw is a professor and the Research Director of the Health Arts Research Centre. Shortlisted for a Governor General’s Literary Award (non-fiction), she holds two CBC Literary Prizes for creative non-fiction and the Dorthey Livesay BC Book Prize for poetry. Author/editor of eleven books, de Leeuw is a Canada Research Chair (Humanities and Health Inequities) with the Northern Medical Program in Prince George, a distributed site of UBC’s Faculty of Medicine. She grew up on Haida Gwaii and now divides her time between Lheidli T’enneh/Dakelh Territory (Prince George) and Syilx Territory (Okanagan Centre), BC.

X’staam Hana’ax (Nicole Halbauer): X’staam Hana’ax is Nicole’s Tsimshian name, it means Victorious Woman. Nicole is a member of the Tsimshian Nation, Ganhada (Raven) Clan, of Kitsumkalum. She deeply values family and cultural connections.

She is excited to be supporting the H.E.A.L. (Hearts-based Education and Anti-colonial Learning) research program at UNBC. She has spent much of her career in related fields and knows from personal experience that practical decolonization training tools are a critical missing element in most institutions in Canada.

Both her education and her political activism in social equity have led her to positions where she could focus on decolonizing and championing change in health-related sectors. Most recently this was as Interim Director at the Terrace Women’s Resource Centre, and previously as Interim Director for the Pacific Northwest Division of Family Practice Physicians.

She continues to work with her children and grandchildren to restore her culture including harvesting traditional foods, storytelling, and revitalizing the Smalgy’ax language.

After a long day of smashing the patriarchy, Nicole relaxes by knitting and immersing herself in her land with her much-loved horses, dogs, and chickens.