Centering the body in participatory mapping: an exploration of Indigenous women’s care spaces in Roberval

Keywords: Indigenous women, body mapping, participatory mapping, settler colonial city, Canada, care spaces
Abstract Type: Virtual Paper Abstract

Abstract

Building on last year's presentation on body mapping as a creative tool to understand Indigenous women’s experiences in urban settings, this paper has two goals. First, I want to present preliminary results of my thesis research about Indigenous women’s care spaces in the settler colonial city. Secondly, I want to reflect on using body mapping to approach this topic, its possibilities, challenges, and limits.
As we know, Indigenous women are made more vulnerable to different type of violence and discrimination by the combination of colonial structures, sexism and racism. This takes particular forms in urban settings as the colonial narrative created a dichotomy between Indigenous identity and the city. Challenging the idea of Indigenous people being out of place in the city, my research aims to understand better how Indigenous women take care of themselves and their relations, preserving and revitalizing their cultures and ways of being into the world in urban settings.
For doing so, I used a body mapping method to address the experiences of Indigenous women in a holistic and embodied way. Reframing the body as part of a continuum with the territory enables us to apply the mapping processes from, on and through the body. This approach enables thinking of care spaces taking into account interdependencies and relationships between different aspects and scales which affect well-being. The preliminary results are based on a body mapping workshop that was held in November 2022, in the settler city of Roberval near Pekuakamiulnuatsh (Lac St-Jean) in Québec (Canada).