Healing Stories

Throughout my dissertation, I placed healing stories within each chapter as a way of guiding the reader into the research through an Indigenous lens. These stories grew from memory, Land, family, grief, dreams, addiction, recovery, and the lived experiences that shaped both my scholarship and my life.

Through Indigenous Storywork and autoethnographic writing, I positioned myself within the research and allowed personal narrative to stand beside scholarly inquiry. Each story became a threshold into the chapter, offering another way to understand how knowledge lives through relationships, place, cultural memory, and experience.

For me, these stories were more than reflections. They became part of the research itself. They helped reclaim narrative as knowledge and created space for healing, remembering, and returning to the stories that continue to shape who we are.