This project seeks to operate within a traditional understanding of wellness. It is critical to consider these ways in measuring wellness for Indigenous Peoples, to advance one’s wellbeing through culturally safe approaches. Our goal is to identify feasible, acceptable, and evidenced-based approaches to measuring Indigenous child and family wellness among the available literature through a scoping review of existing Canadian and international best-practices in Indigenous wellness assessments. Some of the wellness assessments to be discussed are Indigenous measures created by community, for community, and grounded in Indigenous Ways of Being and Knowing. Others are measures created by nonIndigenous organizations and institutions, aimed at measuring wellness for a variety of contexts and demographics. Both approaches were analyzed to understand the body of work on this topic.
As a first step in this multi-phased project, the scoping review was conducted to examine the existing body of knowledge on the matter. As a second step, initial advising was sought from community members on project appropriateness, with a future phase being the creation of our own wellness measure in mind. Here, semi-structured interviews were conducted with Indigenous community members who hold knowledge in relevant areas to this work including Indigenous leadership and policy development, Indigenous family home visiting programs, Indigenous medicine, and Traditional Knowledge.
This work is being conducted in partnership with the Indigenous Advisory Committee of Until the Last Child and Indigenous student members of the Department of Psychology at the University of Manitoba, led by Anishinaabe student Ms. Levasseur-Puhach, with non-Indigenous academic support from Assistant Professor, Dr. Leslie Roos. Until the Last Child works to bring innovation and financial support to partnerships with child and family services (CFS) and community services agencies, with the goals of (1) preventing child apprehension (2) increasing child placement stability and/or permanency through connections to family and communities of origin. Until the Last Child has had multiple requests from community partners for a culturally aligned tool to assess Indigenous child wellness but has been limited by the lack of an existing measure consistent with Indigenous values or with input from child wellness experts in Manitoba. Dr. Leslie Roos brings expertise in the measurement of child well-being and multi-community member engagement to facilitate this process, with the intention of supporting self-governance, as guided by the Until the Last Child Indigenous Advisory Committee.
According to current literature, returning to practices and understandings informed by Traditional Knowledge of wellness from an Indigenous perspective is crucial to achieving wellbeing (Healey et al., 2016; Restoule, 2013; Sasakamoose et al., 2017; Teufel-Shone et al., 2006). There is also increasing consensus that Indigenous wellness research must be led or co-led by Indigenous persons (e.g. scholars, community members) appropriate for local contexts (First Nations Information Governance Centre, 2020). Failures to conduct research in this way have resulted in further oppression of Indigenous Peoples in larger society due to governmental control and jurisdiction over Indigenous affairs (Indigenous Corporate Training Inc, 2018). As one of many examples, with the support of the Canadian federal government, research practices formerly targeted Indigenous populations as disposable experimental subjects in health studies. These included testing of tuberculosis vaccinations as well as inquiries into the effects of malnourishment on the human body (Lux, 1998; Mosby, 2013).