ABSTRACT
The sacred worldviews and spiritual practices of Indigenous Peoples globally often involve intimate connections with land and nature to promote mental health, resilience, and overall wellness. Drawing on chronicity theory to situate settler-colonialism as a persistent and relentless chronic condition of the body politic emerging through land dispossession, intergenerational trauma, racism, and structural violence, we consider the role of place and other kinds of life from anti-colonial and Indigenous perspectives that centre positive transformations of Indigenous youth wellness identities within cities. Urban locations have often been conceptualized as separate from ‘remote’ and ‘traditional’ geographies demarcating Indigenous health and youth spirituality. The chapter details 54 interviews with 36 youth that were partially drawn from two CBPR projects exploring Indigenous youth wellness within a mid-sized Canadian metropolitan city, Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. Relying on personal, cultural, and moral conceptualizations of spirituality, time, and land to understand themselves as good ancestors, youth come to value and act on their bodies and environments positively in aesthetic and spiritual terms of beauty and acceptance. Mobilizing youth narratives through the Cree concept of miyo-wîcêhetowin – meaning to have or possess good relations – the capacities associated with being and becoming a good ancestor not only allow for youth to thrive-in-place, but ensure contexts and places themselves to confront and outgrow settler-colonial rationalities impacting past, present and future generations in and through Canadian cities and other settler-colonies.
