Grounding Wellness: Coloniality, Placeism, Land, and a Critique of “Social” Determinants of Indigenous Mental Health in the Canadian Context

Viviane Josewski (), Sarah de Leeuw and Margo Greenwood
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Viviane Josewski: School of Nursing, University of Northern British Columbia, 3333 University Way, Prince George, BC V2N 4Z9, Canada
Sarah de Leeuw: Northern Medical Program, University of Northern British Columbia, 3333 University Way, Prince George, BC V2N 4Z9, Canada
Margo Greenwood: School of Education, University of Northern British Columbia, 3333 University Way, Prince George, BC V2N 4Z9, Canada

IJERPH, 2023, vol. 20, issue 5, 1-23

Abstract: Authored by a small team of settler and Indigenous researchers, all of whom are deeply involved in scholarship and activism interrogating ongoing processes of coloniality in lands now known to many as Canada, this paper critically examines “social” and grounded determinants of Indigenous mental health and wellness. After placing ourselves on the grounds from which we write, we begin by providing an overview of the social determinants of health (SDOH), a conceptual framework with deep roots in colonial Canada. Though important in pushing against biomedical framings of Indigenous health and wellness, we argue that the SDOH framework nevertheless risks re-entrenching deeply colonial ways of thinking about and providing health services for Indigenous people: SDOH, we suggest, do not ultimately reckon with ecological, environmental, place-based, or geographic determinants of health in colonial states that continue to occupy stolen land. These theoretical interrogations of SDOH provide an entry point to, first, an overview of Indigenous ways of understanding mental wellness as tethered to ecology and physical geography, and second, a collection of narrative articulations from across British Columbia: these sets of knowledge offer clear and unequivocal evidence, in the form of Indigenous voices and perspectives, about the direct link between land, place, and mental wellness (or a lack thereof). We conclude with suggestions for future research, policy, and health practice actions that move beyond the current SDOH model of Indigenous health to account for and address the grounded, land-based, and ecologically self-determining nature of Indigenous mental health and wellness.

Keywords: ecology; critical social determinants of health; geography; land; anticolonial; indigenous mental health (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I I1 I3 Q Q5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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