Grant: Team Grant: Environments and Health: Intersectoral Prev. Research - IWK/TEK/TES

Our research program will focus on bringing forward stories of reconciliation and healing in an innovative context: intersectoral partnerships in renewable energy development. Our research goal is to bring to light new and restored understandings of integrative health. Indigenous peoples have adapted to local environments for millennia. Place-based knowledge systems, embedded in and communicated through language (especially stories), situate Indigenous peoples in a deep understanding of the interconnectedness and interdependence with the natural world. While the link between a healthy natural world and healthy people is only beginning to be detailed and modeled in dominant (Western) scientific discourse, it has been known, embodied, and taught through stories in Indigenous contexts for hundreds of generations. We are created from four energies - Earth, Water, Fire, and Air - and without these, we cease to exist. And now, the defining issue of our times is anthropogenic climate change. It is Mother Earth's response to our misguided attempts to colonize her. Climate change is a real-world 'wicked' problem that requires horizontal and vertical intersectoral and multi-jurisdictional responses from local to international scales. But these responses cannot come from the stories of Western science alone. We need to put them together with other stories to help us acknowledge, understand, and most importantly, reconcile the damage we have done. Our research premise: Renewable energy development could be a platform for putting reconciliation at the heart of decision-making and implementation. We will examine how Indigenous knowledge systems - as applied to intersectoral partnerships for renewable energy development - have the potential to lead us towards new and restored understandings for integrative health by reconciling and healing our relations with each other as well as the land, air, and water around us.