Water justice & youth mental health resilience: co-creating art-based solutions with Alaskan Native and Awajun communities

For Indigenous Peoples, water provides lifeways, subsistence, and has undeniable spiritual significance. Indigenous Peoples are increasingly recognised as global leaders, actively shaping, through their knowledge and wisdom, national and international water policymaking. Yet, for generations, Indigenous Peoples continue to struggle for water justice across the globe, and colonial legacies still have profound effects on Indigenous Peoples' right to self-determination, socioeconomic development, cultural identity and health outcomes.

Water connects generations over time and can do so in both healing and destructive ways, depending on how the various generations interact with it. The waters we interact with today have experienced historical traumas, just as Indigenous Peoples. Traditional and contemporary art is increasingly being used by Indigenous Peoples to promote intergenerational healing by reflecting on their connection to land and water through family histories. Indigenous youth are playing a critical role by connecting with Elders and leading a dialogue through art, to inspire change and design solutions to recover from historical trauma to water and to peoples.

The goal of our research is to work with Indigenous youth to address current water and mental health issues affecting Indigenous communities. Our approach will be informed by the concept of "two-eyed seeing", blending Indigenous and Non-Indigenous ways of knowing, through a common language: art. We acknowledge that the uneven relationship between non-Indigenous and Indigenous knowledge systems, will require our research team to be careful and consciously aware of their values, positions, and motives.

We will work with Awajun and Alaskan Native Peoples in Amazonas (Peru) and Alaska (USA) respectively, where members of the project team have long-term established collaborations and trusted relationships with local organisations and communities. The early stages of our project will aim to consolidate a cross-country Indigenous and non-Indigenous partnership, based on mutual trust and understanding. Within the research team and with the communities we will develop a common vision of the collaborative process to support the creation of: (i) a shared understanding of how to talk together; (ii) a shared vision of how to walk together; and (iii) a shared understanding of terms and concepts.

Blending narrative and participatory art approaches, which are consistent with and guided by Awajun and Alaskan Native Indigenous ways of knowing, we will raise consciousness for social change, and open new pathways to knowledge development, which shift the power towards Indigenous Peoples and communities. Through artistic caravans, traditional art workshops, an arts-based social enterprise and photovoice, we will explore the linkages between mental health and water and the challenges of equity and justice in water governance in Indigenous communities.

The final stages of our project focus on developing a network to connect Indigenous youth, researchers, artists, activists and policy makers from around the world who share a commitment to arts-based research and intercultural knowledge exchange. The network will facilitate dialogues through an online discussion platform, podcast series and a travelling exhibition.

This study will demonstrate that Indigenous youth are experts on their lands and that they are able to make decisions to inform a future that is compatible with their own goals, ways of knowing and of being. By combining diverse research expertise with Indigenous knowledge and interests, and by building an arts-based understanding of how to harness Indigenous principles in support of water and human health, this project has the potential to inform sustainable strategies using approaches which may be replicated in other regions of the world.