Redvers’ thesis focuses on the growing frequency of land-based practice (e.g. on the land youth programs) in Aboriginal settings, its potential for revitalization, wellbeing, and youth resilience, and the value of land-based practice for other activities such as research. She begins to address a gap in the literature regarding the development, implementation, and evaluation of land based practices.

Redvers’ work describes the health benefits and other positive outcomes that being on the land (and spending more time there) can have for all generations of people. As her work is framed, in part, as a response to high suicide rates in northern Canada, she has a particular emphasis on youth resilience. Redvers works with a land-based understanding that sees the land itself as healing. This has been traditionally known for a long time and only recently has been complemented by biomedical research. Not only does being on the land improve cultural, social, physical, and psychological wellbeing, it also promotes land stewardship, intergenerational transmission of knowledge, enhanced learning, capacity building, language transfer, and good training for non-Indigenous researchers.

From Abstract: "This thesis examines the cultural concept and role of the Land as healer in Indigenous communities in the Northwest Territories, Yukon, and Nunavut, and the importance of facilitating modern Land-based programs and activities for integrated health, education, and environmental outcomes. It describes a yet largely undefined field of professional practice currently being negotiated on the ground in communities. This valid form of integrative practice, centered in Indigenous pedagogy and wisdom, recognizes that people are intimately interwoven and connected with their traditional lands, and that directly cultivating this fundamental relationship can shape and influence all areas of interaction with society, including our health and wellness. Research methods were framed by an Indigenous methodology of narrative experience. Eleven Land-based practitioners were interviewed, and their narratives speak to the recognition of Land practice as an important part of individual and community resilience in the face of rapid colonial change and its subsequent challenges."

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For an alternative source, in case of a broken link, see: http://hdl.handle.net/11023/2996

Redvers, Jennifer. Land-based Practice for Indigenous Health and Wellness in Yukon, Nunavut, and the Northwest Territories.  Master’s Thesis, University of Calgary, 2016.

This paper summarizes numerous health statistics and indicators for off-reserve First Nations people. However, the most relevant items for this study are the impact of language, culture, and community identity on health. For context, off-reserve First Nations people 15 or older most commonly report: blood pressure complications, arthritis, and asthma, and 10% of off-reserve First Nations people experience Diabetes. 60% of First Nations people off-reserve “report very good mental health, compared with 72% of the total Canadian population.” (7) Mental health issues were more common in women than in men.

Rotenberg cites Reading and Wien (2009) as a demonstration that cultural community and continuity influence proximal health indicators such as smoking or poverty. Additionally, Rotenberg uses data from participation in hunting, fishing, trapping, etc. (from the Aboriginal Peoples’ Survey 2012) as a proxy for cultural continuity/connectedness. Approximately 62% of off-reserve First Nations People over 15 participated in a traditional activity (as defined and limited by the survey) in 2011. This was not found to be a productive factor; in fact, people who participated in traditional activities were more likely to have a chronic condition. Similarly, the APS did not demonstrate “a significant association between Aboriginal language speaking abilities and any of the three negative health outcome variables analyzed after controlling for various factors.” (16) This study uses health indicators such as having a personal physician: results likely depend significantly on how health is measured. For example, people who reported being able to turn to friends or family in times of crises were far more likely to have better overall health than those who had no-one to turn to. Strong family ties do have a significant impact on health.

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This study is available for free on the Statistics Canada website: https://www.statcan.gc.ca/pub/89-653-x/89-653-x2016010-eng.htm

Rotenberg, Christine. “Social determinants of health for the off-reserve First Nations population, 15 years of age and older, 2012.” Statistics Canada. Catalogue no. 89-653 (2016).

From Abstract:

This dissertation applies Rob Nixon’s argument that “arresting stories, images, and symbols” are required to draw attention to the slow violence of environmental degradation (Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor 3) to an extended case study of the way in which narratives in various forms, media, and genres have disseminated and legitimated one Indigenous community’s claims about the violence wrought by uranium mining on their land. The case study on which the project centers is the fifty-year campaign undertaken by members of the community of Déline, Northwest Territories to obtain recognition of and remediation for the environmental, cultural, and psychological risks and damages of federally-mandated uranium mining on Great Bear Lake. Like previous scholarship on risk definition, environmental justice, and the environmentalism of the poor, this study draws out the ways in which conflicts over risk definition give rise to environmental injustice. Like some of this scholarship, it highlights the importance of narrative to legitimating officially discounted risk definitions. The study builds on existing scholarship by adding the variable of cross-cultural, multiple-media adaptation into the equation, arguing that adaptations can alter dominant perceptions of risk even as they alter the discounted risk perceptions they support. Re/mediation, the term the project coins to convey this process of restoring legitimacy to marginalized narratives through mediation, is thus offered as a problematic but ultimately effective riposte to slow violence and its attendant environmental injustices. This project is only the second book-length work on the case study at hand, and the first to analyze textual representations of it across multiple media.

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Queen's University has made this resource available upon request at the following link: http://hdl.handle.net/1974/13510

Fletcher, Alana. Re/mediation: The Story of Port Radium. Doctoral Thesis, Queen’s University, 2015.

