Grant: Fellowship - PA: First Nations, Inuit and/or Métis Health

This research will work with five Friendship/Métis Centres (FC/MCs) in British Columbia to develop a vision for community mental wellness grounded in people's experiences of living with diabetes. Indigenous peoples in Canada face significant mental health and diabetes inequities. Developing effective strategies to address these inequities must include understanding the links between diabetes, mental health, and unique contexts of historical trauma, racism and cultural discontinuity. Urban Indigenous perspectives in health programming remain, however, problematically lacking. As a result, mainstream health services are often ineffective, culturally unsafe, and underused by Indigenous peoples. In contrast, Indigenous-led health services grounded in local Indigenous knowledge(s) improve access to care and wholistic health outcomes for Indigenous peoples. This study builds upon a larger Indigenous-led research partnership between the FC/MCs, the Health Authority and the University of British Columbia - Okanagan. Over the past year, we have worked together to co-develop, implement, and evaluate culturally safe tele-diabetes clinics. In this process, the FC/MCs identified urgent needs to address mental wellness. This research will thus engage FC/MCs, as co-researchers, to: explore community mental wellness needs and priorities, and co-develop recommendations for mapping community-based pathways to mental wellness and resilience. Consistent with Indigenous Methodologies and Two-Eyed Seeing, information gathering and sharing will be facilitated by local Elders, Community Research Liaisons, and Advisory Teams. Methods include environmental scans, Talking Circles, and Community Gatherings. We will co-create a collective vision to guide development of culturally safe wholistic programs aimed at improving mental health and diabetes outcomes, and resilience in urban Indigenous communities. Results will be community-owned and add to knowledge bettering Indigenous health outcomes.