ABSTRACT
Indigenous health, wellness, and illness are complicated and contested concepts, often studied and addressed in abstract ways by non-Indigenous people. These abstract understandings are often not aligned with the long histories and rich contemporary realities lived by Indigenous peoples and communities themselves. Written from the perspectives of both Indigenous and non-Indigenous authors, this chapter outlines key contemporary ideas and literatures about the wellbeing (or barriers to wellbeing) of Indigenous peoples and communities. Anchored mostly in Canadian geographies, but with implications globally, the chapter explores how profiles of Indigenous people’s health and illness have been established over time. Specifically, we use anticolonial frameworks to critically unpack how Indigenous people’s health and illness have been framed and thus produced at embodied scales. This chapter ends with suggestions for ways to reconsider understandings about Indigenous people’s health and wellness by offering concrete ways to transform languages, methods, methodologies, and pedagogies that pertain to Indigenous health and illness.
