Arts Explorer #10: Community Arts Project

Aboriginal women and families in the City of Toronto deserve to be noticed and supported! Why are they an invisible population? Where is the community action around the issues they face? How can we become allies to them in our professional lives?

Our group chose to focus on this population because we believe they are undervalued and underserved as inhabitants of this diverse city. We read in the Urban Aboriginal Peoples Study (Environics Institute, 2010) that Aboriginal Torontonians seek to become a more visible, better appreciated part of this city. There are several community organizations, like the Native Women's Resource Centre (NWRC) and the Native Canadian Centre, who work to meet the needs of this population, but how engaged are non-Aboriginals? Not engaged enough was our answer.

Click image to enlarge or visit this link for a closer look.

So, we decided to use guerrilla art to make our idea visible and bring it to the forefront. The image at the centre of the visual map was created by an artist friend, who we asked to participate in our project. We also contacted a family support worker at the NWRC, as well as Ryerson professor Peter Menzies, to ask for guidance on our action. This step was especially important given that we are outside of this cultural group.

The image represented our idea and became the visual for our guerrilla art action, which we documented in this video. My art word of the week is space, because I think the negative space in this image conveys how transparent or invisible these families can often be to outsiders.  As Schirrmacher and Fox (2009) write, "negative space is the space left between or surrounding subject matter" (p. 143). Are we paying enough attention or will this space remain blank?

To engage people in the idea, we also created a wiki to offer an opportunity for dialogue and learning. It links back to our visual map and video, provides resources and information, and can be edited and added to by the broader community. In this way, using our own skills and those of our friends, we reached our goal of sparking conversation around the issues faced by urban Aboriginal women and families in the City of Toronto.

I feel that our presentation today went well overall. I like using alternative visual supports (like the Popplet above) to show our thinking process, so I'm glad we could integrate that. I think we also chose a social justice issue that is important to us, and that's a good starting point for creating a project that is meaningful and relevant.

If we had the chance to do it over again, I might try to point out a couple of specific issues faced by urban Aboriginal women and families in Toronto, such as high rates of poverty and low levels of education (Williams, 1997), in order to highlight the urgency of this project. I'd also turn up the volume on our video because the song Rose chose was fantastic but I don't think anyone could hear it!

That being said, I'm glad we did this project and I hope other students in the class will feel interested in learning more about urban Aboriginal families so they can be a support to them as ECEs. We have a very important role to play in their wellbeing but we need to be well-informed, respectful and dedicated to continuous learning. This group of children and families have very specific needs because of a long history of colonization and oppression, and I really think we need to take that into account when considering how Aboriginal children learn and what their families might value.
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References

Environics Institute. (2010). Urban Aboriginal peoples study.

     Toronto: Environics Institute.

Schirrmacher, R., & Fox, J. E. (2009). Art and creative

     development for young children. Belmont, CA:

     Delmar.

Williams, A. M. (1997). Canadian urban Aboriginals: A focus on

     Aboriginal women in Toronto. The Canadian Journal of Native 

     Studies, 17(1), 75-101.