Grant: Catalyst Grant: Indigenous Approaches to Wellness Research

Adopting a model that includes a wholistic definition of health and well-being, this project will develop and test an Indigenous Food Sovereignty Best Practice framework to design, implement and evaluate health interventions for Indigenous peoples accessing services in urban and rural communities in northern Ontario. This will include a model to measure the benefits of an Indigenous food sovereignty (IFS) framework and the identification of culturally-based measures that coincide with the objectives of IFS in northern Ontario. Through a regional IFS survey with Indigenous peoples in urban and rural communities in northern Ontario, informal interviews with administrators of Indigenous health programs and case studies at two Aboriginal Health Centres delivering programming rooted in IFS practices and principles, the following key questions will be examined: 1. How can IFS be expressed as a concept of wellness to inform the development and delivery of health interventions for Indigenous populations?; 2. How do we measure the impacts of applying IFS practice and principles to health interventions?; 3. How are IFS principles and practices expressed in current interventions targeted towards Indigenous populations in northern Ontario?; And, 4. How do principles and practices of IFS support good health for Indigenous populations in northern Ontario? At a community level, this project will examine the effectiveness of moving from an outcome based approach to one that is focused on the ways in which health is negotiated and lived among Indigenous peoples according to an Indigenous model of health, and thus an understanding of health that is culturally-based.