About Taking Action!

The Taking Action! Project: Art and Aboriginal Youth Leadership for HIV Prevention is a national project working with six Aboriginal communities across Canada. We want to figure out how Aboriginal youth understand HIV in relation to their communities and cultures and also to see if using art is an effective tool for working with youth to talk about HIV/AIDS.

Why is this important?

There is so much in Aboriginal history and teachings to support healthy sexuality and Aboriginal traditions have always recognized the power behind the youth voice. Yet, there is a lack of culturally relevant information about HIV, which is a concern because HIV affects Aboriginal youth and their communities at higher rates across Canada.

It is time for Aboriginal youth to get involved in creating culturally relevant information that educates to prevent HIV. Unleashing the creative power of youth as health promotion activists is a successful approach, used both in Canada and around the world.

With this in mind, our team has developed the Taking Action! Project. It aims to involve Aboriginal youth as HIV prevention leaders, using both traditional art forms and new media approaches. Aboriginal youth, with the help of artists and community partners, will tackle the higher HIV infection rates among members of their communities by developing and showcasing their own creative art-based responses.

Taking Action! Workshops

Taking Action! workshops are organized by local youth coordinators with the support of local elders and other community members as well as the Taking Action! research team.

The goal of these workshops is to provide youth with a chance to develop projects that unpack the links between structural inequalities, individual HIV risk, and Aboriginal culture(s).

This means creating artwork about stuff like:

  • Colonization, racism, assimilation, isolation, and residential school system legacies
  • Healthy sexuality and HIV risk
  • Aboriginal cultural knowledge and traditions

During these workshops, youth learn about HIV by working in small groups with trained artists on projects like music, video, photography, hip hop, and other art forms, discussing their artwork with the other participants in the project, and, on the last day of the workshop, presenting their artwork to their community.

We have held Taking Action! Workshops with the urban Aboriginal community in Toronto, Ontario (October 2008), Kettle and Stony Point First Nation & Aamjiwnaang First Nation in southwestern Ontario (February 2009), Kahnawake First Nation just outside of Montreal, Quebec (May 2009), Nak’azdli First Nation in northwestern British Columbia (October 2009), Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island (May 2010), and Puvirnituq in Nunavik (October 2010). In each of these communities, our local youth coordinators did an amazing job planning a weekend workshop with the youth in their community.