By Cheryl Jahn

New open-access website by HARC looks at culture and healthcare

Aug 16, 2024 | 3:45 PM

PRINCE GEORGE – An organization at UNBC has created a new open-access, arts-based and anti-colonial website that offers a wide range of perspectives on culture. The goal is to open minds to the different cultures that we live in with an eye to greater acceptance.

“You can use it for a journal club, you can use it for your own learning,” explains x’staam Hana’ax (Nicole Halbauer), Manager of Research. “You can learn it as part. You can use it as part of your curriculum in your classroom. It’s absolutely available free for anyone to use. And there are no shortages of topics, right? There are currently 30 topics on the website, everything from a cooking show, poetry echoing body language, painting, sacred paintings, all sorts of things.”

It’s a project that started long ago.

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“Well, in 2008, the HARC team, the Health Arts Research Center, came together and they started creating anti-oppressive learning resources. And over the last 15 years, they’ve developed so many opportunities for people to learn how to be anti-oppression in their practice, and in their teaching, and in the rocking in the world. And this is just the next step of that is to create this entire website filled with resources that help people learn how to be anti-oppressive.”

And, while many of the stories are around anti-colonialism, there are stories of many cultures. Let’s take a cooking show. You think a cooking show, you take three generations of Filipino workers who have worked within the health care system at various levels. First, as a first-Canadian immigrant, then as a nurse within our health care system, and then as a kinesiology within the health care system. If those three women come together, teach you how to cook a meal and talk about what it was like for them as employees in the Canadian healthcare system through three generations, you get to have an understanding about how your practices, policies and environment impact the people that work for you can have.”

And this production is not the end. If there’s gap, they’ll find a way to fill it.