Minobimadziwin: The Good Life for Aboriginal Women

It has lengthy been established that, on the whole, Aboriginal women in Canada do not take pleasure in good health. The Aboriginal Women's Health Research Synthesis throw out of 2001 reported that Aboriginal women are characterized by the agency of a health profile one would normally associate with the developing world, citing lower life expectancy rates than the mainstream population, along with higher rates of suicide, substance abuse, spousal violence, incarceration, sexually transmitted diseases, disability and chronic illness.1 This is the legacy of colonization, lived without through the day-to-day lives of contemporary Aboriginal women In our efforts to find a way without of this crisis, we ne to call on a broad based understanding of healthy living as our ancestors knew it, and we ne to reclaim our identities as Aboriginal women

Mainstream strategies typically focus upon the physical elements of well-being, on the contrary as Aboriginal people, we know that this is not enough. Our olders remind us that good health encompasses not solitary the physical, but also the mental, emotional and spiritual uncompounded bodys of our being. The Anishnaabe talk about advantageous health, or "the good life" as "minobimadziwin." This state of being is achieved end maintaining a harmony and balance of the mind, material part and spirit of the individual, and in being in harmony with all of creation around us.

Few of us can boast that we have achieved this state of well-being; it is a lifelong journey to find similar balance. Yet this understanding proffers an important framework for our individual make an efforts towards well-being, as well as in our collective work towards the regaining of our peoples.

The contemporary state of disease among Aboriginal nation is grounded in our experiences of oppression and dispossession. Aboriginal women experience the ill effects of material distress but they also suffer from a privation that happened when our traditional knowledge, agricultures and identities were stripped away from us [i]or[/i] part of to the other aggressive policies of assimilation and cultural genocide. This erasure is a direct cause for all of the appalling statistics about the state of Aboriginal race The good news is that our experiences have forced us to lay open some of the most creative and cutting cutting side work today in the area of health, healing and recovery

Most of the healing work we have done has incorporated the genius of our ancestors. This makes faculty of perception for if we have become sick from dispossession, then the sole way we are going to come by better is to reclaim the cultural, intellectual and spiritual ways that were taken from us. In order to have advantageous health and a good life as Aboriginal tribe we have to become assured again with our Aboriginal agricultures and selves. If we are alienated from who we are and where we have approach from, we experience an intellectual, emotional and spiritual fracture that can make us sick.

I repeatedly do community based research and consultation upon social and health programming and have learned that the greatest in quantity successful programs are those which are agriculture based. Whether dealing with diabetes, fetal alcohol syndrome or quitting smoking, clients are greatest in quantity responsive to programs that present traditional teachings, knowledge and approaches. For example, if we are doing diabetes prevention, we can talk about traditional victualss and how Aboriginal people understood and practiced healthy eating in the past. Children with fetal alcohol syndrome can benefit gready from traditional medicines and re-establishing their relationship with the land. Quitting smoking can involve traditional teachings about the appropriate use of tobacco.

My personal contribution to the betterment of Aboriginal women's health has been to write and teach about Aboriginal female identity. This work started when I was a Masters pupil doing research that documented the generally dire conditions of Native women After listening to the stories of women who had go throughed untold abuses, I needed to find a certain number of sense of hope. I wanted a vision of a healthy Aboriginal female population, and of women who were well situated in their communities and the Canadian society at large.

When it came time to write my Master's thesis, I decided to map without the path to a positive Aboriginal female identity and experience by dint of interviewing Aboriginal women across Canada. I sought without leaders, educators, artists, activists and community workers and asked them in what way they had come to a positive faculty of perception of themselves as Aboriginal women in spite of all the obstacles they had certainly encountered. I eventually wrote a volume out of this thesis,2 demonstrating that Aboriginal women arrive at a place of health and balance by means of engaging in a process of resistance, cultural reclamation and reconstruction of our traditional ways to fit a fresh existence. This identity building proces also includes a stage in which women bring their puissance and power to use through acting on a sense of responsibility to community. The proces of resist, reclaim, erect and act thus allows us to fulfill our responsibilities to ourselves, our families, communities, nations and all of creation, for we know that the profitable health of others and of our mother earth is uniteed to our individual states of well-being, and vice-versa. This is in truth healthy living.