Session B: Strengthening Animal-Human Relationships as a Doorway to Indigenous Wellness

One of the most devastating effects of colonization has been fragmented relations among humans and their more-than-human counterparts (Battiste, 2013; LaDuke, 1999/2015; Kawagley, 2001; Naytowhow et al., 2016; Tuck & McKenzie, 2015). Traditionally, Indigenous peoples positioned animals as equitable partners in interconnected human and more-than human networks, animated with spirit and the ability to act and communicate (Kimmerer, 2013; Little Bear, 2000; Sheridan & Longboat, 2006; Todd, 2014, 2016). While growing literature and public attention emphasizes the importance of human bonds with animals for health (Hodgson et al., 2015) and has helped to position animals as co-therapists in the healing process (Adams et al., 2015; Dell, Chalmers, Dell, Sauve & MacKinnon, 2008; Snowshoe & Starblanket, 2016), the scope of animals’ spiritual and communicative capacity has remained under-appreciated. As a result, animal-focused human wellness programs are still frequently founded on a Western power-based hierarchy with the “human on the top” (Castricano, 2008, p. 17) and focus primarily on corporeal forms of communication between humans and animals (Argent, 2012; Despret, 2008; Matamonasa-Bennett, 2015; Maurstad, Davis & Cowles, 2013). Current research offers little conceptual guidance to support animal-based wellness programs that account for Indigenous spiritually-based relationships with animals. Health promotion and treatment initiatives that do not recognize and utilize Indigenous peoples’ social relations with more-than human beings are bound to have limited effectiveness. Indigenous understandings of interwoven and reciprocal networks of human and more-than-human social relations must be restored in order to “do no further harm” and facilitate Indigenous peoples’ healing journeys. Reconciliation across Western and Indigenous contexts requires learning to work together with the more-than-human world and developing ethical spaces for health research in which holistic wellness is appreciated and understood in the context of all our relations. As an attempt to re-establish and strengthen human relations with the more-than-human world, a culturally-adapted animal-human relationship workshop was delivered in a rural Saskatchewan First Nation community on two occasions where Indigenous traditional Elder and youth participants shared stories about animal-human relationships and the role of more-than-human beings for Indigenous holistic wellness. Storytelling was used as an effective, culturally-appropriate, and generative method that helped both researchers and participants make sense of complex animal-human connections. It was the primary tool for data gathering and meaning-making among workshop participants, as participants collectively explored and interpreted their relations with the more-than-human (Myers, 2010). This method supported participants to synthesize their experiences into a larger set of group stories that form a platform for further discussion and analysis (Wilkins, 2004). The results revealed that animal-human relationships are simultaneously physical and spiritual in nature, and domestic and wild animals play many ‘person’ roles in the lives of Indigenous community members; these non-human person roles are literal, not metaphorical, and assume all the sentience and agency that the term ‘person’ implies. Furthermore, the power of these relationships is amplified when paired with traditional ways of connecting with the spirit world (e.g., ceremony). The findings have clear practical and policy implications for health services, education, environmental sustainability, and bio-resource management