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In this episode, Heather sits down with Reneltta Arluk, a performing arts artist and Indigenous arts advocate and leader. We get to hear beautiful stories from Reneltta of growing up on the trapline in the Northwest Territories and how this allowed for her creativity and imagination to flourish. Realizing that the stories she’d grown up around can last generations, Reneltta created Akpik Theatre, a place to foster and grow Northern Indigenous stories. Her performing arts practice invites us, as listeners, into the importance of recognizing specific protocols embedded in Indigenous stories, lands, and relationships to community and place. In other words, stories must be held properly, and there can be no storytelling of a place without relationship to place.
Reneltta Arluk, D.Litt., is Inuvialuk, Gwich’in and Denesuline, Cree from the Northwest Territories. Akpik Theatre is a northern focused Indigenous theatre company that adheres to its namesake, the cloudberry, striving to flourish in the northern climate it reflects. Reneltta recently received an honorary doctorate from University of Alberta for her continual contributions to the decolonization of cultural institutions that has led to a fundamental shift in indigenous settler relations.
This podcast is created by the Impact Chair in Transformative Governance for Planetary Health at the University of Victoria, with production support from Cited Media. We receive additional support from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research You can find us at https://indigenousplanetaryhealth.ca/
