We live in unsettling times of converging environmental and health crises. Globally, from climate change and mass species extinction to the spread of both chronic and communicable diseases—now including COVID-19, we face catastrophes that compel us to rethink life and health as a whole. As ‘modern’ societies grapple with a seemingly ‘unprecedented’ planetary chaos, now preceded by an indefinite suspension of the ‘normal’ way of life (given COVID-19), Indigenous Peoples locate these crises differently, as part of a long sequence of devastating environmental disruptions and pandemics spreading from the onset of violent conquest to the climate and health injustices of globalization’s (neo)colonial and settler colonial present. Being distinctively and particularly impacted all along, Indigenous resistance and resilience find strength in the embodied knowledge that another world is possible outside and beyond the colonial present of environmental and health injustices.
This other, Indigenous world, is rooted in an encircling notion of whole health that has been passed down by Indigenous ancestors through generations of survivance and struggle, even in the face of relentless colonial and patriarchal aggression, including systematic attempts to erase Indigenous cultures, practices and knowledges. While richly diverse, many Indigenous Peoples share a holistic vision of health based on reciprocity and care of the sacred relations among the health of the land, the community (including humans and non-humans), the body and the spirit. From Indigenous knowledges, illness and instability come from imbalances among relations, including among societies and with Mother Earth. As modern societies are forced, however painfully, to pause their frantic pursuit of ‘economic growth’ at all costs (often in ways that aggravate systemic injustices), we must ask not how to ‘restart’ the same system that has been destroying lands and disrupting the climate for centuries while failing to address many of the world’s basic health and nutrition needs. Instead, we must ask; how do we reclaim other visions and knowledges that can guide us to healthier, more just and sustainable futures? In this webinar, Indigenous knowledge-bearers, Martha Many Grey Horses and Marcelo Eduardo Zaiduni Salazar join moderators Mindahi Bastida and Leonardo Figueroa to discuss the challenges to Indigenous health from past to present crises, as well as alternatives based on Indigenous whole health approaches.