Embodying transience in the Yukon
In the Yukon Territory, the Department of Family and Children’s Services operates child welfare services. There are 14 First Nations in the Yukon, 11 of which are self-governing. Recently Yukon First Nations and the Yukon government have been working together more often to reduce youth in care and decrease overrepresentation. Yukon First Nations make up 23 per cent of the overall Yukon population, and 80 per cent of children and youth in care are indigenous to the territory (Yukon Bureau of Statistics, 2016; Yukon Child and Youth Advocate, 2019). The Yukon Moving Home co-researcher project ran in partnership with the Skookum Jim Friendship Centre, Yukon Child and Youth Advocate, and the Splintered Craft Youth Arts Centre, in the summer of 2016. For 2 weeks, five Yukon First Nations, Inuit, and Metis co-researchers met Monday to Friday for 6 hours a day in a local youth centre. A local elder came to open and close the research project with prayer and was available to youth for additional support if needed. Mornings were discussion- and workshop-oriented, followed by lunch, and afternoons were open for co-researchers to work on their individual or collaborative ABR projects. The project ended with an optional public art show as the action part of PAR, and everyone participated. All art remained the property of the co-researchers, and the artist statements were crucial in the analysis phase.
Exploring personal embodiment in (potentially) traumatic narratives is difficult emotional labour. With some care and awareness of the difficulty and tensions of the task at hand, the concept of embodiment of transience was shared with co-researchers through several open-ended prompt questions at the start of this research project. The questions were designed to facilitate co-researchers’ connecting past movement in the child welfare system to current-day social and geographic mobility, with his/her/their ever-present body and feeling(s).
- 1 How do you think moving around so much, having multiple placements in group homes and foster homes, has affected you?
- 2 How do you feel about moving now in your life?
- 3 What sort of people is the child welfare system creating through so many placements?
- 4 What might you still be carrying with you from this experience and how do you carry it?
The first question broadly introduced the research topic, and the second offered a more concrete and focused example. Many, but not all, co-researchers readily self-identified with terms such as traveller, gypsy, always moving, or having wanderlust early on in the project, even going so far as to say they applied to participate in the research precisely because they have wondered about their frequent movement themselves and wished to learn more. Connecting these expressions of mobility to lived experience in the child welfare system, the third question is socially oriented and critical of child welfare practices. The third question strongly resonated with co-researchers, as their lived experience has made them “system-wise” (Liang et al., 2016), and they were quick to share stories, ideas, and examples of their thoughts on what sort of people the child welfare system creates. Not wanting to promote a narrative focused on former youth in care versus the Children’s Aid Societies, the project then asked co-researchers to connect this lived experiential knowledge to their bodies for Question 4. Co-researchers were asked to consider the body as a home, as the home we always have, and what we carry with us all the time.
When asked by co-researchers for an example of embodiment of transience, I shared a realization that I have had concerning my own body. I explained that I had spent some time homeless after growing up in and out of foster care, sleeping outside every night, subject to the elements, other people, and the police. I’d tense up at night when I went to sleep. That tensing, my dog, and my knife were my protection when I slept. Fast forward to 5 years off the streets, and I was hired for my first job with full health benefits where I could begin getting registered massage therapy. Only then, in my first session, did I realize that, even years after I had been on the streets, my body was still tensing up every night. My body had learned a habit that was useful at the time of homelessness and transience, but now that habit was maladaptive - causing me ongoing physical pain and stress. Together, these four questions and my personal anecdote framed the way co-researchers were invited to consider their bodies, embodiment, and transience as they began their explorations and excavations of personal history.
