Finding Common Ground through Creativity: Exploring Indigenous, settler and Métis values and connection to the land Melanie Zurba Holly Ann Friesen Abstract Finding Common Ground through Creativity, a community-based action research project, was activated with the purpose of engaging the community, cross-culturally, by exploring the values and connections surrounding land. The project was to create shared-spaces for promoting place- based dialogue around a theme accepting of the intersections of contexts relating to the land, such as the need for decolonization, healing, and reconciliation. Keywords: art, aesthetic, collaboration, decolonization, social action, reconciliation. Introduction Imagining place and a different kind of future beyond colonial structures and social constructs can be highly challenging for communities aiming to build equanimity, reconciliation, and ultimately working toward decolonization. For those that acknowledge the injustices associated with the historical and on-going forms of colonization, a desire to engage in social action may be problematized by economic disparities and social fragmentation, which may be the very products of a colonial lifeworld 1 . However, grass-roots initiatives have been heralded as being capable of responding to these challenges because of their connections to regional contexts and geographies (Sium et al. 2012; Zalara 2013). Through social action, such as land-based activism, communities can reframe the contexts in which they exist, through creating awareness of power imbalances and shifting such imbalances towards greater forms of self-determination (Willow 2009). Smith (1999) describes how communities are often understood in terms of their political boundaries, citing among other examples the reservation systems existing in North America. The International Journal of Conflict & Reconciliation Fall 2014, Volume 2 Number 1 1