Reviewing Indigenous-Led Healing and Wellness Initiatives

Over the past several months, the Executive Policy team has delved deep into a literature review on Indigenous-led wellness initiatives.

The literature review explored six core principles found across academic literature related to Indigenous-led healing and wellness:

• trauma-informed care
• strengths-based empowerment
• Elder-led wisdom
• culturally safe practices
• community-led services
• land- and arts-based approaches

Together, we found these principles can steer health care and wellness initiatives towards cultural competence, respect, and community empowerment.

The review highlighted the limitation of representing Indigenous WG2STGD+ people’s perspectives in the literature and urges future research that is more inclusive of their perspectives. Achieving this entails delving into the impacts of Indigenous healing programs on diverse groups and exploring insights from less conventional sources.

The review also illustrated the transformative power of integrating Indigenous perspectives into mainstream health care. By adopting the six principles highlighted here, health care systems can move towards providing culturally competent and empowering care for Indigenous Peoples.

Ultimately, this literature review highlighted the importance of including Indigenous-led practices in health programming and spoke to the critical role of Indigenous knowledge systems in approaching healing initiatives. We look forward to sharing the full literature review with you in the coming months.