Grant: Operating Grant - PA: Aboriginal Ways of Knowing and Two-eyed Seeing (Bridge)

In Canada, First Nations (FN) people heart health is commonly known through euro-western medical worldview, and often our understanding of deep historical and current socio-economic issues, along with traditional knowledge is silenced. Historically, the Indian Act and other oppressive acts of colonialism have submerged FN approaches. Opportunities to examine both FN health and euro-western approaches will cultivate culturally-rooted ways to guide FN health. A three-year community-based study using the tradition of storytelling with digital technology and oral history methods will create twenty digital stories of mite, along with heart and cardiovascular health care situated in FN women perspectives. The women will be from two communities; one urban (Winnipeg Manitoba) and one northern (Opaskwayak Cree Nation, Manitoba). We will create a safe space to discuss factors that negatively impact FN heart health such as transitions from traditional to westernized lifestyles and diets; poverty; poor access to quality foods; the legacy of residential schools; racism; access to medical care; culturally unsafe health care; and economic and geographic marginalization. The purpose of this study, governed by a two-eyed seeing approach, is to locate FN women's concepts, language, and experiences of mite (heart health), and initiate dialogues with euro-western medicine communities to extend our collective understanding of heart health among FN. By way of the deliverables personal videos, a website and curriculum materials, the study will encourage FN communities to engage in protecting their own heart health and support dialogue with euro-medicine communities. FN cultural-based understandings and storytelling from two communities (urban and rural) concerning the mite including how to maintain a healthy heart and what it means to care and heal the heart is an important to shift how we collective know heart health among FN.