HARC is intended as part of an integrated response to an identified need for a knowledge centre dedicated to renewing health in Northern BC through creative, geographically, and socio‐culturally specific means and as an agent for building capacity to bring that knowledge into practice, especially in the North, and especially for Indigenous communities.
Four primary principles guide the vision, relationships and work of HARC:
1. Respectful and reciprocal relationships with multiple and diverse communities
2. Thinking creatively about health disparities in the North
3. Merging artistic ways of knowing and being with health and medical paradigms
4. Producing new spaces for innovative and creative knowledge about well-being
Here, we showcase works that reflect and inspire these guiding principles, and that emphasize the transformative role that the arts and creative expression can play in expanding and renewing health and well-being in the North by engaging health issues and disparities through deeply-rooted and profound strengths and resiliences of northern communities and peoples:
June 28, 2015
Over three days in May 2014, the Health Arts Research Centre held a gathering in the Waap Galts’ap Longhouse on the Northwest Community College campus in Terrace, BC. Our intention for this inaugural gathering with HARC Advisors and Guiding Collaborators was to connect and reconnect with one another on the issues, principles, and experiences that draw each one of us to working with the arts, humanities and creative expression to renew health …
Read MoreDecember 19, 2013
Arts and creative expression are ways of making meaning, conveying experiences, exploring our history and culture, and building relationships with place, with one another and with the world around us. HARC team members have chosen words to describe the thinking, visioning and ways of working and understanding around the links between arts, creativity, expression, health, healing and well-being.
Read MoreSeptember 24, 2013
This provocative piece, a house post totem pole created in red cedar by renowned contemporary Gitxsan carver Ya’Ya Heit invokes the connections between creative expression, lived experience, place, story, community, and health. Here is the story of how the totem pole came to be as written by the artist in the book “Seekers and Travellers: Contemporary Arts of the Pacific Northwest Coast” by Gary Wyatt (Douglas & McIntyre, 2012; pg. 104). Me …
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