2025/06/21 by Chapola, Jebunnessa
#Ethnic Minority #Immigrant #Newcomer #Racialized #Visible Minority
paper · doi:10.11575/prism/49503
This presentation tells the story of a racialized settler woman’s transformative journey toward belongingness and mutual empowerment through community engagements in Saskatoon, Canada. I will discuss how Indigenous Land-based learning became healing and empowering for me as a newly arrived settler woman of colour. I will also focus on how collaborative community learning has supported taking responsibility for understanding the meaning of Land in solidarity with Indigenous and newcomer communities through involvement in community garden activities, community radio shows, and various anti-racist, cross-cultural cultural community activities. Using decolonial, feminist, and relational autoethnography as my research methodology, this presentation will discuss my twelve years of community engagements in Treaty 6 territory. This presentation will also address how I challenged everyday racism and colonial practices ingrained in the daily lives of newcomer Canadians through community engagements. My doctoral research emphasizes a key lesson from this life journey: the need to be responsible for understanding the Indigenous meaning of Land to create belongingness with the Land and its original peoples while resisting the assimilationist forces affecting Indigenous and newcomer communities through their unique histories, despite the orchestrated biases operating through colonialist structures. The author concludes with the hope that analyzing decolonial, collaborative learning stories and connections with the Land and cross-cultural community engagements may help other non-Indigenous communities build meaningful relationships with the Land and create belongingness.