Our Stories, Our Journeys

Drawing + Sharing Stories of Indigenous Health and Wellbeing

We developed a community workshop/meeting to hear the unique experience of Indigenous peoples and tribal communities through stories. Our Stories, Our Journey is a two-part workshop that involves an individual exercise and a group-facilitated discussion.  Seven Directions hosted 4 workshops, 1 in person and 3 virtually. Attendees represented diverse tribal affiliations, age groups, and life experiences.  

Our Stories is the first step in our two-part workshop,where we asked individuals to adapt Nina Wallerstein's River of Life exercise for collaborations as a tool to reflect on personal experiences.

The River of Life activity is an engagement tool used in community based participatory research and evaluation (CBPR/E)  to assess collaborations and identify common goals and objectives. For our purposes, the River of Life used a life-course theory to health approach to understand the ways in which individuals live and the various factors that have shaped personal and community health. The life-course suggests that each life stage (toddler, adolescence, adulthood) influences the next, and together the social, economic, and physical environments in which we live influence our health and the health of our communities. This was especially important to identify the determinants of health and the experiences unique to Indigenous communities.

Our Journeys is part two of our workshop, where we held 90-minute, semi-structured  community conversations on topics of community health, healing, and well-being.

Five community meetings were held virtually across the United States, representing tribal communities from the northeast, Southwest, Midwest, and Plains regions. The community discussions had a semi-structured format, beginning with introductions from facilitators and attendees, sharing stories from the Our Journeys activity, and identifying determinants unique to Indigenous people andtribal communities in the United States. The attendees represented diverse backgrounds, therefore the term social determinants of health was sometimes nuanced. However, when framing SDOH as the ways in which our communities have remained healthy or the barriers Indigenous people face to be healthy, the conversations provided invaluable insight to social determinants from anIndigenous lens.

As part of our project, we worked with a graphic artist who created graphic illustrations of the community conversations. The graphic illustrations highlight the themes of social determinants of health from each community. The graphic illustrations were returned to communities for preview, feedback, and approval. The stories, lessons, and knowledge shared through this process has provided us invaluable insights and information to enrich our understandings of social determinants of health from Indigenous perspectives.