Anishinabe youth perceptions about community health: toward environmental repossession

This community-based research applied environmental dispossession as a theoretical framework for understanding Anishinabe youth perceptions about health, social relationships and contemporary Anishinabe way of life in Northern Ontario, Canada. Qualitative interviews with 19 youth reveal considerable worry about their community's health. Youth perceive changes in the Anishinabe way of life, including decreased access to their traditional lands, to be central to poor health at the community level. Youth emphasized the importance of social relationships for fostering healthy behaviours and developing community wide initiatives that will provide opportunities for reconnecting to land, and for learning and practicing Indigenous Knowledge. This study builds on the growing body of decolonizing research with Indigenous communities, and it concludes by offering the concept of environmental repossession as a way forward for studies on the Indigenous environment-health interface.