Miyo-wîcêhetowin in the city

2021

The sacred worldviews and spiritual practices of Indigenous Peoples globally often involve intimate connections with land and nature to promote mental health, resilience, and overall wellness. Drawing on chronicity theory to situate settler-colonialism as a persistent and relentless chronic condition of the body politic emerging through land dispossession, intergenerational trauma, racism, and structural violence, we consider the role of place and other kinds of life from anti-colonial and Indigenous perspectives that centre positive transformations of Indigenous youth wellness identities within cities. Urban locations have often been conceptualized as separate from ‘remote’ and ‘traditional’ geographies demarcating Indigenous health and youth spirituality. The chapter details 54 interviews with 36 youth that were partially drawn from two CBPR projects exploring Indigenous youth wellness within a mid-sized Canadian metropolitan city. Relying on personal, cultural, and moral conceptualizations of spirituality, time, and land to understand themselves as good ancestors, youth come to value and act on their bodies and environments positively in aesthetic and spiritual terms of beauty and acceptance. Mobilizing youth narratives through the Cree concept of miyo-wîcêhetowin ― meaning to have or possess good relations― the capacities associated with being and becoming a good ancestor not only allow for youth to thrive-in-place, but ensure contexts and places themselves to confront and outgrow settler-colonial rationalities impacting past, present and future generations in and through Canadian cities and other settler-colonies.

Environmental Health Insights, 2023

Indigenous Peoples and their deep knowledges offer a fundamentally important way of seeing the world and the environment. Through relationships to distinct ancestral homelands, Indigenous Peoples have developed unique ways of surviving, adapting, connecting, and relating to their respective environments. Indigenous Sacred Places themselves are connections to ancestors, to all beings on the planet, and to different planes of existence. Sacred Places serve an important environmental role in many Indigenous Nations around the globe. Yet, Indigenous Sacred Places, and in particular understandings of spirit that connect Sacred Places, have been historically and contemporarily marginalized and excluded from environmental health academic discourse and spaces. This despite concrete calls for the amplification of Indigenous traditional knowledges-that of which does not separate spirit from knowledge, or spirit from action-they are intertwined. With this, we sought to amplify in this Perspective, understandings and connectivity between Sacred Places, spirit, and environmental health through the stories from Indigenous Elders, processes of ceremony, and personal synthesis.

Social Science & Medicine , 2019

Relationships to land and nature have long been recognized globally as a central Indigenous determinant of health. As more Indigenous peoples migrate to larger urban centers, it is crucial to better understand how these relationships are maintained or function within urban spaces. This article outlines the results of a year-long collaborative study that qualitatively explored Indigenous young peoples' connections between "land," nature, and wellness in an urban Canadian context. Thirty-eight semi-structured interviews were conducted with 28 Cree and Métis Indigenous youth living within Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. A strength based analysis focused on re-imagining miyo-wicehtowin; that is, the processes of youths' self-determination and agency that build positive human-nature relationships and enact "land-making" amidst their urban spaces. This research critically engages environmental dispossession and repossession to more readily consider decolonizing land-based approaches to health and wellness among urban contexts. Future empirical and methodological directions for exploring human-nature relationships in urban health research are also offered.

Teaching Mysticism, edited by Dr. William Parsons, Rice University. Oxford University Press, 2011: 121-137.

visionary ecology and indigenous wisdom L ee I rwin Teaching Native American religion and spirituality is a diffi cult and demanding task; one that requires constant attention to formative issues within Religious Studies and within the interdisciplinary context of Native Studies. Th ese diffi culties stem from shallow or artifi cial representations that mask a long history of brutal political and religious oppression, false characterizations, the denial or underevaluation of native epistemologies and spiritual values, and the constant tendency to rewrite, reinscribe, and reassimilate native beliefs into alien, nonnative constructs of meaning. Th e need to avoid essentializing attitudes and falsifying "trickster hermeneutics" ( Vizenor 1999 , 15-18) in native interpretations of religious practices creates a context of tension, uneasy resistance, and oft en anger and suspicion on the part of native persons toward any (false) claims to represent native religious thinking. As a scholar of native religious history, I am keenly aware of the ambiguity that informs a fi eld of study whose history is overshadowed by 400 years of oppression, denial, and marginalization through aggressive colonialism and government control, followed by an unexpected late-twentieth-century turn toward romanticization, commodifi cation, and a naive fi xation on native spirituality unmoored from its usual grounding in place, language, tradition, and required social relationships. An authentic context for teaching native religions requires conscious commitment to bring fully into view, for discussion and debate, the long and painful history of religious denial and constant mis/reinterpretation that has dominated most discussions of native religions .

