Āhkamēyimowin: Walking Together

Abstract

This exploratory study was materialized through community involvement establishing a community-university partnership with the Girl Power Program at Sturgeon Lake First Nation, Saskatchewan. Girl Power is an after-school program that helps girls between the ages of 10 and 15 to mitigate risk factors including sexual violence and abuse, parental neglect, and teenage pregnancy. This community-based participatory research project guided by āhkamēyimowin (perseverance in Plains Cree) studies how girls involved in the Girl Power Program described the concept of mamāhtāwicikew (empowerment in Plains Cree). The purpose of this research is to illuminate the experiences of girls in relation to empowerment, as well as roadblocks to empowerment, in order to discover strategies used to foster empowerment and to identify opportunities for community development. This participatory study utilized youth engagement, and was co-facilitated and co-designed by a 15-year-old Senior Mentor in the Girl Power Program, as determined by the adult allies and the girls’ in the Girl Power Program. Overall, ten girls participated, who were between the ages of 10 and 12. Arts-based methods were employed so that the girls created an ‘Empowerment Blueprint’, symbolizing a visual representation of empowerment in their lives. Participatory analysis was used, and the findings highlighted the importance of including First Nation girls’ voices in the design and delivery of empowerment initiatives. Further, the importance of collaborative value-based research methods in mobilizing girls’ commitment towards social change grounded in their experiences of empowerment, and overcoming roadblocks to empowerment through co-creating community solutions. The benefits of this study were to illuminate how girls at Sturgeon Lake First Nation experience various influences that shape their daily lives, and how they characterized these influences either as empowering, or as roadblocks to empowerment. To address the roadblock of hunger, the Sturgeon Lake Central School and ACCESS Open Minds Youth Centre partnered to develop a youth garden. The research highlighted the role that young adults play in facilitating empowerment through research in community development.