AlterNative: An International Journal of Indigenous Peoples

Despite the recent Truth and Reconciliation Report in Canada, rates of Indigenous children being apprehended by the state remain disproportionality high when compared to non-Indigenous children. Starting with a critical decolonizing methodology, this article charts connections between historic and contemporary settler-colonial state interventions into lives and places of Indigenous families. We interrogate resiliencies of false settler-state logics based on “for their own good” logics about Indigenous peoples. We then turn to the recent ascendance of cultural safety, considering the concept’s positive possibility, and potential limitations, with reference to child-welfare and apprehension of Indigenous children. Finally, based on established evidence that child welfare is a crucial determinant of broader Indigenous health and well-being, the article concludes with thoughts about how those working with settler-colonial state apparatuses might achieve culturally safe engagements with Indigenous cultures in the contemporary colonial present. Our solutions are located in literary arts, where the article begins.

This article explores the concept of cultural safety in relation with the diversity of cultural identities experienced by urban Indigenous youth. While the existing literature focuses on educating health care providers on the historical context and resultant disparities in social determinants of health among Indigenous Peoples, little attention has been given to how these histories have impacted the ways in which urban Indigenous Peoples have negotiated their identities. We contend that the numerous ways in which urban Indigenous identities have been impacted by colonial policies have many implications for urban service providers and policy-makers, and for the meaning of cultural safety in this context. Drawing on participatory research that employed Indigenous methodologies, with 20 urban Indigenous youth living in Montreal, we outline some guiding principles in addressing questions of Indigenous identity among urban youth, and their relevance to the definition and application of cultural safety concept and practices.

Life in the city for any youth can be challenging without a proper support network. For Indigenous youth in particular, the unique burden of intergenerational trauma due to the residual effects of colonialism (e.g. residential schools and historical outlawing of traditional practices) can contribute to both unhealthy behaviors and a continuation of “culturally unsafe” spaces. As a response to these challenges, this article examines the positive effects that a grassroots film creation and production program in a major urban centre in Saskatchewan, Canada, had on participating Indigenous youth. Community-based researchers from the Indigenous Peoples’ Health Research Centre observed how a culturally safe space created the conditions to enable youth to become creative through the arts in an environment supported by an intergenerational network of Nêhiyaw (Plains Cree) kinship relationships called wâhkôtowin. The article also argues that the effectiveness of culturally safe spaces can benefit from recognizing the operation of ethnogenetic processes in contemporary environments.

This article explores the significance of cultural safety in view of the struggle over ancestral domain and modernity for Kelabit youth and elders in the state of Sarawak in Borneo, Malaysia. Our participatory case study points to the challenges to cultural safety caused by the external pressures of modernization and competing knowledge systems from downriver that are breaking down the leadership and decision-making processes to protect the land. We found that intergenerational community mapping and language revitalization provide a means for supporting cultural safety. Our applied research suggests that cultural safety benefits from being defined locally. Empowering youth and elders to harness, renew, and defend the potential of Kelabit identity and unity is part of recognizing that cultural safety needs to be constantly affirmed by its proponents. It is a process that demands to be actively grappled with and defined by community members at the individual and collective levels.

This article discusses transformations underway within Indigenous health in northern British Columbia and Canada. We highlight two organizations that are working to create ethical space and cultural safety at the intersections of Indigenous knowledge about health and wellness, Western medicine, and healthcare services for Indigenous peoples in Canada. The article argues that the cultural, organizational, and systemic transformations necessary to address the deep and ongoing health inequities experienced by Indigenous populations should be rooted in Indigenous knowledges and should prioritize Indigenous voices, values, and concepts. Cultural safety, ethical space, and Two-Eyed Seeing are three examples of ideas anchored in Indigenous knowledges that speak to relationships at the interface of different systems of knowledge. We offer some examples of how a public health knowledge translation centre and a regional health service delivering organization are actualizing these concepts in their work nationally and regionally in northern British Columbia, Canada.

In this article, three Métis authors, engaged in human service, share their conceptualization of cultural safety in educational settings. Their examples pertain more specifically to learning moments where Indigenous pedagogy is used to convey aspects of the colonial history and various forms of violence towards Indigenous peoples in Canada. In cases where there is a diverse or multicultural learning group, housed within a dominant Euro-Canadian culture, cultural safety can be designed to create a learning environment that promotes increased trust, sharing and exploration of “risky subjects”. This article is structured around a presentation of a pedagogy developed by Jeannine Carriere and Cathy Richardson in an Indigenous cultural sensitization training for child and youth mental health practitioners in British Columbia. Their approach encircles first-person testimony shared by Vicky Boldo, provides a structure for witnessing such testimony and then invites feedback from Vicky in relation to cultural safety for those who educate from Indigenous perspectives. The authors address the issue of backlash and White guilt that are often evoked when truths about violent histories are brought to the fore.

Rosborough, T.P., & Rorick, C. L. (2017). Following in the footsteps of the wolf: connecting scholarly minds to ancestors in Indigenous language revitalization. AlterNative: An International Journal of Indigenous Peoples, 13: 11–17. DOI: 10.1177/1177180116689031.

The above article that appeared in the March 2017 issue of AlterNative: An International Journal of Indigenous Peoples was missing an in-text citation on page 15. The first sentence of the second paragraph should have read as follows:

“Language shapes [our epistemology:] the way we think, perceive, and organize the world in culturally meaningful ways, and [our] First Nations languages provide irreplaceable ways of organizing the social, natural, [and metaphysical] world, based on [our ontology, which is] the ancient, cumulative human experience and associated assumptions of First Peoples” (Ignace, 2015, p. 12).

The following reference was also missing from the reference list:

Ignace, M. (2015). British Columbia kindergarten - 12 First Nations languages curriculum building guide. First Nations Education Steering Committee. Retrieved from: http://www.fnesc.ca/wp/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/614108-FNESC-LANGUAGE-BULDING-CURRICULUM-BOOK-290316-B-F-with-Cover.pdf

The authors apologise for these errors and any confusion they may have caused.