Mining sick: Creatively unsettling normative narratives about industry, environment, extraction, and the health geographies of rural, remote, northern, and Indigenous communities in British Columbia

Abstract

Rural, remote, northern, and Indigenous communities on Turtle Island are routinely—as Cree Elder Willie Ermine says—pathologized. Social science and health scholarship, including scholarship by geographers, often constructs Indigenous human and physical geographies as unhealthy, diseased, vulnerable, and undergoing extraction. These constructions are not inaccurate: peoples and places beyond urban metropoles on Turtle Island live with higher burdens of poor health; Indigenous peoples face systemic violence and racism in colonial landscapes; rural, remote, northern, and Indigenous geographies are sites of industrial incursions; and many rural and remote geographies remain challenging for diverse Indigenous peoples. What, however, are the consequences of imagining and constructing people and places as “sick”? Constructions of “sick” geographies fulfill and extend settler (often European white) colonial narratives about othered geographies. Rural, remote, northern, and Indigenous geographies are discursively “mined” for narratives of sickness. This mining upholds a sense of health and wellness in southern, urban, Euro‐white‐settler imaginations. Drawing from multi‐year, relationship‐based, cross‐disciplinary qualitative community‐informed experiences, and anchored in feminist, anti‐colonial, and anti‐racist methodologies that guided creative and humanities‐informed stories, this paper concludes with different stories. It unsettles settler‐colonial powers reliant on constructing narratives about sickness in others and consequently reframes conversations about Indigenous well‐being and the environment.

Patient- and Community-Oriented Primary Care Approaches for Health in Rural, Remote and Resource-Dependent Places: Insights for Eco-Social Praxis

“…Fifth , a minority of the literature in colonial contexts e.g., Bourke et al ( 1 , 33 ) recognized the growing imperative for primary care and public health systems to be better informed by Indigenous knowledges and perspectives in decolonizing research and practice ( 105 ). In addition to moving beyond a deficit framing of Indigenous communities in rural and remote regions ( 9 , 106 ), recognizing the strengths of Indigenous perspectives can overcome false dichotomies between ecological (nature) and social (people) systems. This recognition has perfused recent international calls such as the Association for Medical Education in Europe's consensus statement on Planetary health and education for sustainable healthcare ( 102 , 107 , 108 ).…”

“…This recognition has perfused recent international calls such as the Association for Medical Education in Europe's consensus statement on Planetary health and education for sustainable healthcare ( 102 , 107 , 108 ). The fact that Indigenous voices and leadership are now being recognized for their importance to informing integrative, eco-social approaches to health ( 109 ), has far-reaching implications across primary and public health ( 78 , 106 , 110 – 112 ), but particularly for eco-social issues such as climate change ( 113 ). Those interested in practice that reflects the complex context of health will face increasing imperatives to learn from and with Indigenous-led work as generative pathways to address eco-social concerns in practice in rural and remote contexts ( 114 ).…”

On older person/place transformations: Towards a more‐than‐representational geography of aging in rural Canada

“…With few exceptions (see Skinner 2012, 2013), at the same time, little attention is given to the emotional and affective dimensions of rural living nor to the fluidity, mutability, and temporality of being in rural Canada. It is, in short, a view of the rural that creates and reinforces "rural aging" as distant, vulnerable, and other (Aldred et al 2021).…”

River conversations: A confluence of lessons and emergence from the Taieri River and the Nechako River

“…Lessons from the Taieri on the complexities of catchment management and governance (Parkes, 2015 ) have created a basis for application, adaptation and refinement in the Nechako context (e.g., Gislason et al, 2018 ; Picketts et al, 2016 , 2020 ). Similarly, insights from working with the rural, remote, and Indigenous geographies and communities of the Nechako have highlighted common, inequitable burdens of cumulative impact from converging environment, community and health impacts of climate change, land and water degradation, and loss of biodiversity (Aldred, 2021 ; Gislason et al, 2021 ; Parkes, 2016b ; Parkes et al, 2019 ).…”