Though Gordon does not use the phrase “Dene Ts’ı̨lı̨,” much of her dissertation is about the ways in which the people of Délı̨nę are preserving Sahtúot’ı̨nę epistemology with and for youth. She focuses on three primary areas of preservation or revitalization: first, on the land “heritage” activities, second, continuing Sahtúot’ı̨nę engagement with the Port Radium mine, and third, the tensions between elders and youth. She argues that the continued use of Sahtúot’ı̨nę epistemology in Délı̨nę helps the community heal from and avoid further social pathologies inflicted by ongoing colonization.

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As of May 2018, this thesis has not yet been made available to the public. 

Gordon, Sarah. Cultural Vitality as Social Strength in Délı̨nę, Northwest Territories, Canada. Doctoral Thesis, Indiana University, 2014.

This paper is based on an evaluation of Dechinta, Bush University’s first semester, run by Thea Luig in 2010. The evaluation consisted of semi-structured interviews with instructors and students, along with a critical reflection from the founder and manager of Dechinta (second and third authors, respectively). Dechinta aims to promote experiential, land-based learning based on “Indigenous values and ways of relating to the environment” (14).

From the variety of evidence collected from their evaluation, the authors conclude that Dechinta has enormous potential to be a model of land-based instruction. Students have personal, embodied, and experiential learning experiences that lead to “unique understanding… tangible skills, personal growth, and high knowledge retention” (21). It faces the challenge of funding, and dogmatic understandings of what higher education entails. In addition, the authors call for further research to understand learning and well-being in relational contexts.

Abstract:

In June 2010 “Dechinta” - Bush University Centre for Research and Learning ran their first semester of land-based and university-accredited courses. During a three-week pilot session at a remote location in the Canadian Northwest Territories, students from Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal background learned about health promotion, the history of their people, governance, creative writing, and sustainable technologies. Resident Elders, cultural experts, university professors, and artists taught in collaboration through fireside lecturing, writing, and speaking assignments, travelling out on the land, gathering wood, harvesting, moose hide tanning, making dry fish, and more. Experiential learning that engaged students on intellectual, emotional, and physical levels created awareness of various emotional difficulties, their causes, and their effects on health among participants. The experience of interrelatedness with the land and the group, sharing these experiences in storytelling and writing, working and being on the land proved effective in addressing and emotionally integrating these issues. The Elders present contributed to this process by modeling appropriate behaviour in the face of difficulties and conflict. This paper intends to show the varied relationships between the pedagogy of northern Aboriginal people and the promotion of lifelong well-being. It will relate the experience of Dechinta with a theoretical discussion drawing on critical pedagogy, cultural anthropology, and psychology.

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This PDF is not available open access, but can be purchased from the Journal in its bookstore. 

DOI: https://doi.org/10.18848/2156-8960/CGP/v01i03/41181

Luig, Thea, Erin Freelnd Ballantyne, Kyla Kakfwi Scott. “Promoting Well-Being through Land-Based Pedagogy.” The International Journal of Health, Wellness and Society 1, no. 3 (2011):13-26.

This document presents a number of tools for adapting youth-focused programs to meet the needs of young Aboriginal people. They advocate for a strengths-based approach, which means focusing on factors that protect Aboriginal youth from violence, suicide, substance abuse, etc., rather than giving too much attention to negative statistics. Their approach also emphasizes understanding and integrating cultural identity, and they offer a self-assessment guide, specific strategies, ideas about working with schools, and research considerations.

From Abstract:

From coast to coast to coast in Canada, there is growing recognition that many youth programs do not adequately meet the needs of Aboriginal youth. Some programs have been developed without any thought to the unique circumstances of Aboriginal youth. Others have been superficially adapted with respect to program materials, but without a deeper consideration of the myriad programmatic, organizational, and evaluation factors that require fine tuning. Many program staff and community leaders are eager for guidance to more meaningfully adapt or develop programs that meet the needs of these youth.

This toolkit is our attempt to provide such a guide for front-line service providers, facilitators, educators, community partners, and researchers. We hope that individuals from all these groups will find something in this manual to help them improve their work with Aboriginal youth.

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Strategies for Healthy Youth Relationships has made this resource available for free on their website: https://youthrelationships.org/engaging-aboriginal-youth-toolkit

Crooks, Claire, Debbie Chiodo, Darren Thomas, Shanna Burns, and Charlene Camillo. Engaging and Empowering Aboriginal Youth: A Toolkit for Service Providers, 2^nd edition. Victoria: Trafford Publishing, 2010.

Irlbacher-Fox presents her experience with self-government negotiations in the Sahtu. She proposes the existence of a 'dysfunction theodicy,’ within which a colonial state frames a colonized community as suffering, and “shifts responsibility for suffering onto the sufferers, establishing itself through discourse and action as a necessary and legitimate interventionist agent in the lives of Indigenous people alleged to lack the capacity to recognize or alter what the state alleges to be their own suffering-inflicted actions” (107). For example, state intervention in childcare, 'substandard education,’ or 'corrupt local government’ are all manifestations of a dysfunction theodicy.

