Walking with our sisters: healing through storytelling

Abstract

This thesis explores the experiences of members of the Walking with Our Sisters organizing committee before, during, and after the installation came to Sudbury, Ontario in January 2018. The primary research objective was understanding how storytelling allows for a collaborative and holistic approach to the research process. Through the sharing of Indigenous stories and knowledge, this thesis implicates the researcher as a settler-researcher who was privileged with stories of members of the WWOS organizing committee’s journey before, during, and after the installation visited Sudbury in January 2018. Although each participant’s story revealed the uniqueness of everyone’s experiences working in the committee, four major themes emerged from the interviews: 1) personal connections to violence against women 2) relationships, self-care & debriefing, 3) arts-based methods as a form of healing and 4) closing the bundle. Presenting the participants’ interviews back, through the process of storytelling, revealed the emotional and personal responses to the WWOS installation and created a more collaborative research process than traditional Western approaches, thus shifting the power in the research. The results of this research will be useful in contributing to decolonial literature and understanding the importance of practicing self-care when approaching the traumatic subject matter associated with MMIWG.