Assessing wellness using a Medicine Wheel framework: A cross-sectional study of stress and resilience in a First Nation community in Ontario, Canada.

• Main Author: Tanner, Bryan C.R.
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Published: Scholarship@Western 2020
• Subjects: Canada; First Nations
• Online Access: https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/etd/7327; https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/context/etd/article/9785/viewcontent/auto_convert.pdf

We adopted a Medicine Wheel framework to assess the countervailing associations of stressors stemming from colonialism and cultural resilience resources on wellness-oriented measures of physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual health in a First Nations community. Additionally, we assessed the mechanisms under which cultural resilience resources promoted better health across these outcomes. A series of modified Poisson regression models were fit to assess the study objectives. We found that increasing frequency of thoughts of historical losses were associated with decreases in the likelihood of reporting better physical, emotional, and spiritual health. We found only limited evidence of a protective association for cultural resilience resources, where use of traditional healers had a modest protective association with men’s spiritual health (PR: 1.44, 95% CI: 1.11 to 1.85). Our findings suggest that stressors stemming from colonialism and cultural resilience resources may be important targets for intervention in Indigenous wellness-oriented health programming.