Two-eyed seeds

PROJECT DESCRIPTION

Two-eyed Seeds: Indigenous Storytelling Project aimed to foster Indigenous-settler relationships through collaboration and relationship-building. Working in groups with Carleton Neuroscience students, the team collaborated with two Thunder Bay Indigenous Youth organizations ­— Keewaytinook Okimakanak (KO), and the Regional Multicultural Youth Centre (RMYC) to decolonize media spaces and give agency to the Indigenous youth voices. Unlike other capstone projects, Two-eyed Seeds focused not on creating a tangible digital media project, but on connecting historically disconnected communities, helping change the storytelling landscape to include more voices, and ensuring these relationships can continue going forward while following a community-based participatory research approach. The final deliverable was a multimedia website that included reflections, graphics, photos, and videos. This deliverable was appropriate because it allowed for different forms of storytelling and a space for them to be accessed by the Indigenous communities, which the students collaborated with.

final project

Transcript: The Truth and Reconciliation Commission defines reconciliation as an ongoing process of establishing and maintaining respectful relationships. This Indigenous storytelling project involving community-based research with Indigenous youth is a critical step towards that reconciliation. But we have to recognize that there’s a history of using Indigenous peoples as subjects and research and extracting their knowledge without giving anything back. Considering this, we adopted a two-eyed seeing approach valuing both Indigenous and Western ways of knowing and doing. By engaging with Indigenous youth and incorporating their perspectives and insights, this project aims to contribute to a more inclusive research process. 

Involving Indigenous youth is important. They’re not only the future of Indigenous communities, they’re the future of reconciliation in this country as a whole. With this project, we hope to promote positive change through storytelling. The goal is to elevate their narratives and give them agency over their stories. 

Indigenous stories and voices have been silenced, erased and misrepresented since the conception of Canada. This project, utilizing the knowledge from our research and ethics training, and the media skills learned from our undergraduate program, is meant to serve as a guide for future students and settlers to contribute to undoing this legacy. 

On this website you’ll find a collection of our experience as Carleton University Media Production and Design students collaborating with neuroscience students and two Indigenous community organizations to create a multimedia storytelling project. This website is a hub of our project goals, approach and outcome for fostering Indigenous settler relationships through collaboration and community building. 

Community-Based Participatory Research

Community-based participatory research respects the interests of the community, especially when working with Indigenous communities. This approach involves researchers and community members as a team for decision-making throughout the process from developing research questions and how the project goes. It also involves developing tools and methods, collecting, analyzing, and interpreting the data, as well as developing conclusions and disseminating results. When working with the Indigenous youth, they will decide what interests and direction the project goes. We will just facilitate and provide our support. Ultimately, the project belongs to the community and they will determine how it is disseminated.

Reflection

The following video provides a reflection from the four group members on their experience.