Weaves of Wellness: Exploring the Experiences of Wellness and Imbalance in Indigenous Youth

This research, which takes place on Treaty 6 lands and involves an Indigenous and decolonized worldview, stems from a personal and professional exploration of what it means for me to be Indigenous. Using a Metissage research sensibility (Hasebe-ludt, Chambers, & leggo, 2009), the research weaves my own experiences in relation to the research participants, and in relation to the land, and other living and non-living beings. The purpose of this study is to better understand the emotional, spiritual, physical, and mental experiences of wellness and imbalance in Indigenous youth in public high schools, and to foster an understanding of the Medicine Wheel. This research ultimately asks, how do the experiences of youth fit within the Medicine Wheel? Participants will share their experiences of wellness and imbalance through storying, sharing circles, art, with the researcher using reflective journaling to reflect on the experience of listening. These stories will be audio or visually recorded. Participants will then place their experiences onto the Medicine Wheel into one or more of the four areas. Given that education and health systems are colonial tools oppression (Stewart, Moodley, and Hyatt, 2017), this research hopes to provide school staff, teachers, therapists, counsellors, health professionals and others with ways to meet the needs of Indigenous youth, in consideration of the Medicine Wheel and the Metissage conceptual trope. Hasebe-ludt, E., Chambers, C. M., & Leggo, C., 2009. Life writing, and literary Metissage as an ethos for our times. Peter Lang Publishing. Stewart, S. L., Moodley, R. & Hyatt, A. (2017). Indigenous cultures and mental health counselling. Four directions for integration with counselling psychology. Routledge.

Physical Activity and Healing through the Medicine Wheel

Physical Activity and Healing through the Medicine Wheel

Pathways to indigenous identity: one family’s story of colonization and reintegration

This research study is an examination of one family's journey of finding out about their Indigenous ancestry later in life and how, if at all, it has affected their sense of identity or feelings of interest in engaging with the Indigenous communities of Canada. In cooperation with her father, the principal researcher uses an Indigenous research method of storytelling and a methodology based on medicine wheel teachings to discuss their learning about their Indigenous heritage as adults with little to no connections to their original community. Through storytelling, the research study hopes to reveal the complications of forming an Indigenous identity later in life and after generations of colonization have erased familial traditions and knowledge.

Balancing the Medicine Wheel through Physical Activity

Balancing the Medicine Wheel through Physical Activity

Physical Activity and Healing through the Medicine Wheel

Physical Activity and Healing through the Medicine Wheel

Pathways to indigenous identity: one family’s story of colonization and reintegration

This research study is an examination of one family's journey of finding out about their Indigenous ancestry later in life and how, if at all, it has affected their sense of identity or feelings of interest in engaging with the Indigenous communities of Canada. In cooperation with her father, the principal researcher uses an Indigenous research method of storytelling and a methodology based on medicine wheel teachings to discuss their learning about their Indigenous heritage as adults with little to no connections to their original community. Through storytelling, the research study hopes to reveal the complications of forming an Indigenous identity later in life and after generations of colonization have erased familial traditions and knowledge.

Balancing the Medicine Wheel through Physical Activity

Balancing the Medicine Wheel through Physical Activity

‘All my Relations’ in Ruby Slipperjack’s Silent Words (1992)

This presentation examines the extent of which Nature in Ruby Slipperjack’s Silent Words (1992) serves to reconnect 11-year-old protagonist, Danny, to his Anishinaabe identity. When Danny flees his run-down house in a settler-colonial town, he finds limitless support from the plant and animal life of Northern Ontario. The relationship between boy and Nature transcends the boundary between the human and the more-than-human world and becomes that of a student and teacher. Danny’s reconnection to Nature and his willingness to listen to its many abstract teachings are central to the reclamation of his indigeneity. With the help of some human interpreters, Danny develops the epistemological tools and the humility to allow Nature to heal his past traumas as well. The Anishinaabe medicine wheel teachings profess that a holistically healthy person seeks to find balance among their intellectual, spiritual, emotional, and physical self. Danny achieves this on his journey through the woods while decolonizing and re-indigenizing himself. This reading of the role of more-than-humans in Silent Words also identifies Nature’s propensity to share Anishinaabe teachings in subtle and unexpected ways for those who are willing to listen. Though it is a fictional text, the transformative learning and healing processes Danny goes through after reconnecting with Nature are generalizable to the real-world. In many ways Danny’s reclamation of his Indigenous identity mimics the large-scale Indigenization movement happening throughout Turtle Island today.

The Medicine Wheel Revisited: Reflections on Indigenization in Counseling and Education

Indigenization involves relating traditional cultures to modern methods, concepts, and science to facilitate their use by those populations. Despite attempts to indigenize both the practice of counseling and the content of educational curricula, mental health and educational deficits in Amerindian communities have remained. This article suggests indigenization in the North American context is often based on a reified view of culture that discounts naturalistic and scientific approaches, and that this dynamic inhibits progressive cultural change at institutional and community levels. A secular approach to indigenization is proposed that relates modern conceptual thought to traditional cultures in a way that is consistent with traditional constructs. The medicine wheel, traditional to North American Great Plains cultures, is applied to counseling to illustrate how concepts found in aboriginal cultures could inform modern practice with wider applications to curriculum development. Related tensions involving interpretations of aboriginal spiritualities and modernity are discussed.