Co-creation Is Not for the Faint of Heart

Since , I have been developing a series of documentary projects on women and incarceration that embeds co-creation into its core methodological and political frame. This work is a collaboration between the Centre for Restorative Justice at Simon Fraser University (Vancouver, British Columbia) and the Immersive Storylab at York University (Toronto), co-directed by my research partner, Brenda Morrison, and myself. From the beginning, we understood that because of the very complex histories and unique social vulnerabilities of the women we would be working with, our process had to be deeply relational, networked, and organically collaborative, particularly as a substantial percentage of the women would be Indigenous. In Canada, although Indigenous women account for less than  percent of the female population, they make up  percent of women in federal institutions and – percent of women in some provincial, territorial, and remand centers. As criminologist Lisa Monchalin (Algonquin, Métis) argues, Canada’s criminal justice system is “rooted in Euro-Canadian colonialism [and] fuels injustice that is directed specifically against Indigenous peoples.” With our limited funding, we were not ready to initiate the rigorous bureaucratic and unpredictable process of requesting security clearances and access to currently incarcerated women. We felt that listening to formerly incarcerated women’s stories would thus provide crucial immersion to help us design the “real” project we would propose in writing our grant applications. We launched a call on social media. For our first circle in September , nine women showed up to the tiny cramped quarters of a woman’s center in East Vancouver. Since then, our circle has grown to include a lively group of Indigenous (multiple nations) and nonIndigenous women. Our collaborators invite others. We continue to post photos and news of our circle on Facebook, a critical site and much loved platform for formerly incarcerated women who were once exiled from social and worldly connections. Indigenous elders or community members facilitate these circles. The talking circle is a dynamic and profoundly nonhierarchical process that has been central to Indigenous community life for millennia. Restorative justice and social justice