Exploring Indigenous Women’s Dietary Practices with the Women Warriors Program: Social Determinants and Resilience in Seeking Wellness
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Indigenous women (First Nation, Métis, and Inuit) experience nutrition-related chronic illness at disproportionate rates when compared to both Indigenous men and the Canadian population at large. Negative social determinants of health stemming from recent and historical injustices contribute to this reality. Indigenous women’s position in Canada is distinct as they may face marginalization on the basis of sex, race, and socioeconomic status. Despite these realities, Indigenous feminist literature demonstrates that Indigenous women are often at the forefront of anticolonial movements and attempts to improve wellness within their communities. This research investigates what Indigenous women’s dietary practices reveal about their distinct experiences, needs, preferences, and values relating to food and health. It took place on Treaty 6 territory in the city of Lloydminster and its surrounding rural areas, and includes the experiences of Cree and Métis women. Current public health initiatives targeting individual behaviours are ill-equipped to respond to the larger socio-political roots of problematic dietary practices in Indigenous contexts. These include colonial assaults on Indigenous food systems which have resulted in trauma, food insecurity, and the transition away from traditional foods toward store-bought, processed alternatives. My intent in conducting this research was to engage Indigenous Women in conversations about how these factors impact them, how they cope with or combat them, and what supports they seek out and offer to others in light of such experiences. Literature relating to social economy and social capital, the social determinants of health, anticolonial theory, Indigenous perspectives of health and wellness, and Indigenous feminism frame findings collected through interdisciplinary ethnographic methods that include participant observation, dietary recalls, supportive network mapping, and personal narratives. Underlying the research design is the recognition that Indigenous women’s voices should be prioritized in efforts to improve health equity. This study was conducted in partnership with Women Warriors, a holistic wellness program for Indigenous women that promotes cultural safety in its design. Beyond informing future programming, the findings have implications for initiatives and services aimed at improving Indigenous women’s nutrition, access to traditional foods and food knowledges, and wellness more broadly.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".