2019

and Environment. She is the Scientific Director of the Kahnawake Schools Diabetes Prevention Project (KSDPP) a 24-year communityuniversity partnership and health promotion program in her home community of Kahnawake, near Montreal, Quebec. Dr. Delormier's research interests include Indigenous research methodologies, qualitative methodologies, Indigenous Peoples' food systems and the prevention of diabetes and obesity prevention through community mobilization strategies.

Hernandez explores the marginalized field of Indigenous science and its potential for imparting lessons on environmentalism. The book focuses on the experiences and perspectives of Indigenous Latin American women and land protectors, highlighting the need for changes in public policy and attitudes towards the Earth. Hernandez combines storytelling and personal experience to challenge traditional academic writing and presents a non-western approach to environmental knowledge. While the book addresses the issues of ecocolonialism and extractive capitalism, it could benefit from further elaboration on indigenous land management practices and solutions. Overall, "Fresh Banana Leaves" is a valuable resource for scholars, students, and anyone interested in interdisciplinary intersections within the field of science. [Extracted from the article] Copyright of Natural Resources Forum is the property of Wiley-Blackwell Werk, J. (2024). "Presbytery gives land back for Indigenous tiny home village." Christian Century 141(2): 21-23. The article focuses on the Presbytery of the Cascades' decision to give land back to the Indigenous-run Future Generations Collaborative for the construction of Barbie's Village, a tiny home village and early childhood center for unhoused Indigenous families in Portland, Oregon. Topics include the historic return of land, the Presbytery's conditions for the gift, and the significance of addressing homelessness and fostering Indigenous community healing.

Alternative, 2024

This study analyzes the literature on Indigenous sacred sites within the larger topic areas of land-based education and healing, as per the guidance of Anishinaabe (a group of Indigenous Peoples from the Great Lakes and the Great Plains areas of contemporary Canada and USA) Elders and community leaders in eastern Manitoba, Canada. A scoping review was conducted to identify the size, scope, nature, and key themes of existing research in seven databases, inclusive of gray literature which is a key source for Indigenous organizations. In total, we analyzed 35 articles and documents. The emerging themes included: (1) sacred sites and the promotion of health and wellness; (2) sacred sites as places of knowledge; (3) the desecration and protection of sacred sites; and (4) legal battles between Indigenous Peoples and the state. Recommendations to advance understandings and correct colonially imposed imbalances are discussed, and health and legal implications are outlined.

The central themes discussed in this issue 1 are intrinsically related. Indigenous Knowledge and its transmission is a key issue for both the indigenous and the scientic communities. It behooves the latter to decolonize its methodology and worldview in order to understand indigenous ecologies and their views of Western development in the name of science. Indigenous spiritualities are in the domain of the elders, many of whom have left warnings of imminent eco-catastrophes resulting from hyper-industrialization and offerings of spiritual hope for their followers and for all of humankind. Knowledge and spirituality together, then, address broader questions such as the future of humans in nature.

Anales, 2002

The world according to most Amazonian Indians is a place where no sharp distinction can be made between the social, the natural and the supernatural, rather than constituting separate realities they are interconnected and mutually interdependent. In the following I explore some ontological dimensions of health, healing, and shamanism among the Matsigenka of southeastern Peru's montaña area 1 and to do so it is necessary to take into account notions of body, spirit and conviviality. The inquiry focuses on conceptual systems behind notions of healing and of the power of the medicine, that is, on cultural rather than on instrumental explanations. I am interested not only in what people say but also in how they express themselves; verbal expressions provide a convenient entrance into conceptualisations of the world as perceived and Acknowledgement: This paper has profited from generous and insightful comments from Dr. Kaj Århem, Dr. Gerhard Baer and Dr. Glenn Shepard. I also thank the editors for their comments and advice which have served to improve this article. For the flaws that may remain I am the only accountable. 1 The fieldwork upon which this paper is based has principally been carried out among the Matsigenka of the Upper Urubamba area. I visited the Matsigenka the first time in 1972 and since then I have returned a number of times for longer and shorter periods.