Date of Award
Spring 5-17-2025
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Master of Arts in Expressive Therapies
Major
Expressive Therapies
First Advisor
Dr. Leticia Prieto Álvarez
Abstract
Settler colonial disconnection from place perpetuates ongoing harm to Indigenous communities, ecosystems, and cultural systems through extraction, displacement, and erasure. This community engagement project explores how communities can develop emergent cultural practices that acknowledge historical and ongoing harms while building toward repair and right relationship. Through a series of five participatory workshops combining movement, storytelling, and folk dance creation; seven community members and three culture bearers, understood as "elders" explored their relationship with place through embodied practice. The research utilized an anti-colonial arts-based methodology centered on community wisdom while documenting the process through multiple complementary methods. Findings demonstrate that folk dance practices can help communities recognize themselves as cultural beings, transform embodied patterns of disconnection, and develop new forms of ethical relationship with place.
This work contributes to understanding how arts-based practices can support cultural reconciliation while offering specific methodologies for ethical cultural creation in settler colonial contexts. The resulting folk dance practice serves as both an outcome and ongoing vehicle for community engagement, creating tangible ways to embody concepts of ethical relationship with place.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
Recommended Citation
Fir, Renna, "Healing Our Relations Emergent Folk Art Creation Community Project for Cultural Healing and Reconciliation" (2025). Expressive Therapies Theses. 56.
https://digitalcommons.lesley.edu/expressive_therapies_theses/56
Included in
Counselor Education Commons, Environmental Studies Commons, Social Justice Commons, Social Work Commons
