Current and Ongoing Projects
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Indigenous Identity PhotoVoice
What does Indigenous identity mean to students?
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Anti-Racism Education through Film
How can we ‘change the script’ on racism through arts-based research and education?
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Community-Based Education for Reconciliation
How are people learning for reconciliation outside of classrooms?
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Umbay Nagamon: Come Sing
Students don’t exist in a vaccuum. How is one school division in Manitoba providing education at the community level?
About Us
The Story Grounds is a creative research lab rooted in storytelling, arts-based inquiry, and relational practice. We hold space for diverse personal, ancestral, and place-based stories to emerge, be shared, and be witnessed.
Our work centers collaborative, ethical, and respectful approaches to storytelling, often in partnership with Indigenous communities, artists, and knowledge holders. Through film, photography, visual storytelling, performance, and narrative, we explore how stories shape understanding, unsettle dominant narratives, and create possibilities for connection, reflection, transformation, and social change.
We believe that stories are not just told—they are grounded in land, memory, and relationship.
Our Story
Founded in 2025 by Dr. Michelle Lam, The Story Grounds is the creative and collaborative space associated with her appointment as a Canada Research Chair in Community-Based Education for Reconciliation. The lab was created to explore the role of film, arts-based research, and collaborative storytelling in how people learn about truth and reconciliation outside of formal K-12 or post-secondary education systems.
This work grows out of partnership with Indigenous communities, artists, scholars, and knowledge keepers, and is rooted in the understanding that storytelling is a way of deepening understanding across difference. As a non-Indigenous researcher, Dr. Lam approaches this work with humility, care, and deep respect for the relational ethics required in Indigenous and community-based research.
The lab was named The Story Grounds to reflect a commitment to place, plurality, and process. Stories are grounded in land, in relationship, and in lived experience. The plural “grounds” acknowledges the many territories, contexts, and voices that shape the stories we hold, share, and co-create. This is a space where stories are held, nurtured, and invited through collaborative film, arts-based methods, and listening practices that honor the emotional, cultural, and historical weight of narrative work.
Our Values
Why Stories? All of us are made up of stories. Stories tell us who we are and why we are here. They tell us where we come from and where we are going. And in today’s polarized world, stories are more important than ever.
Why Story Grounds? We want to be a place where stories are planted and nurtured like seeds in soil. Grounds are places where roots grow, building community and shared ownership. Just like meeting grounds, it’s a place for multiplicity, where worldviews can meet and co-exist. We want our research and creation to be grounded in mind, body, and spirit, and grounded in ethical relationships.
Humility. Story is co-creative and collective. One person cannot and does not know everything, and we all have things to learn from each other.
Place-Based Practice. Stories are situated within land and context, and we honour the histories and places that shape them.
Respectful Relationships. Stories come alive within people, places, histories, and imagined futures. All collaborations must be handled with care, reciprocity, shared responsibility, ethics of care, and respect.
Openness and Warmth. Listening is a key part of shared storytelling. We believe in deep listening across differences with an attitude of openness.
Art as Inquiry. Arts are not only for expressing ourselves, but are a way of understanding and knowing.
