Grant: Travel Awards - Institute Community Support

Structural racism is defined as the macro-level systems, social forces, institutions, ideologies, and processes that interact with one another to generate and reinforce inequities among racial and ethnic groups. There are many studies to document health inequalities among Indigenous peoples worldwide. How do experiences of oppression in the past have an impact on the present day health and wellbeing of Indigenous peoples? Studies suggest that present day social forces driving racial inequalities in health are conceptualized as being the result of historical legacies of social oppression, with racism as the link between race and health. Furthermore, studies of disparities should more seriously consider the multiple dimensions of racism as fundamental causes of health disparities, particularly structural racism. By investigating forms of structural racism from an Indigenous perspective we can build on the discourse about oppression and its link to the present health inequalities experienced by Indigenous peoples. The data from a previous Canadian and Finnish comparative study was analyzed further for this project, which was mostly qualitative data in addition to simple descriptive statistics and the Norway quantitative data comes from the SAMINOR data set, a population based study of health and living conditions in areas with both Sámi and Norwegian inhabitants in Norway. Discussed in this presentation are the background, methodology and theoretical framework for the dissertation and the first two articles produced and plan for further articles. An emphasis of this discussion will be on the use of both Indigenous and Western methods in the project and research ethics practices in different countries when working with Indigenous peoples.