“Nothing Is Gonna Change If We Don't Care for Everyone”: A Narrative Inquiry Alongside Urban Indigenous Youth in an Afterschool Physical Activity Wellness Program

Abstract

In the fall of 2013, the authors received funding to help develop and implement an afterschool wellness program alongside Indigenous youth aged 6–10 years old in the North Central neighborhood of Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada. The Growing Young Movers (GYM) afterschool program was funded, in part, as a corrective response to a broader social trend in which Indigenous youth in this neighborhood reported declining health and wellness outcomes, as well as multiple other barriers to social inclusion. This article discusses the reflections of three senior high school Indigenous youth (16–18 years old) who participated in the afterschool program as peer-mentors over a 2-year period from 2015 to 2017. Our inquiry reveals how these youth viewed the program—and their role(s) within it—in far more complex, active, and even political terms, than the program's initial framing as a physical activity-based “intervention” had anticipated. Our analysis (re)positions youth according to their own personalized voice and narratives as: cultural leaders, knowledge holders, and as agents of change in their community.

Resisting Concepts as Starting Points in a High School Leadership Pathway Alongside Indigenous Youth

“…As shared in the introduction, GYM and the Leadership Pathway were conceptualized from prior research and community experience (Lessard, 2015;Lewis, 2018;Schaefer et al, 2017) with an intergenerational approach. For example, high school youth would be paid to mentor and co-facilitate the after-school GYM program for children from the surrounding elementary schools each day.…”

“…For some on our research team, they had lived intimately alongside the Indigenous youth who became part of our research for several years prior as teachers within the high school (Brian Lewis, Tamara Ryba, Brett Kannenberg). For others on our research team, they had a historical and ongoing connection to the Growing Young Movers (GYM) after-school program and the youth since its inception over a decade ago (Sean Lessard and Brian Lewis) (Lewis, 2018). While some of us (Michael Dubnewick and Tristan Hopper) had only recently taken up appointments as professors at the University of Regina and had just begun to step into the midst of the high school landscape, GYM, and the lives of the Indigenous youth they eventually came to know.…”

“…Wakeful to Multiple Storied Landscapes: Locating How After-School Programs Are Embedded in Dominant Stories of School and Recreation Since GYM's beginnings, those part of the nonprofit youth program have continuously framed and negotiated an everyday practice where Indigenous youth are known as knowledge holders (Lewis et al, 2022;Schaefer et al, 2017). As noted in their prior work, this framing of youth as knowledge holders often bumps against dominant institutional narratives of school that position youth as passive recipients who are in need of knowledge and/or fixing.…”