Photovoice: picturing the health of Aboriginal women in a remote northern community.

The purpose of this paper, part of an evolving ethnographic doctoral study, is to describe the use of photovoice in exploring the health beliefs and health promotion practices of pregnant Tlicho women in Canada’s Northwest Territories. It is but a preliminary look at the method and its use in a remote community. What research methods are culturally appropriate for working with Aboriginal people? Photovoice, a technique based on participation, empowerment, and self-documentation, is a culturally appropriate method for conducting rural and remote health research. It is a way of capturing images of one’s everyday life experiences using a camera, then describing the images in the context of one’s life, thus allowing others to gain an insider’s view of everyday life in one’s community. In this paper we will describe how photovoice is being used as part of an ethnographic study, provide examples of its use, and describe lessons we have learned and challenges we have encountered. It has been said that a picture is worth a thousand words, but it is more than that.A picture is a way of gaining insight into the “humanness that surrounds us” (Collier & Collier, 1986, p. 1). In fact, Bach (1998) describes photographs as “mini-narratives.” It is this aspect of photography that drew our attention to the possibility of exploring its use as part of a research project with pregnant Tlicho women from a remote community in the Northwest Territories. The Tlicho (Dogrib) Nation is the largest Dene tribe in the Northwest Territories.The women who participated in the study were from the largest Tlicho community, which has a population of 1,864 (NWT Bureau of Statistics, 2001) and year-round road access to the city of Yellowknife. Meleis (1996) suggests that a true understanding of the health and illness status of a group can result only from the group’s own knowledge concerning its values, priorities, responses to life’s disruptions, perceptions CJNR 2004,Vol. 36 No 4,189–201