Abstract: 

Just as dahshaa - a rare type of dried, rotted spruce wood - is essential to the Dene moosehide-tanning process, self-determination and the alleviation of social suffering are necessary to Indigenous survival in the Northwest Territories. But is self-government an effective path to self-determination? Finding Dahshaa shows where self-government negotiations between Canada and the Dehcho, Deline, and Inuvialuit and Gwich'in peoples have gone wrong and offers, through descriptions of tanning practices that embody principles and values central to self-determination, an alternative model for negotiations. This accessible book, which includes a foreword by Dene National Chief Bill Erasmus, is the first ethnographic study of self-government negotiations in Canada.

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Irlbacher-Fox, Stephanie. Finding Dahshaa: Self-Government, Social Suffering, and Aboriginal Policy in Canada. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2009.

The authors address the topic of young Indigenous suicide as receiving increased attention following reports like the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples. Following earlier research (Chandler and Lalonde 1998), the authors take a second time period of data (1993-2000) from Indigenous communities in British Columbia and replicate their original findings. They contend again that cultural continuity, as measured by community activities, lowers a community’s suicide rate. In addition, they add two new components of cultural continuity: local control of child welfare services, and band councils composed of more than 50 percent women.

Abstract: 

This research report examines self-continuity and its role as a protective factor against suicide. First, we review the notions of personal and cultural continuity and their relevance to understanding suicide among First Nations youth. The central theoretical idea developed here is that, because it is constitutive of what it means to have or be a self to somehow count oneself as continuous in time, anyone whose identity is undermined by radical personal and cultural change is put at special risk of suicide for the reason that they lose those future commitments that are necessary to guarantee appropriate care and concern for their own well-being. It is for just such reasons that adolescents and young adults - who are living through moments of especially dramatic change - constitute such a high-risk group. This generalized period of increased risk during adolescence can be made even more acute within communities that lack a concomitant sense of cultural continuity which might otherwise support the efforts of young persons to develop more adequate self-continuity-warranting practices. We present data to demonstrate that, while certain indigenous or First Nations groups do in fact suffer dramatically elevated suicide rates, such rates vary widely across British Columbia's nearly 200 aboriginal groups: some communities show rates 800 times the national average, while in others suicide is essentially unknown. Finally, we demonstrate that these variable incidence rates are strongly associated with the degree to which British Columbia's 196 bands are engaged in community practices that are employed as markers of a collective effort to rehabilitate and vouchsafe the cultural continuity of these groups. Communities that have taken active steps to preserve and rehabilitate their own cultures are shown to be those in which youth suicide rates are dramatically lower.

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The full text of this report is available on ResearchGate and Sage Journals.

Chandler, Michael J., and Christopher Lalonde. “Cultural Continuity as a Protective Factor against Suicide in First Nations Youth.” Horizons—A Special Issue on Aboriginal Youth, Hope or Heartbreak: Aboriginal Youth and Canada’s Future no. 10 (2008): 68–72.

The authors develop the concepts of personal and cultural continuity, and how personal and/or cultural change undermines continuity and may put an individual at risk of suicide. Using data from British Columbia, Canada (1987-1992) the authors first examine Indigenous communities with elevated suicide rates, followed by Indigenous communities with very low rates of the same. They contend that these rates are associated with greater or lesser cultural continuity, as indicated by community heritage practices.

Abstract: 

This research report examines self-continuity and its role as a protective factor against suicide. First, we review the notions of personal and cultural continuity and their relevance to understanding suicide among First Nations youth. The central theoretical idea developed here is that, because it is constitutive of what it means to have or be a self to somehow count oneself as continuous in time, anyone whose identity is undermined by radical personal and cultural change is put at special risk of suicide for the reason that they lose those future commitments that are necessary to guarantee appropriate care and concern for their own well-being. It is for just such reasons that adolescents and young adults - who are living through moments of especially dramatic change - constitute such a high-risk group. This generalized period of increased risk during adolescence can be made even more acute within communities that lack a concomitant sense of cultural continuity which might otherwise support the efforts of young persons to develop more adequate self-continuity-warranting practices. We present data to demonstrate that, while certain indigenous or First Nations groups do in fact suffer dramatically elevated suicide rates, such rates vary widely across British Columbia's nearly 200 aboriginal groups: some communities show rates 800 times the national average, while in others suicide is essentially unknown. Finally, we demonstrate that these variable incidence rates are strongly associated with the degree to which British Columbia's 196 bands are engaged in community practices that are employed as markers of a collective effort to rehabilitate and vouchsafe the cultural continuity of these groups. Communities that have taken active steps to preserve and rehabilitate their own cultures are shown to be those in which youth suicide rates are dramatically lower.

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Access this resource from Transcultural Psychiatry. 

Chandler, Michael J., and Christopher E. Lalonde. “Cultural Continuity as a Hedge Against Suicide in Canada’s First Nations.” Transcultural Psychiatry no. 35 (1998): 191–219.