UNYA Toolbox: Exploring Indigenous Youth Mental Health in Western Canada
As I have written before, my team has the honor and privilege of working with the Urban Native Youth Association (UNYA), based in Vancouver, Canada, the native land of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples.
To build our toolboxes, we dove into the colonial and political history of Western Canada, the history of violence and racism, intergenerational trauma created by state violence through the Sixties Scoop: a period of the systemic severing of children from their families by the child welfare authorities into the foster care system and infamous residential schools. Beyond academic journals and miscellaneous articles from NPR to BBC, I have added podcasts, graphic novels, artwork, and social media as my modalities for contextualizing the space where UNYA operates and the community they serve.
Political & Historical Context: A Timeline
The graphic above details recent policy decisions and government decision-making in regards to Indigenous Youth in British Columbia. An important Two important years to add are 1996: the year the last state-sponsored residential school was closed; and June 2021: when nearly 800 unmarked graves of Indigenous children were discovered on former residential school land, sparking outrage amongst the Indigenous communities of Canada and across the globe. Read more below.
Intergenerational Trauma & Resilience
The Legacy of Residential Schools
The historical and present impact of residential schools on the Indigenous Peoples of North Abya Yala (specifically Canada and the United States), is extraordinary. While the history of the state stealing Indigenous children extends back to the founding of New France, “the term usually to schools established after 1880,” with the final state-funded residential school shutting down only 25 years ago in 1996. This devastating state-sponsored program
“Residential schools were government-sponsored religious schools that were established to assimilate Indigenous children into Euro-Canadian culture. … Residential schools were created by Christian churches and the Canadian government as an attempt to both educate and convert Indigenous youth and to assimilate them into Canadian society. However, the schools disrupted lives and communities, causing long-term problems among Indigenous peoples. The last residential school closed in 1996.”
(“Residential Schools in Canada,” Tabitha Marshall, David Gallant. The Canadian Encyclopedia.)
To say these schools disrupted lives and communities is a massive understatement. Indigenous leaders across Turtle Island say that every Indigenous person knows someone impacted by residential schools, or has been impacted themselves, either through experience, or familial and generational trauma. There are survivors of the Canadian Residential School system to this day, and the impact is lasting on the souls of young Indigenous folk trying to cope with their emotions, their sovereignty, and their identity. Wrestling with these struggles as a community is an ongoing process, and one that requires resilience, patience, and a commitment to protecting Indigenous cultures from erasure and abuse.
Mental Health Intervention Mapping
After our conversation with Gillian Andrews, former co-director of UNYA, we learned that aside from their organization, there aren’t any other mental health intervention programs in Vancouver, BC dedicated specifically to Indigenous Youth. For my toolbox, I opted to do some search engine analysis and see what google maps would reveal for a young person searching for mental health resources in their area (Vancouver, Canada). At first, I search for UNYA’s location, as a guideline for the general area I should be looking in.
Next, I searched for mental health intervention and wellness in Vancouver, BC, which resulted in 30 proposed options. When I zoomed in to mimic the geographical framing from the original search, that number came down to 19. It is interesting to note that UNYA is not listed amongst these results. In fact, no Indigenous-centered mental health organizations were listed in the search results.
Finally, I searched for “Indigenous Youth Mental Health Interventions, Vancouver BC” which yielded 20 results. Only 20% of these locations were actually dedicated to Indigenous people: UNYA, Aboriginal Mother Centre Society, Aboriginal Wellness Program, and Vancouver Aboriginal Health Society. The Aboriginal Wellness Program is a part of Vancouver Coastal Health (located at the top of the image), which had the only website I found with an Aboriginal Health Team that works in collaboration with the First Nations Health Authority and has dedicated itself to allyship and support of Indigenous people. UNYA is the only organization of these four spaces dedicated to mental health and wellness and Indigenous Youth specifically.
Our colleague Isabelle also found a page on the British Columbia government website called Mental Health and Substance Abuse Services Map, however, it is almost disrespectful how difficult the site is to navigate. There is no search bar; the only option to search is via a drop-down menu that has no organization other than the interventions being listed in alphabetical order. Not to mention, there are easily hundreds of options on the menu. It was so difficult to navigate, the only reason it is in our toolbox is to put into context how challenging it is to digitally search for mental health support via the government website.
MH Interventions: Two-Eyed Seeing
What does it mean to find balance between Western and Indigenous healing practices?
