By Angel Houle, Kinship Rising youth researcher 

Welcome to the INVINCIBLE project!

The name of our new project is INVINCIBLE: Our Voices from Care, a storytelling project by Indigenous youth in care! INVINCIBLE is a hands-on project created, written and designed by us, Indigenous youth who are part of the Youth Council at Surrounded by Cedar Child and Family Services on lək̓ʷəŋən homelands. We created our stories and artwork from our personal lives as youth in care. Our goal is to share our voices with others, to create, teach and learn together. Our stories are meant to inspire other Indigenous children and youth in care and let them know that they are not alone. We created stories such as graphic novels, poems, video stories, artwork about childhood memories, cultural stories, and first-hand journals of our experiences and the emotions we had in the foster care system. 

Why do our stories matter? 

Our stories have meaning, we are the next generation of teachers and leaders!! We want to support other children and youth in care by showing that we are standing proud, we are grounding our lives in who we are, we carry the stories with pride. So we did this project because we love the opportunity to be creative; learn new skills; share, teach and learn; and inspire others. 

There are so many benefits to the INVINCIBLE project, including showing our power and connections as youth in care. Another important benefit is that taking part in this kind of research is fun!! I feel as if I learned a lot. It’s fun to be creative, work in the community, show everyone what we have to offer, and learn some cool new skills. 

Indigenous youth in care need a voice!

My personal experience is that youth in care don’t have a lot of opportunities to do things like this. These opportunities don’t come often, unless we’re lucky enough. So we want to share with other youth that you can do this, we have a lot to say! Even if you were not given the best hand in life and you didn’t have a good start, there are opportunities out there like this, and a lot of us are doing really great with our lives and we have success. We want other youth to know that we are creative, we are storytellers. We want them to feel empowered to be loud and let everyone know that we’re still here! And we’re awesome!!