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Choose Life: The Potential for Reciprocal Healing Through the Arts

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Engaging First Peoples in Arts-Based Service Learning

Part of the book series: Landscapes: the Arts, Aesthetics, and Education ((LAAE,volume 18))

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Abstract

This chapter offers narratives of the authors’ own experience and ruminations on the power of arts-based engagement to promote healing. Our intention is to respond to colonization, historical trauma and the ongoing suffering present in neo-colonial societies. We assert that both the “colonized” and the “colonizers” are in need of healing and social change. One way that healing can be effected, or at least initiated, is through the arts. We tell our own stories in support of this argument. Our offering is one of embodied and emplaced personal experience and personal connections with each other and with others across time and space. We link our stories with a growing international literature on intergenerational trauma and healing and community based arts projects we have been involved with in the United States, Aotearoa, and Australia.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Kaupapa Māori refers to research efforts and resultant solutions developed by Māori, for Māori.

  2. 2.

    Winanjjara is a Warumungu language term. I understand that “Winanjjara” refers to people who sing all of the time, it is part of their essential being.

  3. 3.

    I acknowledge here the formative place of Marcuse’s (1964, 1969) and Goodman’s (2011) writing on liberation on my now default conceptions of liberation via ABSL and intercultural relationship building.

  4. 4.

    I have jointly explored many outcomes of the ABSL work in Tennant Creek with valued colleagues Brydie-Leigh Bartleet and Gavin Carfoot who have led the Queensland Conservatorium Griffith University Tennant Creek ABSL work since 2009, and Dawn Bennett and Anne Power who have shared their own ABSL learnings from Curtin University and the University of Western Sydney. Please refer to our academic publications for more details on student outcomes from this work.

  5. 5.

    I am thinking here in particular of a recent conversation with Grenville Hancox of the Sidney de Haan Centre for Arts and Health in the United Kingdom.

  6. 6.

    I refer here to Elizabeth Mackinlay’s dancing toward decolonization discussions both in chapter 14 of this book and previous academic publications.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Kinuk Sisakta Consultation, Training, and Research Services, Aotearoa, New Zealand

    Joseph Stone

  2. School of Human Services and Social Work, Griffith University, Logan, QLD, Australia

    Naomi Sunderland

Authors
  1. Joseph Stone
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  2. Naomi Sunderland
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Correspondence to Naomi Sunderland .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Queensland Conservatorium Research Centre, Griffith University, South Bank, Queensland, Australia

    Brydie-Leigh Bartleet

  2. Research and Graduate Studies, Curtin University, Perth, West Australia, Australia

    Dawn Bennett

  3. Centre for Educational Research, Western Sydney University, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia

    Anne Power

  4. School of Human Services and Social Work, Griffith University, Logan, Queensland, Australia

    Naomi Sunderland

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Stone, J., Sunderland, N. (2016). Choose Life: The Potential for Reciprocal Healing Through the Arts. In: Bartleet, BL., Bennett, D., Power, A., Sunderland, N. (eds) Engaging First Peoples in Arts-Based Service Learning. Landscapes: the Arts, Aesthetics, and Education, vol 18. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-22153-3_15

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-22153-3_15

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-22152-6

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-22153-3

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