In Ottawa’s cozy Octopus Books bookshop, a small crowd gathered on March 6 to hear Catherine Richardson speak about the release of her newest edited book, Stitching Our Stories Together: Journeys into Indigenous Social Work.
A collaboration between co-editors Richardson, a professor at Concordia University, and Jeannine Carrier, an associate professor at the University of Victoria, the book is a collection of graduate research by Indigenous social work scholars.
“We wanted to create a platform for Indigenous graduate students to share and publish their writing,” Richardson said. “All the articles relate in some way to either social work practice or Indigenous healing.”
Richardson said the book’s title comes from the act of stitching Indigenous stories together as if they’re “squares on a blanket.”
“[The stories] often complement each other. It’s all the ways that we’ve resisted colonization and colonial violence,” she said. “You get a fabric or a sense of landscape around all the different ways people have strived to preserve their culture and their dignity and their language and their families.”
Facilitated by Patricia McGuire, a professor at Carleton University’s School of Social Work, the March 6 conversation centred around how Indigenous knowledge and storytelling can challenge settler ideas in social work and beyond.
“Now that there’s more Indigenous people that are publishing, I do think that there’s an opportunity for Indigenous knowledges to spread,” McGuire said. “I think we need those discussions with each other.”
An example of centring Indigeneity in social work would involve advocating for a more response-based practice, where addressing violence and adversity starts with supporting people with dignity and care, Richardson said.
She also discussed how beadwork, a traditional Indigenous practice she described as “meditative, soothing [and] healing,” was used alongside the stitching metaphor in the book to provide cultural context.
The book’s front cover, featuring beaded medicine bags designed by Métis artist Shawna Bowler, is also a nod to this practice. Richardson wore a medicine bag during the conversation.
Deborah Connors, the director of Carleton’s School of Social Work, attended the event. Admitting that she had read about a third of the book, she said she enjoyed seeing young researchers “exploring how to do something completely different than what has been done before.”
“It’s serious because it’s a reclaiming, but it’s also exciting and really engaging,” Connors said.
One of her key takeaways from the book was researcher Robert Mahikwa’s use of “story-sharing,” which refers to a person sharing their personal story with a researcher or another individual. It’s similar to a one-on-one interview, but without the intermittent questions.
This practice reflects an Indigenous epistemological framework and redefines the research process.
“It’s a very simple change, but it really does change the feel of what’s happening,” Connors said.
Richardson said she wants people, especially social workers, to ask themselves how they can contribute to systemic change and practise social work in a way that doesn’t perpetuate harm of Indigenous people.
“[Social work] has been an arm of colonialism, like removing children from Indigenous families,” Richardson said.
Indigenous land was stolen and colonized by destroying the social fabric of Indigenous communities to render them incapable of resisting, Richardson said.
“We need a complete system change and some of the recommendations in these chapters help to guide that path.”
Featured Image by Georgia Looman/the Charlatan.
