She started studying the science of life and then went onto life in the arts and never looked back. Hailey Verbonac is Cree Metis, originally from Inuvik, Northwest Territories. She did her undergraduate degree in Biology with a minor in drawing at Mount Allison University in New Brunswick. With just 5000 people in the town of Sackville, this felt more manageable for her coming from Inuvik which had 3000 people. She did theatre on the side while she was in school after watching it on tv with interest given there wasn’t much theatre going on where she was from. She did management and design for theatre rather than acting on stage. She got into visual arts sketching dissections as she studied for her anatomy midterms.

Four years later, she was really loving theatre, so she applied to theater programs and got into the national theater school in Montreal for their production design and technical arts programs. It included lighting design, sound design, video design, stage management, technical, direction, and production management. The wide range of topics allowed her to figure out what she liked to do and she found she loved lighting and video design. She graduated three years later and worked as a theater designer in lighting and video and as an illustrator, making her own content in video design. Recently, she moved into a management role with the Great Northern Arts Festival, bringing up artists to Inuvik and working in the Arctic arts scene.

She’s inspired to do the work that she does because it aligns so much with her interests. “I love stories of all kinds. I love people talking about themselves and hearing about both personal stories and stories from, especially cultural stories, Indigenous cultures. I think that's just so important to keeping things alive and keeping teachings and language alive. Learning from a textbook is on some level useful, but it's not how people were traditionally taught, and it's not the most interesting way to teach, I find,” she explains. Verbonac has been able to be part of touching stories from a variety of places as part of her work with Indigenous theatre. As an intensely visual person, she is drawn to this form of storytelling.

Her advice for Indigenous people leaving their community for their education would be,

“Take it slow and just be secure that home will always be there, and even if it takes a couple goes. Keep going but if things are not feeling right or not going well, it's totally okay to go back home, figure yourself out, take some time and try again… Not succeeding is such an important part of developing.”

She encourages exploring education for education's sake if it’s an option instead of just thinking about what will make the most money or what’s the right thing to do. While she’s not using her biology degree, she doesn’t regret doing it.

“It's alright to take stuff in smaller steps,” Verbonac adds, sharing how she only learned how stoplights worked in university given she didn’t really have to know that in her small Northern community. She was glad she chose a smaller place but she still experienced culture shock given Inuvik was mostly Indigenous. In retrospect, she wishes she had integrated more with the community.

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If she could give a message to her younger self it would be to eat more to avoid being hangry and “Don't walk into a room and think that you need to prove anything or that you need to make people like you. Just know that you have and are offering something and be secure in that.”  

To maintain her wellness, Verbonac makes sure to eat and sleep regularly. She tried running but found it boring. Yoga, on the other hand, was something she really enjoyed. She’s found trying to do things she doesn’t enjoy isn’t sustainable but leaning towards good habits and making small shifts is much more likely to be successful. She’s also enjoyed finding people who share her interests to be much more nourishing than trying to fit in with people who enjoy things she doesn’t.

As far as obstacles, Verbonac felt isolated and lonely and like the way she was feeling or trying to be was wrong. She spent a lot of energy trying to figure out what people wanted from her or thought about her or shutting herself off from people and ultimately realized it’s a lot easier to just be the way you want to be. Verbonac also had to work to redefine the ideas she had in her head about what it meant to live well, which included reshaping her habits and routines around calling home so she would still enjoy and look forward to it. She had to learn to take a break to eat and sleep even when she would rather keep going on a project.  

For Verbonac, wellness is related to both mental and physical and she sees the two as being closely tied. She sees wellness as something that needs to be sustainable and finding joy in the way she’s living. She needs to be functional and pleasant to be around and given she gets migraines, she has to be mindful of the way that can impact how she lives her life. Doing contract work, she has to allocate her energy accordingly so she can attend to her wellness, something she doesn’t think she could do as well in a corporate job.

When it comes to someone struggling on their path with wellness, identity or life, Verbonac would say, “It's super normal, and things take exactly how long they take. Nothing can be forced and not to focus too much on, especially in terms of identity, with labels or trying to fit in boxes…Just let things happen organically… Just take your time… Things are going to shift. You don't have to invest too much. It's going to change anyways so just enjoy it, let it happen. If it is a struggle, then if you have a community to lean on, lean on them. If not, then there are plenty of resources to look into and if you have to take time away to focus on yourself, then that's very healthy, very normal.”

Studying the science of life was her starting point but she found what she really loved was life in the arts. Hailey Verbonac went from a small town to a slightly bigger town and found interests she couldn’t pursue back home. She went from sketching anatomy to sketching out new dreams and finding opportunities she never imagined as a new career took center stage.