Land and nature as sources of health and resilience among Indigenous youth in an urban Canadian context: a photovoice exploration – ScienceOpen
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      Land and nature as sources of health and resilience among Indigenous youth in an urban Canadian context: a photovoice exploration

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          Abstract

          Background

          Population and environmental health research illustrate a positive relationship between access to greenspace or natural environments and peoples’ perceived health, mental health, resilience, and overall well-being. This relationship is also particularly strong among Canadian Indigenous populations and social determinants of health research where notions of land, health, and nature can involve broader spiritual and cultural meanings. Among Indigenous youth health and resilience scholarship, however, research tends to conceptualize land and nature as rural phenomena without any serious consideration on their impacts within urban cityscapes. This study contributes to current literature by exploring Indigenous youths’ meaning-making processes and engagements with land and nature in an urban Canadian context.

          Methods

          Through photovoice and modified Grounded Theory methodology, this study explored urban Indigenous youth perspectives about health and resilience within an inner-city Canadian context. Over the course of one year, thirty-eight in-depth interviews were conducted with Indigenous (Plains Cree First Nations and Métis) youth along with photovoice arts-based and talking circle methodologies that occurred once per season. The research approach was also informed by  Etuaptmumk or a “two-eyed seeing” framework where Indigenous and Western “ways of knowing” (worldviews) can work alongside one another.

          Results

          Our strength-based analyses illustrated that engagement with and a connection to nature, either by way of being present in nature and viewing nature in their local urban context, was a central aspect of the young peoples’ photos and their stories about those photos. This article focuses on three of the main themes that emerged from the youth photos and follow-up interviews: (1) nature as a calming place; (2) building metaphors of resilience; and (3) providing a sense of hope. These local processes were shown to help youth cope with stress, anger, fear, and other general difficult situations they may encounter and navigate on a day-to-day basis.

          Conclusions

          This study contributes to the literature exploring Indigenous youths’ meaning-making process and engagements with land and nature in an urban context, and highlights the need for public health and municipal agencies to consider developing more culturally safe and meaningful natural environments that can support the health, resilience, and well-being of Indigenous youth within inner-city contexts.

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          Most cited references71

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          Urban green space, public health, and environmental justice: The challenge of making cities ‘just green enough’

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            Green space, urbanity, and health: how strong is the relation?

            To investigate the strength of the relation between the amount of green space in people's living environment and their perceived general health. This relation is analysed for different age and socioeconomic groups. Furthermore, it is analysed separately for urban and more rural areas, because the strength of the relation was expected to vary with urbanity. The study includes 250 782 people registered with 104 general practices who filled in a self administered form on sociodemographic background and perceived general health. The percentage of green space (urban green space, agricultural space, natural green space) within a one kilometre and three kilometre radius around the postal code coordinates was calculated for each household. Multilevel logistic regression analyses were performed at three levels-that is, individual level, family level, and practice level-controlled for sociodemographic characteristics. The percentage of green space inside a one kilometre and a three kilometre radius had a significant relation to perceived general health. The relation was generally present at all degrees of urbanity. The overall relation is somewhat stronger for lower socioeconomic groups. Elderly, youth, and secondary educated people in large cities seem to benefit more from presence of green areas in their living environment than other groups in large cities. This research shows that the percentage of green space in people's living environment has a positive association with the perceived general health of residents. Green space seems to be more than just a luxury and consequently the development of green space should be allocated a more central position in spatial planning policy.
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              The Construct of Resilience: A Critical Evaluation and Guidelines for Future Work

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                Author and article information

                Contributors
                andrew.hatala@umanitoba.ca
                Journal
                BMC Public Health
                BMC Public Health
                BMC Public Health
                BioMed Central (London )
                1471-2458
                20 April 2020
                20 April 2020
                2020
                : 20
                : 538
                Affiliations
                [1 ]GRID grid.21613.37, ISNI 0000 0004 1936 9609, Department of Community Health Sciences, Max Rady College of Medicine, , University of Manitoba, ; Winnipeg, Manitoba Canada
                [2 ]GRID grid.25152.31, ISNI 0000 0001 2154 235X, Wiyasiwewin Mikiwahp Native Law Centre, College of Law, , University of Saskatchewan, ; Saskatoon, Canada
                Article
                8647
                10.1186/s12889-020-08647-z
                7169029
                32312240
                70f8e886-f631-4f2c-bb6d-a8ee97b9aa8e
                © The Author(s) 2020

                Open AccessThis article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver ( http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated in a credit line to the data.

                History
                : 11 September 2019
                : 2 April 2020
                Funding
                Funded by: FundRef http://dx.doi.org/10.13039/501100010928, Institute of Indigenous Peoples' Health;
                Award ID: FRN 130797
                Funded by: FundRef http://dx.doi.org/10.13039/501100000155, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada;
                Award ID: 895-2011-1001
                Categories
                Research Article
                Custom metadata
                © The Author(s) 2020

                Public health
                health,resilience,well-being,meaning-making,indigenous youth,urban,land,nature,canada
                Public health
                health, resilience, well-being, meaning-making, indigenous youth, urban, land, nature, canada

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