Grounded in Culture, Sustained by Community: Advancing Indigenous Health Promotion in Canada
Year: 2026
Type: dissertation
Abstract: Indigenous health promotion is a distinct paradigm, rooted in self-determination, cultural grounding and the collective resilience of Indigenous communities that have sustained themselves through generations of colonial violence aimed at eradicating our Peoples. Mainstream health promotion models continue to dominate Indigenous contexts, while accounts of what self-determined culturally grounded health promotion looks like in practice, and how it is sustained over time, remain insufficiently documented and theorized. This dissertation contributes to that emerging body of work through four interconnected manuscripts grounded in a decade of community-engaged research conducted in partnership with the Kahnawà:ke Schools Diabetes Prevention Program (KSDPP) and five First Nations communities participating in the Community Mobilization Training. Manuscript 1 presents a narrative review that positions Indigenous health promotion as distinct from mainstream approaches. Synthesizing recent developments across the field, the review demonstrates how Indigenous scholars and communities are centering sovereignty and Indigenous knowledge systems as the foundation for health promotion theory and practice. Manuscript 2 draws on 30 years of community-led mobilization by KSDPP to uncover conditions that have enabled its long-term sustainability. Findings from a literature review and kitchen table conversations revealed several sustaining conditions including community-owned governance, cultural grounding, integration of research, intervention and training, and trusted local champions. Manuscript 3 explores how diverse First Nations communities conceptualize and enact culturally grounded health promotion. Through talking circles, five interconnected cultural domains were identified. Across these domains, four core cultural knowledge translation processes emerged through which health promotion is enacted and sustained: experiential education, social-collaborative engagement, adaptive braiding of Indigenous and Western knowledge systems and personal cultural healing. Manuscript 4 documents the iterative development of a community readiness self-assessment tool across three assessment cycles. Findings demonstrate that community self-assessment generated richer data and meaningfully different insights than external assessment, that readiness is dynamic rather than fixed, and that the assessment process itself functions as a relational entry point and reflection mechanism rather than a gatekeeping measure. Collectively, these four manuscripts advance understanding of Indigenous health promotion as a living, relational, and self-determined practice grounded in culture, and sustained by community in accountability to future generations.
Author: McBeath, Brittany May
Language: English
Subfield: Health
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7206410213