"I Used to be Scared to Even Like Stand Beside Somebody Who Had It": HIV Risk Behaviours and Perceptions among Indigenous People Who Use Drugs

Objectives: In Canada, and elsewhere, Indigenous people who use illicit drugs and/or alcohol (WUID/A) experience a disproportionate burden of HIV-related harm. This study examined HIV risk perceptions and behaviours among Indigenous people WUID/A living in the Downtown Eastside (DTES) and the policies and practices that shape inequities and vulnerabilities for them in HIV testing and treatment. Further, we aimed to situate the vulnerabilities of Indigenous people WUID/A in HIV care within the context of wider structural inequality and generate recommendations for culturally relevant and safe HIV treatment options. Methods: This research employed an Indigenous-led community-based participatory approach using talking circles to explore experiences of Indigenous people living with HIV. Under the participatory research framework, community researchers led the study design, data collection, and analysis. Talking circles elicited participants’ experiences of HIV knowledge, testing, and treatment, and were audio-recorded and transcribed. Data were coded line-by-line and codes were organized into themes. Results: Five key themes were identified via the talking circles: evolving HIV risk perceptions (e.g., HIV knowledge and testing, and “intentional exposure”); research as an avenue for HIV testing; HIV treatment and discussions about grief and loss; HIV-related stigma and discrimination; and the importance of culturally-relevant and safe HIV treatment options for Indigenous people WUID/A. Discussion: Our work reveals that Indigenous people WUID/A do not have adequate access to HIV knowledge and education, often limiting their ability to access HIV testing and supports. Participant stories revealed both internalized and community stigma and discrimination, which at times compromised connection with participants' home communities. Further, our findings point to a failure in the public health system to deliver accessible HIV information to Indigenous Peoples, hence, many participants have solely relied on participation in community-based research studies in the Downtown Eastside (DTES) for HIV education and knowledge. There is an urgent need for accessible, culturally safe, and community-based education and treatment options for Indigenous people WUID/A within HIV care.

Pedagogical Talking Circles: Decolonizing Education through Relational Indigenous Frameworks

This article focuses on pedagogical talking circles as a practice of decolonizing and Indigenizing education. Based upon Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s (TRC) Calls to Action and the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP), non-Indigenous educators have a responsibility, while Indigenous educators have an opportunity, to transform normative colonial institutional knowledge structures and practices. Pedagogical talking circles are particularly useful in providing supported spaces for participants/students to engage in reciprocal and relational learning. The pedagogical theories outlined in this article utilize three main Indigenous methodological approaches: situated relatedness, respectful listening, and reflective witnessing. Based upon these underlying approaches, this article speaks to the necessity for decolonizing education (K-12 and post-secondary).

Traditional Sports and Games: Intercultural Dialog, Sustainability, and Empowerment

From Traditional Sports and Games (TSG) we have not only learned different ways of living time as well as inhabit space and a particular mode of practicing sports and games from distinct cultures, but also promoting universal dialog among people. TSG presents sustainable and ecological references for living needed even before the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic. Nowadays, environmentally friendly policies and production methods must be taken more seriously. TSG may reveal a path to sustainable development, considering our corporeality and cultural diversity. TSG are expressions of human groups that historically reproduce their way of life-based on modes of social cooperation and specific forms of relationship with nature, traditionally characterized by sustained environmental management. The purpose of this article is to discuss how TSG promotes intercultural dialog with a focus on sustainability, and how it empowers people and creates equality among its players. We understand that TSG can break socio-cultural barriers. For this study, we considered data from a Brazilian experience of TSG’s Festival held at a public school in the city of São Paulo (Brazil), organized in collaboration with our study group. Data consists of observations recorded in pictures and films during the processes of organization, preparation, implementation, and evaluation of a TSG Festival, held in a public school in São Paulo, Brazil from the years of 2017 and 2018, with the participation of 800 students from the first to the ninth grade of elementary school, aged between 7 and 17 years. The first step in our analysis is taken from a dynamic called “Talking Circles,” where researchers registered dialog about experiences and used specific literature about TSG, from a philosophical perspective. The team and students from our study group that organized these events were invited to participate in four different Talking Circles. Approximately 20 people participated in each one of these meetings. Recurrences that emerged from these Talking Circles are presented in the results and explored afterward. What does this experience–from bodies in movement, artistic or sporting, or both–teach about intercultural dialog and empowerment? Such gestures indicate a cultural heritage and corporeal wisdom that allows humans to face new encounters and understanding in peace, recognizing humanity common to all of us, regardless of our origins. Ethical and aesthetical results of such dialog reveal possibilities to be explored in our relationship with different cultures and the environment, providing points of sustainable development through TSG.

Responsible Tourism: A New Era of Responsibility?

