Healing Justice Panel at the Indigenous Economics Conference, June 10-12, 2021

This video and blog is part of a series sharing the themes from ICA's "Reclaiming the Sacred" Indigenous Economics online conference held June 10-12 2021. This conference was held in partnership with the Canadian Society for Ecological Economics.

At the Healing Justice panel in the Indigenous Economics virtual gathering in June 2021, we heard from each panelist as they offered stories about their interactions with healing. 

Healing is unique to each individual but also is tethered to the collective, to the communities where people work and live. “Communities” include non-human relatives and future generations. 

Arlana Redsky shared that we need deeper integration between land, animals, and humans. Indigenous peoples are in a relationship with land and animals in such a way that holds animals as kin and family members. This concept is called Kincentric Ecology.

In this intertwined healing justice system, it is critical that Indigenous conceptions of relationship are understood and given significance by policy makers. Indigenous peoples need to be consulted and brought into the management or monitoring process. This is not only to make smart and intelligent policies but also to protect Indigenous peoples’ health and well-being as they are the most impacted in the process, both directly and indirectly.

Besides disease transmission from animal to humans, seeing and experiencing sick animals can impact Indigenous peoples’ mental wellness and trust of government entities. The federal government needs to open up and expand their knowledge that their policies are based on. 

Hannah Méndez shared that iterative storytelling can help us heal. We need to encourage cross-culture storytelling so we can learn ways to nurture our holistic being. We all have gifts to share, and we must learn how to share them selflessly. Multimedia and other forms of storytelling can assist in this process of understanding.  

In practice, Indigenous people can move away from this hyper-productive mode and move towards a way of life where community and self-healing are accepted and encouraged.

Healing is dynamic, not static and can be found in different ways. Therefore, it is important to find similarities in our differences and be inspired, grow and heal from each other. 

Speaker Biographies 

Hannah Méndez (she/her/ella) is a Venezuelan-American graduate from Long Island University Global. Her focus has been on environmental justice and conservation in pursuing a B.A. in Global Studies and minoring in International Relations, Arts + Communications, and Spanish. She conducted her undergraduate research on ‘The Empowerment of Black Indigenous Women of Color Through Food Systems in the U.S.’, which she presented at the 2021 National Conference for Undergraduate Research and received her university's Senior Thesis Award. Hannah has worked with environmental organizations Women’s Earth Alliance, Earthday.org, and currently with Atmos Magazine. She is also a member of environmental groups Latinas for Climate and Bad Activist Collective. She hopes to work at the nexus of her passions for social and environmental justice, multi-media storytelling, and documentary photography.

Arlana Redsky is Anishinaabe and a member of the Shoal Lake 40 First Nation in northwestern Ontario. She is a Ph.D. student in the Faculty of Native Studies at the University of Alberta, and a faculty member of the Summer Internship Program for Indigenous Peoples in Genomics (SING Canada). Arlana has received the SSHRC Doctoral Fellowship for her dissertation research on the social, cultural, and political aspects of Chronic Wasting Disease management in Alberta, Canada. Her M.Sc. thesis, written in the Department of Resource Economics and Environmental Sociology at the University of Alberta, focused on expert perceptions regarding cervid (deer, moose, elk, caribou) management in Alberta. Arlana’s current areas of research and specialization include wildlife disease management, wildlife conservation, Indigenous harvesting rights, posthumanist ecology, and historical-contemporary multi-species entanglements in the Colonialocene. 

Meda DeWitt is a Traditional Healer, Certified Massage Therapist, Ethno-herbalist, educator, virtual and in-person events coordinator, and has an Associates in Science, an Associates in Human Services, a Bachelor’s in Liberal Studies: Women’s Rites of Passage and Master of Arts in Alaska Native Traditional Healing at the Alaska Pacific University. 

Margi Dashevsky is the Regenerative Economies Coordinator for Native Movement and the Fairbanks Climate Action Coalition and has a Bachelor’s in Environmental Studies and a Master’s in Education Equity.

Melina Laboucan-Massimo (she/her) is Lubicon Cree from Northern Alberta, Canada. She is the founder of Sacred Earth Solar and the Director of Healing Justice at Indigenous Climate Action. She has worked on social, environmental and climate justice issues for over 15 years. Melina has worked, studied, and campaigned in Brazil, Australia, Mexico, Canada and across Europe focusing on resource extraction, climate change impacts, media literacy, energy literacy and Indigenous rights & responsibilities.

Further reading and what you can do

Read more on the Kincentric Ecology.

For Indigenous people in academia, we need to push back and denounce the demand to be objective as a researcher in our methodologies. Many of us bring trauma into our work because of intergenerational trauma experiences as well as ongoing colonialism and capitalism. We need to acknowledge our own experiences in our work and push towards a new way of incorporating ourselves in a more non-objective manner. 

We need to inform others about our ways of healing and share each other’s experiences so we can find and relate to our similarities and disseminate our deep knowledge about healing to those who need them the most. We need to break free from the stringent healing paths and hypocrisy in sectors like in academia and embrace diverse ways of healing.

Storytelling and sharing: Global solidarity will come from sharing each other’s experiences. We need to break out of our bubbles and share and learn from each other. This will enable us to learn more about ourselves and other communities. 

How can settlers become allies? According to the panel, one way could be to genuinely learn and understand the suffering and trauma that Indigenous peoples have suffered and take that understanding and share it within your network, so we can give those who have suffered a break from modelling and remodelling their traumatic experience. Choose to listen well, be humbled, and work hard.

Keep an eye out for more on Healing Justice from ICA soon.