This month’s Common Thread focuses on Indigenous health, sovereignty, and cultural humility.  Cultural humility asks something different of us than simply learning about another culture.  It requires ongoing reflection on our own assumptions, attention to power within our relationships and systems, and a willingness to listen to communities as authorities on their own experiences and needs.  In Indigenous health, that also means understanding that concepts such as sovereignty, self-determination, historical trauma, and relationships to land and community are not peripheral to health as they can be central to how health and well-being are understood and experienced.

Conversations about Indigenous health often begin with disparities; differences in access, chronic disease, maternal health, mental health, or life expectancy. Those outcomes matter, but focusing only on disparities can leave out an important part of the picture: tribal sovereignty and self-determination.

Tribal sovereignty refers to the inherent authority of Tribal Nations to govern themselves and make decisions affecting their people, lands, and communities. As educators, clinicians, and learners, we must understand health equity beyond the lens of individual service delivery. Real equity centers on self-determination: supporting Indigenous communities with the authority, funding, and decision-making power to transform health systems.

Land acknowledgments in recent years have become more common in universities, health care organizations, conferences, and public events. At their best, they can invite us to recognize that the places where we live, learn, work, and provide care have histories that long predate the institutions occupying them today. However, acknowledgment should be more than a statement of whose land we are on.

To acknowledge Indigenous land also means recognizing the histories that shaped how that land changed hands including displacement, broken treaties, forced relocation, and policies designed to disrupt Indigenous communities, cultures, and ways of life. It also means recognizing something equally important: Indigenous peoples do not belong solely to the past. Today, they are vibrant sovereign nations, scholars, clinicians, patients, and knowledge holders actively shaping our communities and our disciplines.

Yet, what strikes me now is how little of that knowledge carried into my education as a nurse and healthcare professional. While Indigenous history was part of my childhood education, Indigenous health was largely absent from my nursing education. I cannot recall meaningful discussions about Indigenous maternal and infant health, cultural traditions surrounding childbirth and childrearing, or how historical experiences with healthcare systems continue to influence care today.

IMAGE: 2020 Photo from the Florida Everglades that sit on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded homelands of the Tequesta, Calusa, Seminole Tribe and the Miccosukee Tribe of Florida.

This space will feature a prompt designed to help you grow in relationship with yourself and others.  Here is November's reflection prompt:

How might our understanding of wellness change if we viewed it as relational; shaped by connection to family, community, culture, place, and belonging rather than primarily individual?

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