Reimagining Indigenous spaces of healing: Institutional environmental repossession

Abstract

Among the global Indigenous population, concepts of health and healthy living are wholistically intertwined within social, physical, natural, and spiritual systems. On-going processes of colonization and experiences of environmental dispossession have had the effect of removing Indigenous peoples from the lands, people and knowledge systems that have traditionally promoted their health. In 2014, Big-Canoe and Richmond introduced the idea of environmental repossession. This concept refers to the social, economic, and cultural processes Indigenous people are engaging in to reconnect with their traditional lands and territories, the wider goal being to assert their rights as Indigenous people and to improve their health and well-being. As Indigenous mothers, both who live in urban centres “away” from our families and traditional lands and knowledge systems, we engage with this conceptual model as a hopeful way to reimagine relationships to land, family, and knowledge. We embrace the concept of environmental repossession, and its key elements – land, social relationships, Indigenous knowledge – as a framework for promoting health and healing spaces among those who live “away” from their traditional territory. Drawing on three examples, an urban hospital, a university food and medicine garden, and a men’s prison, we suggest that these spaces do indeed offer important structural proxies for land, social relationships, and Indigenous knowledge, and can be important healing spaces. With increasingly urbanizing Indigenous populations in Canada, and around the world, these findings are important for the development of healing places for Indigenous peoples, regardless of where they live.