Nineteenth International Conference on the Arts in Society

Abstract

As an non-Indigenous researcher in arts education, I was called in the middle of the pandemic to participate in a collaborative project between Peru and Canada with Quechua communities in the Andean region (2021-2024). By linking arts education and Indigenous health, we sought to highlight how artistic co-creation could encourage dialogue between local health actors and community members in order to foster the mutual recognition of Indigenous ancestral traditional knowledge in health from a global health perspective. While the instigation of artistic co-creation activities in this project sought to foster dialogue and the need for healing in the face of the traumas of colonialism experienced and perpetuated by the local health system, several pitfalls and difficulties arose between theory and practice. While arts education proved to be essential to allow dialogue and greater reciprocity between the participants of this project, the journey placed me in front of several ethical questions. It is with humility and an acknowledgement of the limitations of my personal experience as a non-Indigenous researcher, artist, and educator that I wish to share an autoethnographic account of this experience of reciprocity and learning in Indigenous research.