The discourse on responsible tourism, although not new, has been given a new lease on life in the wake of COVID-19. Before 2020, global tourism mobilities were unparalleled with seemingly little standing in the way of the juggernaut that tourism had become. Typically, tourism is seen through an economic lens – for the jobs it provides and the impetus it gives to the coffers of governments and the wallets of tourism dependent communities. This has not changed since the tourism growth model was spawned in the 1960s and has only intensified through to the era of overtourism. In invoking the term, New Era of Responsibility, it not too subtly suggests that for global tourism, the reframing that needs to take place is urgent and has been expedited by the pandemic of 2020. What is called for has been broached before and if tourism is to be the panacea of the catalogue of things ascribed to it, business as usual is surely not feasible. The call for an epoch where responsibility is assumed reverberates in talking circles that reference the Anthropocene as a time when the urgency to act with greater responsibility is now, more than ever, vital, given that the demands put upon the planet continue to intensify while the requisite attention needed to allow recovery and replenishment, and to stave off system failure, continually deteriorates. Tourism has become entrenched as a lifestyle phenomenon for many, and a livelihood source for as many more. The call for responsible tourism appeals to finding the balance between competing priorities and most importantly, to acknowledge planetary limitations.

A Critical Review of the Native American Tradition of Circle Practices

This chapter is a critical review of circle practices. The author first examines the philosophical underpinnings behind similar practices of restorative justice, circles, circle practices, and talking circles. Then, the author explores the description of protocol and procedures of talking circles in the literature by various others. Thirdly, this literature review examines talking circles used in practice in the literature. This chapter synthesizes and critiques existing literature, as well as video resources and oral tradition. Circle practices are a traditional Native American practice of communication and community which has a strong spiritual core as a means for restorative justice. For some Native American people during talking circles, it is believed the person holding the eagle father or talisman cannot tell a lie.

Indigenous Constitutionalism and Dispute Resolution Outside the Courts: An Invitation

The Supreme Court of Canada’s jurisprudence on constitutionally protected Aboriginal rights filters Indigenous laws through the lens of liberal constitutionalism, resulting in distortions of Indigenous law. To overcome this constitutional capture, this article advocates for an institution that facilitates dispute resolution between Canadian governments and Indigenous peoples grounded in Indigenous constitutionalism. To avoid a pan-Indigenous approach, this article focuses on Anishinaabe constitutionalism as one example of Indigenous constitutionalism. It highlights points of contrast between Anishinaabe constitutionalism’s and liberalism’s foundational norms and dispute resolution procedures. This article argues that a hybrid institution—combining features of both liberalism and Indigenous constitutionalism—would merely reproduce the constitutional capture of Aboriginal rights jurisprudence. It also illustrates how the procedures of talking circles—which are one means of giving effect to persuasive compliance—promote the voice of all involved. Finally, this article argues that from the perspective of Anishinaabe constitutionalism, the non-binding nature of the processes offered by the new institution would be a strength, not a drawback.

Talking Circles: A Culturally Responsive Evaluation Practice

Talking Circles are safe spaces where relationships are built, nurtured, reinforced, and sometimes healed; where norms and values are established; and where people connect intellectually, spiritually, and emotionally with other members of the Circle. The Circle can also be an evaluation method that increases voice, decreases invisibility, and does not privilege one worldview or version of reality over another. The purpose of this article is to describe how the Circle can be a culturally responsive evaluation practice for those evaluators wishing to build relationships, share power, elicit stakeholder voice, solve problems, and increase participants’ capacity for program design, implementation, and evaluation. Circles can be used by both Indigenous and non-Indigenous evaluators. By offering the global evaluation community this concrete, practical, and culturally responsive approach, we open the door so that others can build on this work and offer additional insights as this practice is used, refined, and documented.

Jumping through hoops: An overview of the experiences and perspectives of Aboriginal mothers involved with child welfare in Manitoba

This article provides an overview of the experiences of Aboriginal mothers involved with child welfare in Manitoba. Jumping through hoops was a prominent perspective evident in stories and reflections that Aboriginal mothers shared about their experiences with child welfare and legal systems. The research drew upon interviews and talking circles conducted with Aboriginal women, and included interviews conducted with community advocates and lawyers in the spring and summer of 2007.

Identidade, Cuidado e Direitos: a Experiência das Rodas de Conversa sobre a Saúde dos Povos Indígenas

Introduction: There is a historical fragility regarding the training of health care professionals working with the Indigenous Health System in Brazil and the awakening of the growing sensitivity for the promotion of intercultural dialogue is recognized as essential in this context. Thus, the project “Talking Circles about the Indigenous People’s Health” in the university emerged in 2016, developed in a partnership between medical school professors and indigenous students from the Indigenous Tutorial Education Program - PET Indígena - Health Actions, UFSCar. Method: This report is based on the qualitative documental analyses, aiming to present and discuss the experiences, perspectives and dialogues carried out during those meetings, the construction of diversity, the description of the activities performed and the exposure of their potentialities and limits. Results: Based on both Paulo Freire’s Culture Circles and active teaching-learning methodology tools, those meetings dealt with topics related to Indigenous People’s Health, the results of which were here grouped into three categories: Identity; Care; and Indigenous Rights. The Talking Circles format fostered the construction of new knowledge in indigenous health’s field related to different cultures, specific health policies, concepts of health-disease process, providing an initial approach on the indigenous health context in Brazil. Additionally, they provided a space with indigenous leadership that dared to indicate innovative perspectives on identity issues and health understandings, disease and healing processes, as well as raising the epistemology inherent to these populations. Conclusions: Based on the dialogue between different actors, it was possible to arouse interest of the health professionals regarding ethnic and cultural issues and give visibility to the indigenous people at the University. Moreover, it can be a first step towards the construction of optional interdisciplinary disciplines and the insertion of the topic in undergraduate school curricula in the health area.