ENVS 228 - Global Indigenous Health

FC SSCI CD

4 credits
Global Indigenous health and well-being have been steeped in the community-based environmental knowledge systems and ethics. Such traditional understandings of health often intersect with individual, community, and environmental relationships, emerging into the idea of balance and living well. However, the legacy of colonization and the imposition of colonial policies regarding health, justice, and the environment have dramatically intervened with Indigenous peoples’ environmental and health relationships today. This course explores the historical and ongoing traumas associated with colonization and colonialism, understanding Indigenous concepts of health, well-being, and healing, and ways of moving forward for health and environmental equity.

This course will investigate a broad understanding of Indigenous peoples and their health status, practice, case, and delivery. Case studies will be global but draw from the first nations of North America, Australia, and New Zealand. In doing so, this course challenges students to be critical of Western discourse, privilege, and power and encourage them to be self-reflective of their own views regarding Indigenous health and Indigenous-led environmental movements. Building on Indigenous knowledge systems of health and environment as well as critical decolonial theories, the course will explore issues of Indigenous health within four broad themes: environmental ethics and social history, environmental and ecological health, impacts of colonial violence on sovereignty, and Indigenous environmental knowledge and health activism. It is our goal to learn how Indigenous peoples are responding to the health crises in their communities and the ways for non-Indigenous people to engage in building positive health outcomes with Indigenous communities.
Prerequisites & Notes: ENVS 101 or ENVS 201 or consent of the instructor