Grant: Travel Awards - Institute Community Support

Culture as the foundation for wellness is about honouring Indigenous nursing knowledge and the result of coming to know and understand our own Indigenous experience. While working with four Indigenous nurse scholars Lisa Bourque Bearskin, Alice Reid, Madeleine Dion Stout, and Lea Bill we drew on our own Indigenous research approach to glean aspects of our collective experience to attended to the question of how Indigenous knowledge manifests itself in the practices of Indigenous nurses and how it can better serve individuals, families and communities. This research framework centers Indigenous principles, processes, and practical values at the center of the design. It inclusively captures four key components of the entire research process, which are based on Cree/Métis understandings of creating respectful research activities; enacting ethical relationships; being responsible for the gathering, documenting and analyzing the data, and ensuring that mutual reciprocity is honoured. One of the finding from this research study was the notion of culture as wellness. Each of the other themes outlined in the study stem from the four main threads of understanding including roots of being, entanglement of roots, on nursing terms and living the practice. Culture as wellness is stem from the ontological and epistemological of Indigenous knowledge. What was central to this study was that Indigenous knowledge has always been fundamental to the Indigenous nurses' ways of undertaking nursing practice regardless of the systemic and historical barriers faced when providing healthcare for Indigenous peoples. One of outcomes of this research showed many important aspects to building Indigenous knowledge in nursing scholarship such as how nursing education and the delivery of nursing service to Aboriginal communities needs to ensure that local Indigenous peoples and the community knowledge systems are at the core of nursing standards and healthy public policy