Geography and the medical‐health sciences have long histories of engaging the humanities. The last decade has seen for both disciplines a significant growth in theoretical frameworks, pedagogic strategies, and research methods that draw upon visual and literary arts, critical self‐reflection, creative tools and expressions, and even direct engagement or partnership with artists, curators, authors, theatre‐practitioners, and other professionals in the arts. Both geographers and medical‐health professionals, then, are increasingly (re)making and understanding various worlds through the humanities. In this paper we explore the histories of humanities in both geography and the medical‐health sciences, especially medicine: we argue the two disciplines have much to learn from each other's engagement and work with the humanities. Focusing on the increasing use of narrative and storytelling in both disciplines, we argue that deployment of humanities‐based frameworks and impulses must not be taken up without careful and critical analytical reflection. Finally, we ground our theoretical explorations with empirical examples from recent community‐based work about the risks and benefits of storytelling and visual arts when looking at the health geographies of Indigenous and settler peoples in Northern British Columbia.De manière impromptue : vers une démarche critique sur les méthodes de mise en récit et les méthodologies en géographie et en sciences médicales et de la santé: L'intérêt pour les sciences humaines par la géographie et les sciences médicales et de la santé s'inscrit dans une longue tradition. Au cours de la dernière décennie, les deux disciplines ont connu une importante croissance de cadres théoriques, de stratégies pédagogiques et de méthodes de recherche qui font appel aux arts visuels et à la littérature, à l'autoréflexion critique, à des outils et modes d'expression novateurs, voire même à une participation directe ou à des partenariats avec des artistes, conservateurs, auteurs, praticiens de l'art dramatique et d'autres professionnels du domaine des arts. Autant les géographes que les professionnels de la médecine et de la santé contribuent de plus en plus à (re)constituer et comprendre divers mondes à travers les sciences humaines. Cet article brosse un tableau historique des sciences humaines tant en géographie qu'en sciences médicales et de la santé, en particulier la médecine : nous soutenons que les deux disciplines ont beaucoup à apprendre l'une de l'autre sur l'intérêt que chacune porte aux sciences humaines. En mettant l'accent sur le recours grandissant par les deux disciplines à la narration et à la mise en récit, nous faisons valoir l'idée que le déploiement des cadres et des impulsions fondés sur les sciences humaines ne peut pas être envisagé sans mener au préalable une réflexion analytique minutieuse et critique. Enfin, nous fondons cette étude du champ théorique sur des exemples empiriques tirés de travaux réalisés à l'échelle communautaire sur les risques et les avantages de la mise en récit et des arts visuels quand on se penche sur les aspects géographiques de la santé des peuples autochtones et colonisateurs dans le nord de la Colombie‐Britannique.

We are unequivocally in favor of much, much, more space opening up for Aboriginal peoples and Indigenous ways of knowing and being in academic (and myriad other) spaces. We are worried, however, about a current lack of published critical engagement with policies and practices that appear, superficially, to support inclusivity and diversity of Indigenous peoples in academic institutions. We argue that, principally because such policies are inherently designed to serve settler-colonial subjects and powers, many inclusivity and diversity policies instead leave fundamentally unchanged an ongoing colonial relationship with Indigenous peoples, their epistemologies, and their ontologies. Indeed, we contend that individual Aboriginal peoples are suffering at deeply embodied levels as universities and other institutions rush to demonstrate well-intended “decolonizing” agendas. Drawing from examples in British Columbia, this paper provides a critical intervention into a rapidly ascending, and deeply institutionalized, dominance of policies and practices that claim to promote and open spaces for Indigenous peoples and perspectives within academic institutions. We draw from critical race theorists, including Sara Ahmed, and in our conclusion offer suggestions that aim to destabilize and trouble the good intentions of neo-colonial policies.

Authored by a small team of settler and Indigenous researchers, all of whom are deeply involved in scholarship and activism interrogating ongoing processes of coloniality in lands now known to many as Canada, this paper critically examines “social” and grounded determinants of Indigenous mental health and wellness. After placing ourselves on the grounds from which we write, we begin by providing an overview of the social determinants of health (SDOH), a conceptual framework with deep roots in colonial Canada. Though important in pushing against biomedical framings of Indigenous health and wellness, we argue that the SDOH framework nevertheless risks re-entrenching deeply colonial ways of thinking about and providing health services for Indigenous people: SDOH, we suggest, do not ultimately reckon with ecological, environmental, place-based, or geographic determinants of health in colonial states that continue to occupy stolen land. These theoretical interrogations of SDOH provide an entry point to, first, an overview of Indigenous ways of understanding mental wellness as tethered to ecology and physical geography, and second, a collection of narrative articulations from across British Columbia: these sets of knowledge offer clear and unequivocal evidence, in the form of Indigenous voices and perspectives, about the direct link between land, place, and mental wellness (or a lack thereof). We conclude with suggestions for future research, policy, and health practice actions that move beyond the current SDOH model of Indigenous health to account for and address the grounded, land-based, and ecologically self-determining nature of Indigenous mental health and wellness.

In recent years, both within and beyond academic and clinical spheres, medical and health humanities have become increasingly influential. Drawing from interdisciplinary fields in the humanities, social sciences, and the arts, medical and health humanities present unique lenses for considering nuanced spaces and lived experiences of health and health care; they also help challenge traditional ways that medicine and health care are understood and practiced. This collection brings together practitioners and theorists working broadly in medical health humanities, asking them both to consider their work as temporally and spatially located and to position their practices in conversation with a growing uptake of humanities methods and methodologies in other disciplines. The work of nine contributors uses these themes as a starting point for thinking about the future of medical health humanities in new and potentially even more productive ways.

Despite the recent Truth and Reconciliation Report in Canada, rates of Indigenous children being apprehended by the state remain disproportionality high when compared to non-Indigenous children. Starting with a critical decolonizing methodology, this article charts connections between historic and contemporary settler-colonial state interventions into lives and places of Indigenous families. We interrogate resiliencies of false settler-state logics based on “for their own good” logics about Indigenous peoples. We then turn to the recent ascendance of cultural safety, considering the concept’s positive possibility, and potential limitations, with reference to child-welfare and apprehension of Indigenous children. Finally, based on established evidence that child welfare is a crucial determinant of broader Indigenous health and well-being, the article concludes with thoughts about how those working with settler-colonial state apparatuses might achieve culturally safe engagements with Indigenous cultures in the contemporary colonial present. Our solutions are located in literary arts, where the article begins.

Anchored in critical analysis of a photovoice project, this article interrogates intersections between (1) health as it is tethered to ideas about the “future” and (2) worries about “the environment.” The ways the concepts of future, health and environment are dealt with by project participants suggest that arts-based research methods may be at risk of being seen as non-political spaces safe for people with privilege to envision some peoples as having more rights than others to a healthy future. The article begins by exploring how arts-based approaches, and photovoice in particular, can result in positive generative conversations between differently positioned research collaborators. Then, guided by critical anti-racist, queer, and Indigenous scholarship on futurities and ecologies, we move on to suggest that arts-based methods might rightly be critiqued for appearing as naïve methods, susceptible to reinscribing dominant paradigms of power and privilege. This tension has implications for geohumanities, explored in the concluding sections of the article. Ultimately, we argue that working with arts-based methods across sectors must acknowledge and account for gradations of power. Gradations of power are, after all, always informing who is afforded and allowed a healthy future when what is broadly referred to as “the environment” is at stake.