Here we are on Turtle Island: Indigenous young adults navigating places, spaces and terrain

Abstract

In this paper, I aim to investigate the migration of Indigenous youth from the reserve to the urban environment. I will investigate the implications of an arts-based programme for youth and how they utilized my programme as a resource for learning. The goals of this paper are to provide a nuance thinking of and theorizing land as related to Indigenous communities. Indigenous young adults have had to figure out how to deal with these injustices from residential school and have taken up the call to fight for in their communities against state/nation desires for annihilation. To carry out this study, I conducted a critical ethnography and used arts-based methods to collect data. The stories of the IYAs became vital to learning about the challenges they faced and obstacles they have overcome, including fighting for recognition under the Indian Act, border politics within Canada and the United States, not knowing one’s traditional land and barriers to migrating to the city independently of one’s family. The data collected reveal the resilience of Indigenous young adults in the ways they are overcoming obstacles and speaking out using cultural production and innovative means of communication.

Keywords:

• Indigenous youth
• resilience
• migration
• urban environment
• reserves
• arts-based methods
• settler colonialism
• critical ethnography
• photography
• Canada

Notes

1. The name of the participants and the name of the centre has been changed for the purpose of this study.