Browsing by Author "Sydänmaa, Birgitta Nicola"

Previous research has shown that colonization had profound impacts on precolonial Indigenous communities in North America. From the first contact, the explorers’ perception was colored by Eurocentric ideas rooted in European social systems, religion, cultures, and values, which called into question the moral worth and very humanity of Indigenous peoples. In Canada, colonialism introduced Indigenous peoples with a new social order, including new political, social, cultural, and economic structures, as well as a new stigmatized Indigenous identity, which became foundational for subsequent laws, policies, and institutional practices that aimed to erase those very elements deemed problematic. In Canada, Indigenous people have since colonization persistently suffered from poorer health compared to settler and more recent immigrant populations. Research points to both proximal and distal determinants behind the disparities documented in Indigenous health, and suggests that along with contemporary socioeconomic conditions, the distal factors of colonialism, virgin soil epidemics, and policies of subjugation and assimilation have been traumatic and have contributed negatively to the contemporary Indigenous population’s health. This research thesis is located in the field of medical anthropology and examines health, illness, and healing as culturally shaped, personal, embodied, and shared experiences, meanings, and illness realities. The theory used this thesis rests on an embodied meaning-centered approach of illness, which suggests that elements from the psychobiological, sociocultural, symbolic, political, and historical experiential realms blend to form a network of meanings for a sufferer, an embodied experience of an illness world that is shared as part of a community. Situated in the context of colonial history and present health disparities, the research questions of this thesis center on discovering major themes of embodied experiences and meanings of health, illness, and healing in an urban Indigenous community. Altogether eight weeks of daily ethnographic fieldwork was conducted in an Indigenous urban community in Vancouver, Canada, in the spring of 2017. The data for this thesis consisted of fieldnotes, ten individual interviews and one group interview, taped public speeches, photographs, and videos. A thematic analysis identified six significant categories of embodied meanings and experiences of health, illness, and healing in community narratives: colonization and colonialisms, colonization traumas, structural violence, survivance and resilience, reconciliation, and healing with culture. This thesis establishes that colonization and various colonialisms with policies of subjugation and assimilation are seen by community members as profoundly traumatic events with negative impacts on health that persist intergenerationally to this day. Collective memories of colonization and colonialisms inform what it once meant to be healthy, how communities became sick, and how they can become healthy again. Due to contemporary experiences of structural violence and racism, Indigenous community members continue to experience Canada as an enduring colonial space. Healing for community members is achieved by decolonizing minds from the once stigmatized identities introduced by colonization and by reindigenizing their world through reintroducing the original cultures and cultural identities back into their daily practices and healing their perceptions of the self.