Indigenous Ways of Knowing: Capturing and Sharing your Community’s Story
June 3
10:50am – 12:10pm
Room 518C
This 80-minute workshop will introduce participants to arts-based methods as meaningful tools for evaluation, learning, reflection, and storytelling. Gladys will open the workshop with a 30-minute introduction to arts-based evaluation and learning methods. Shay will lead the remaining 50 minutes of the session, guiding participants through a hands-on activity.
This workshop will begin with an introduction from Gladys to arts-based methods as powerful tools for evaluation and learning, helping to capture the complexity and nuance of community stories. The overview will focus on photovoice and photo elicitation which are photo-based methods for storytelling and inquiry as reflexive methods for capturing stories, emotions, and learnings.
Then we will overview the 13 Moons Curriculum, a teaching resource that invites educators and students to arts and land-based reflections of Indigenous worldviews over the calendar year. Using arts based activities, there will be a hands-on component and reflection for participants around what our experiences bring to this gathering and the knowledge we can share with each other.
Bio:
DR. GLADYS ROWE (she/her) is Muskego Inninew (Swampy Cree) with membership in Fox Lake Cree Nation in Northern Manitoba, Canada. She holds a PhD in Interdisciplinary Studies (Social Work, Indigenous Studies, and English, Film & Theatre) and is the Director of Indigenous Insights Collective. Gladys is a community facilitator, program designer, educator, researcher, and evaluator with approaches rooted in Indigenous, decolonial, and anti-colonial frameworks. She integrates arts-based methods including poetry, collage, zine-making, and visual storytelling to support reflection, storytelling, and collective meaning-making. Her practice recognizes that systems transformation happens through relationships, dialogue, and creativity—holding space for complexity, healing, and emergence. Gladys hosts Indigenous Insights: An Evaluation Podcast if you love learning about evaluation!
SHAY PAUL (she/her) is a Secwépemc artist, arts administrator, and Research Assistant at All My Relations Indigenous Research Center at Thompson Rivers University. Her research background is Indigenous food sovereignty and environmental sociology, Indigenous arts representation, and decolonial gallery curation. As an undergraduate, she has worked in three rural Indigenous communities—Kasabonika Lake FN, Wapakeka FN, and Deh Gáh Gotı̨ę FN—specifically around Indigenous food sovereignty and food security. As the Project Director and Gallery Curator for the Indigenous Resurgence Project, her work is rooted in grassroots, community-led activism that prioritizes collective needs. Whether through land and food sovereignty or visual sovereignty, Shay blends art, storytelling, and social research to work to uplift Indigenous knowledge and support community.