“We live in a Western world, but we walk in Indigenous ways.” — Rae-Ann Le Brun, UNYA
“Peoplehood differs from identity in that it not only encompasses the individual identity, but how that person ties into a larger collection of peoples, and how that, in turn, connects them to other people within that collective. … Peoplehood is made up of four things: territory, sacred history, ceremonial cycle, and language — each thread informs the other. You can’t address a single aspect of it without looking at the whole. Think of a spiderweb: if you cut a single thread that anchors it, the whole thing starts to collapse.” (Rebecca Thomas, 03:50/14:22)
It is important to recognize two-eyed seeing and peoplehood in our project because these terms will help us consider and understand the interconnectedness of Indigenous identity, resilience, and culture in the face of mental health challenges and healing from trauma. We are intending to take a two-eyed approach to our intervention by fusing western technologies (i.e. diary cards) with Indigenous cultural practices such as craftsmanship, storytelling, and artwork as modes of documenting and articulating one’s emotions. We hope to create satellite programming that will allow youth to channel their energy into community work and creative expression while they wait for counseling and additional support from UNYA, they can be informed of Western resources and centers for culture and wellness led by Indigenous people.
Community Interventions: Turtle Lodge
As we learned today from Kunshi Katherine Whitecloud, community interventions do not always appear as these formal organizations, but can be interventions between relations. As a Knowledge Keeper and educator, part of Kunshi Whitecloud’s work with The Turtle Lodge National Council for Indigenous Education and Wellness is to run an expedited intervention program to reconnect Indigenous youths with their languages, cultural practices, and land, through prayer, ceremony, and community intervention. The latter includes bringing together the grandparents, aunties and uncles, and other elders of the community to teach and sit with the young people in their presence, and to guide them in the ways of their people and culture.
Indigenous Youth: Creatively Wrestling with Identity and Self
As Indigenous young people negotiate these different (sometimes contradicting) notions of selfhood, they are engaged in a creative endeavor. They are constrained by ideas of the past and the present — those found in their traditional culture as well as those embedded in the dominant society. The outcomes of these processes — the development of a clear sense of self — can be fundamental in supporting healthy development. (Wexler, 269).
This graphic novel is an incredible retelling of the history of Turtle Island, countering the often-told story of heroic Europeans bringing culture and civilization to the “wild, untamed land” of North America. In the ten-story anthology, ‘“This Place: 150 Years Retold,” twenty contributors — twelve writers, six illustrators, and two colorists — join forces to correct this false narrative and reframe Canadian history from an Indigenous and First Nations perspective.”
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There have been numerous studies since the early 2000s on the importance of culture in healing generational and intergenerational trauma within Indigenous communities. One interesting article explored what role video making could play in expanding health literacy among Canadian Indigenous Youth.
Published in 2008, the article is almost prophetic in its argument about how artistic creative video projects could help youth navigate health and wellness and develop “a critical consciousness about [their] community, culture, confidence, and control” (Stewart, et al). Today, artistic video creation as a form of healing and intervention has emerged on social media platforms like Instagram, Twitter, and TikTok, where Indigenous people have found a platform for education, creative expression, community organization, and resistance practices of oral history and storytelling. @IndigenousTikTok is a page dedicated to Indigenous TikTok creators, centering Indigenous people and content creation while reaffirming the work done by these creatives to spread their word all over the world.
Indigenous content creators and activists like Kara Roselle Smith(@kararoselles) who is Afro-Indigenous, James Jones (@notoriouscree) of the Cree Nation, Tia Wood (@tiamiscihk), and Michelle Chub (@indigenousbaddie), are among a flock of young, influential Indigenous people using their platform to create, educate, and recenter Indigenous peoples and voices.
While our intervention seeks to help UNYA’s waiting list youth reconnect with their community, land, and themselves, we have to remind ourselves that social media has a significant impact on our lives today, and consider how social media movements such as these can support Indigenous Youth in the urban community of Vancouver and how to find balance when encountering social media and digital platforms, rather than psychic fragmentation.
In our initial conversation with UNYA, Gillian Andrews informed us that since the pandemic, more programming (like counseling and mentor check-ins) has offered a virtual option, which they have found to be quite successful. Youth who had trouble showing up for meetings in person, would show up for online sessions. Thus, we are considering how to make our intervention digitally accessible while remembering that there is a distinct lack of access to stable internet and wifi in these communities.
A note on interviews: Our team requested to speak with some of the youth in UNYA’s program or recent graduates in order to get a better idea of what it is that they are looking for from the program, what support they sought for if they were ever on the waiting list, and what their aspirations for the future are. Unfortunately, our request was denied, as there is a tremendous amount these youth are dealing with right now, and Gillian did not see this as a possibility. We understand that this will limit our perspective and the potential for a more well-rounded, fully informed intervention proposal. To make up for it, we are in contact with recent alumni of UNYA’s programming and hope that their interviews may shed more light than the program directors could offer.
