From Creation: Land-Based Healing and Wellness is a compelling documentary featuring the journey of Lauren Aldred, a spiritual health practitioner (hospital chaplain) of Indigenous heritage. This film offers an intimate exploration of trauma, resilience, and the profound healing that arises from connection with the land. Through painting, photography, poetry, and personal narrative, she recounts her ongoing recovery from severe Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and Major Depressive Disorder (MDD). As she moves through pain toward healing, Lauren reveals how nature and creative expression provided solace, hope, and healing during her darkest times.
The documentary invites us to consider the restorative power of the natural world, highlighting Land-based practices that draw on Indigenous wisdom and the arts as important elements of holistic wellness. It challenges us to reimagine healthcare, self-care, and the ways we nurture resilience within our communities.
After the screening, Lauren Aldred and videographer Jim VanDeventer will join us for a live discussion to share deeper insights and respond to questions.
Photo credit to Danielle Vessey
Schedule
Welcome and Land Acknowledgement
Introduction to the HEAL Healthcare project and site with Dr. Sarah De Leeuw
Introduction to the Documentary
Viewing the Documentary
Question and Response with Lauren Aldred and Jim VanDeventer
About Lauren Aldred
Lauren's primary relationship is with Creator, experienced through the Land; she enjoys this relationship through silence and listening, canoeing, snowshoeing, medicine gathering, hiking, and in time will rejoin the earth with peace.
Her heritage is English and non-status Plains Indigenous. She lives on an acreage with two dogs and seven chickens.
Currently working on her dissertation in a Doctorate of Ministry at St. Stephen's, her undergraduate work was in Education at Simon Fraser University. She holds a Master of Arts in Public and Pastoral Leadership from Vancouver School of Theology, and a APA certified Mindfulness-Based Ecotherapy certificate.
Awards include the Northern Health Charles Jago Award for Empathy, University of Northern BC’s Golden Key Society Honorary Membership, Shooting Star Award (Volunteer-PG), and recognition from the then-Ministry of Women's Equality.
She teaches Land-Based Healing and Wellness at the continuing education and graduate levels. She is also a frequent workshop/conference presenter and exhibiting artist/poet/photographer.
Formerly the Manager of Spiritual Health for Northern Health, she also served on the board of Canadian Association for Spiritual Care - BC from 2009-2022, as Vice-Chair, Chair and Past-Chair.
Workshop and exhibition enquiries may be made to myriadpinchi@gmail.com.
About Jim VanDeventer
Jim VanDeventer is a professional videographer living and working on the ancestral and unceded territory of the Nak'azdli Whuten. He is a multi-talented man with many qualifications who is currently training to become a community mental health worker. He enjoys videography, movies, photography, traveling with his husband Sami, and cooking. Jim is an amazing cook and he makes the "world's best" butter chicken.
About H.E.A.L. Healthcare
Hearts-based Education and Anti-colonial Learning in Healthcare (H.E.A.L. Healthcare)
Longstanding and well-established health disparities exist because of racist, colonial, able-ist, geographic, economic, and gendered inequities. Our team believes arts and humanities have an unrealized potential to disrupt these inequities. The H.E.A.L. Healthcare project brings together artists, writers, activists, and people with lived experience to create arts-based anti-oppression learning materials for healthcare educators, professionals, and practitioners wanting to address biases and ‘-isms’ that permeate healthcare systems and culture. This arts-based online learning resource was built using a decolonizing approach by the H.E.A.L. team.
Our work begins from the premise that healthcare is both an art and a science, and that the Health and Medical humanities are growing interdisciplinary fields bringing together health and medical sciences with arts to make actionable change. The H.E.A.L. Healthcare project provides a platform for healthcare professionals to take action to decolonize their practice, using arts as a mechanism for change.
H.E.A.L. Healthcare is a result of a long-standing collaboration between the Health Arts Research Centre (HARC) and the National Collaborating Centre for Indigenous Health (NCCIH) at the University of Northern British Columbia on the unceded traditional territories of the Lheidli T’enneh in the northcentral geographies of colonial British Columbia.
Learn More: https://healhealthcare.ca/
The National Collaborating Centre for Indigenous Health (NCCIH)
The National Collaborating Centre for Indigenous Health (NCCIH) is a national Indigenous organization established in 2005 by the Government of Canada and funded through the Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC) to support First Nations, Inuit, and Métis public health renewal and health equity through knowledge translation and exchange. The NCCIH is hosted by the University of Northern BC (UNBC) on the traditional territory of the Lheildli T’enneh in Prince George, BC.
Learn More: https://www.nccih.ca/en/
About the Health Arts Research Centre
With the highest rates of both preventable and treatable premature mortality in BC (194.5 and 45.7 deaths per 100,000 population, respectively), the Northern Health Authority has the lowest health status in BC. The 2018 Report of the BC Provincial Health Officer documents deep inequalities between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples. Disparities in well-being are a pressing health issue that require multi-disciplinary and cross-community collaboration and partnership for innovative thinking, working and acting.
Creative artistic expression is important to well-being
There is increasing consensus that health-based creative arts enhance human well being. Human interaction with their geographical place (environment, ecosystems, plants, animals, water and air), culture (history, art, movement and expression), community and social structure (nation, community, family), ability and agency (personal condition, literacy, rights and freedoms), and societal forces and legacies (governance, policies, colonialism, racism, economics, poverty) all come to bear on human health and well-being. The unequal sharing of resources, services and spaces through these social determinants result in equalities of health with some peoples bearing a larger burden of illness, poor health and discomfort than others. Addressing northern, rural and Indigenous health inequities in BC requires new, outside-the-box creative research that recognizes health, healing and renewing well-being as an integrated endeavour equally involving science and art. HARC seeks to contribute to renewing health and well-being in northern and Indigenous communities by addressing health inequities through:
Advancing new strategies anchored in creative arts and social determinants of health that produce innovative ways of addressing health inequities
Developing these new strategies based on the strengths and resiliencies of northern and Indigenous communities
Using creative arts to increase interest in, sustain and support multi-disciplinary and cross-community collaborations for addressing health and well-being issues
HARC was proudly supported for eight years by a Michael Smith Foundation Scholar Award held by Dr. Sarah de Leeuw of the University of Northern British Columbia Northern Medical Program, and in partnership with the National Collaborating Centre for Indigenous Health (NCCIH), and Northern Health. HARC is now generously supported through Canada Research Chairs, Canadian Institute of Health Research, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Counciland Michael Smith Foundationfunding.
Learn More: https://healtharts.ca/our-story/