Spiritually In healing proccesses

"Sprituality as a part of health promotion"

Members of indigenous societies often express broader worldviews than scientific medicine can reflect. Systems of beliefs tradionally include three worlds; the physical, the human, and the spiritual. These worlds influence on feelings of well-being, harmony and balance. Relationships to landscape, nature and human beings are important.  Many areas, where Sámi live, have gone through strong Norwegianization programmes. Many Sámi Elders have during their childhood been forbidden to use Sámi language and promote other cultural statements. 

Várdobaiki Sámi Cultural Centre in Nordland County arranges monthly health-gatherings for Elders. The gatherings practise an extended health understanding, not only focusing diseases. Topics like: “Something can be brought to happen, how can we understand it?”  is on the programmes. Talking in a group of like-minded about phenomena and practices from common lived life call on reminiscence. Relationships to landscape and nature, not only for dailylife support, but also in a spiritual sense, are mentioned. Relatives, old neighbors and friends are memoried. Talking about health worries is not done as direct speech, but through narratives. Common life experiences call on use of mother tongue. They alternate between Sámi and Norwegian language. When talking about emotional subjects and homeland areas they nearly always used Sámi. The mother tongue helps to put traditional knowledge into practice, and vice versa.

The health gatherings represent an arena for meeting and healing of experiences from bygone time when Sáminess was considered inferior and  support Sámi identity. All three worlds are included, and this contribute to harmony and balance.

"Musqueam knowledge keepers and indigenous university witnesses: Awakening the spirit of cultural canoe revitalization in Canada"

This workshop will identify and discuss two social work research and teaching projects led by Indigenous women from the Musqueam Indian Band and the University of British Columbia and Thompson Rivers University.  These Indigenous community-based projects privilege Musqueam language and cultural revitalization to strengthen Musqueam well-being, and support social work educational self-determination that is relevant to Musqueam. It privileges Indigenous voices, models women in leadership, and honours collaborative Indigenist community-university based social work research and student education.   

"Research strategy in indigenous studies"

In this presentation, I will discuss how central principles in Indigenous methodology; emancipatory, multidisciplinary, qualitative focus on contexts, and situated understanding, can be interwoven in the research process in indigenous studies.

There is a growing opinion among researchers that Indigenous studies needs a methodological perceptive that raise from the Indigenous peoples own narratives, said Champagne in 2007. Especially the researchers actively engaged in Indigenous studies experience the shortcomings of traditionally methodical perceptive. Traditionally methodologies fail to establish a dialogue with the Indigenous people. They fail to raise the research problems from the Indigenous world life, and they fail in grounding the research results in the Indigenous knowledge, said Hart in 2010. Indigenous methodology evolved from the work of the Maori researcher Linda Tuwai Smith and her book Decolonizing methodologies (1999). Jordan outlined in 2014 how it has roots in the critical and emancipatory theories of Freire, feministic research, critical-pedagogic, post-positivistic, and qualitative. Contextual phenomenology has also inspired Indigenous methodology. The process of operationalize Indigenous methodologies is ongoing.

In my presentation, I will contribute to this process by outline a chart for a research strategy in Indigenous Studies. The aim is to build research knowledge from the Indigenous narratives. The empirical background is an ongoing, comparative study about family involvement in social work in northern Scandinavia and northern America. The base of the chart is the work of the qualitative researcher Hanne Haavind. Her strategy render a possibility to include Indigenous narratives in the whole research process.