January 2012 - The NCCAH has joined forces with the University of British Columbia (Okanagan Campus) to publish a unique edition of LAKE: A Journal of Arts and Environment this winter.
A call for creative submissions from across the country has resulted in a wide variety of fiction, poetry, essays, and visual arts contributions from new and established Indigenous artists.
Guests include award winning author Warren Cariou and renowned Haida artist Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas, while a creative essay originally prepared for submission to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission links healing from the colonial violence of residental schools with connection to place and the natural environment.
"This edition injects the question of health and Indigeneity into the equation of art and environment," said guest editor Dr. Sarah de Leeuw, a Research Associate with the National Collaborating Centre for Aboriginal Health.
"There is a solid evidence base that creative expression and art can lead to good health. Certainly for Indigenous people, a strong sense of cultural resiliency and identity rooted in place is integral to health - and creative and artistic expression is a vital way to express that relationship," she said.
In a guest editorial to be featured in the special edition, Dr. de Leeuw and NCCAH Academic Lead Dr. Margo Greenwood make note of the deterritorialization experienced by Indigenous peoples globally, as well as burdens of ill-health linked to such issues as sociocultural and economic marginalization.
They suggest that creative expressions provide "living, vibrant, and material documentations of resiliencies and strengths," and show that Indigenous peoples are "alive, thriving, and partaking in an increasingly globalized world."
A moving journey....
Nancy Holmes, a co-editor of the journal, said she was moved by her own journey in facilitating this edition.
"Rarely do we get to work with a group of artists whose relationship to place and to the natural world is so frequently essential to their art. It was a deeply moving experience to read submission after submission about the vital exploration of emplacement and deplacement that is being undertaken by Indigenous artists and thinkers in this country," she said.
"I hope that this issue will affect readers in the way it has affected us: opening us up to new world views, shifting our own sense of how we belong to our homes and places, and reminding us of not only the legacy but also the present worth of Indigenous voices and visions.
"This will be a remarkable issue of work from artists and writers from the Haida to the Haudenosaunee people," she said.
The journal will be published this winter. To request a copy, please contact us at nccah@unbc.ca.