Welcome To The Living Indigenous Encyclopaedias For Health Justice
August 2023
We are very proud and excited to launch this living wisdoms ecosystem. We are coining this term as Knowledges are alive, they evolve through interaction with culture, events, and time. This term also highlights that Indigenous Knowledges are still relevant and will always keep evolving to support our survival and healing.
INTRODUCTION
For this volume we are focusing on how Traditional Ecological Knowledges can be incorporated into urban systems.
To create his volume, we started off by holding an Imagination Lab with three live contributors and two written/audio contributors.
This topic was chosen as Indigenous and Land based cultures are under threat by the lack of systemic action to the dysregulation of our planetary ecosystems and by the continual expansion of capitalism and imperialism. This brings pollution to our habitats making it difficult or impossible to sustain life. It also creates high levels of violence and exploitation and it dysregulates the habitats to the point of floods, drought, and extreme thermal conditions.
There are two things to consider, the first is that the genocide of Indigenous and Land based cultures is continuing. Secondly, in order to survive, we are being displaced to urban spaces.
The forced migration to cities presents further challenges of poverty, cultural erasure, and discrimination. Cities like New York, Lima, Mexico City, Toronto which are all on Native Lands, work hard to systemically erase Indigenous Peoples. Our imaginations are nowhere to be found, our solutions to planetary dysregulation are ignored, and in many cases we are thought to not even exist. This erasure pushes Indigenous Peoples to live in areas of high biological inequity and in inadequate housing, which contributes to poor health outcomes.
Cities like London are usually not thought to be places where Indigenous Peoples or Land based cultures reside. Unfortunately here too we are forced to live in areas of high pollution and inadequate housing. We must also acknowledge that the health risks presented by biological inequity are compounded by the trauma of the migration journey, continual discrimination, and grief of a past life and community.
Cities should be places that sustain life for all Peoples and other than human Kin. One pathway is to incorporate Traditional Ecological Knowledges into urban systems. Indigenous and Land cultures have a lot of Knowledges that are relevant in making urban spaces life sustaining and contribute to ending the dysregulation of our planetary systems. In this volume we will be covering the concepts, Knowledges, lexicons, and principles that will allow Traditional Ecological Knowledges into urban planning systems.
This project is for and by Indigenous and Land-Kinned Peoples, we share it with love for our Peoples and our Ancestors.
The Interactive Miro
Thank you for reading this report please note that we are a non-profit grant and citizen supported lab, we use our funding to create free scientific reports, which provide foundational knowledge about health, health inequities, and health justice. We prioritise the hiring of scientists and researchers from marginalised communities to ensure that the lived experience is covered in an ethical, inclusive, and accurate manner.
Our goal is to be an open lab that is “for the people by the people” and your support helps make that happen.
