Building Relationships from Our Past and for Our Future

In this dissertation, stories of Métis ways of knowing and being together and reconciliation have been interwoven together with stories of my own journey back home to my community in Western Canada to create practical results in and through a community-based research project. To do this work, I collaborated with Métis women across British Columbia, Canada, in a decolonizing and Indigenous community-led research project. Guiding this project are interweaving goals of fostering reconciliation within Métis communities by using a decolonizing methodology that goes beyond theoretical critique to produce practical results with and for Métis communities. Key questions guiding this research include those relating to how social scientific inquiry can benefit Métis communities, how Métis ways of knowing and cultural practices can contribute to reconciliation locally, and decolonizing possibilities for doing sport studies research as reconciliation. Taking these as guides, in the current study, I weave community-based methods and Indigenous perspectives together to envision decolonizing futures with and for our local communities. Rooted in Métis ways of being and being together, these methods of knowledge co-creation include collaborative, decolonizing, and Indigenous-led community-based methods, such as community consultations, as well as sharing and visioning circles. Towards practical results, the primary contributions of this dissertation project are collaborative developments of practical results for reconciliation from within Métis communities. For this, cultural resources materials, as well as action plans were co-created with Métis educators, artists, and community leaders. In addition to the primary contribution of practical implications for Métis communities, the current dissertation also outlines pedagogical implications, as well as scholarly implications for doing research as reconciliation from within the sport studies scholarship.