Healing Indicators: Research in Indigenous health impact assessment and self-determination

This Health System Impact Fellowship is co-funded by CIHR, Michael Smith Health Research BC, and the First Nations Health Authority (health system partner), to help build BC’s health policy research capacity for the integration of policy research into decision-making.

Healing Indicators is a research project that aims to improve health assessment policy. It addresses the need to create tools that centre communities and Indigenous knowledge in the assessment of the health impacts of resource development. The project is grounded in community-based Indigenous methods, with the purpose of developing land-based wellness indicators. The work draws on self-determination, culture, kinship, community, and land to inform and define health and wellness in a First Nations context. As a research program, Healing Indicators is committed to engaging land-based healing and health justice and features a decolonial ‘two-eyed seeing’ approach, with one eye informed by Indigenous ways of knowing, and the other western science. Progressing land-based indicator research is important within the context of the First Nations Health Authority’s “Public Health and Wellness Agenda.” Land-based health indicator development requires emergent community-based methods and design that is inclusive of leadership from Indigenous peoples. The impact of this collaboration is the promotion of critical Indigenous health research, with opportunities to expand on policy gaps in relation to land-based wellness and Indigenous health assessment. Asset-based work, such as this, is relevant within the context of provincially acknowledged widespread racism within the health care system in British Columbia. This work is also significant to the provincial commitment to implement the Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (DRIPA 2019). Healing Indicators is a collaborative research project designed to promote community-led health through land-based indicator development to inform self-determination and wellness in collaboration with the First Nations Health Authority.

Source: CIHR Funding Decisions Database