Murky Waters: An Arts-Based Inquiry into Murdered and Missing Indigenous Women and Girls

The bodies of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls are often discovered at polluted sites in Winnipeg, Canada, including the Red River. Left at toxic sites that authorities deem environmentally dangerous, these women became untouchable in death, mired in sociocultural representations of disposability and wasting practices. We link murdered and missing Indigenous women and girls to the polluting effects of white settler colonialism especially pertaining to the degradation of Winnipeg’s waterways. As a means for enacting slow, environmental violence, current waste allocation practices remain tied to colonial systems that continue to harm Indigenous peoples. To foreground overlapping devaluations of Indigenous lands and people, we argue for a sensory criminology that is sensitized to the ongoing damage of colonial violence.

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

Josewski

Leeuw

Greenwood

2023

IJERPH

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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.

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Murky Waters: An Arts-Based Inquiry into Murdered and Missing Indigenous Women and Girls

Cited by 4 publications

References 22 publications

Movement, movie-making, and soil art: hope in affectively de/composing pedagogies

Movement, movie-making, and soil art: hope in affectively de/composing pedagogies

Sensing Toxic Injustice: Exploring the Polluting Touch of Colonialism

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

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