Grant: Master's Award: Canada Graduate Scholarships

This research revisits the ongoing challenge of meeting the specific health needs of rural, remote, northern, and Indigenous communities in Canada who continue to bear disproportionately high burdens of poor health outcomes. In British Columbia (BC), the overlapping health complications of the COVID-19 pandemic, the opioid crisis, and climate change are highlighting the importance of attending to the specific health needs of these smaller and often underserved communities. While these complications persist, Indigenous-led youth engagement approaches to understanding and measuring health are surfacing and transcending the limits of materialist (quantitative) and deficit-based health indicators to reflect narrative (qualitative) knowledges grounded in local and lived experiences. Indeed, the recognition for Indigenous-led youth engagement approaches on community health indicators in northern BC is growing among scholars. However, these processes are limited in the academic literature, and where and how they occur at local, national, and global scales is not well understood. This research responds to this gap, asking specifically: How does engaging with youth and Indigenous health leadership transform conversations on health and community indicators? Guiding research questions include (i) where and how are communities being informed by youth and Indigenous health leadership? (ii) how can youth and Indigenous health leadership conversations feed into designing health systems that are well-suited for rural, remote, and northern futures? This strength-based master’s project is driven through anti-colonial and eco-social approaches that enact community-based participatory processes responsive to, and appropriate for, youth and Indigenous engagement.