Braiding a Rug of Understanding: Oral Health Perspectives of a Métis Women’s Kinship Group in Northeastern Alberta

Background: There are notable gaps in health research that do not reflect the population demographics and diversity of Indigenous Peoples in Canada. Métis people make up one-third of the Indigenous population in Canada, yet their experiences of health go underrepresented within a wider field of pan Indigenous health research. The paucity of Métis research spans across many health disciplines, including oral health, and may hamper individual and collective self-determination and the work of Métis governance to advocate for the oral health and well-being of citizens. Purpose: The purpose of this study was to privilege the voices of Métis women, as traditional caregivers and keepers of health and wellbeing in their communities, to co-create a deeper understanding of the oral health experiences and perceptions of a Métis women’s kinship group in northeastern Alberta. Methods: A Métis kinship visiting research methodology known as Keeoukaywin was adopted for use in this study. This project recentred the ways of being, knowing and doing of Métis Grandmothers and Aunties. The researcher visited with ten women (knowledge holders) within her kinship network around their experiences of oral health and oral healthcare services for themselves and their families. Two individual visiting sessions with each knowledge holder and one group gathering was held. Consent was obtained for all visiting sessions which were audio recorded and transcribed. Collaborative story analysis was completed through a culturally relevant framework of Métis rug braiding. Research questions guided the collection of their stories as well as the organization and building of the strands of their collective stories. The women’s stories about oral health experiences were intertwined into four main braids synthesizing and sewing together the collaborative meaning of their experiential knowledge into a braided rug of understanding. Results: The four braids represented the kinship group’s attitudes and beliefs about oral health, self-identified barriers to oral health, facilitators to their oral health, and their vision for oral health and oral healthcare delivery for Métis people. These knowledge holders held holistic beliefs and pragmatic and adaptive attitudes towards oral health. They identified geographical, food, water, and financial resource limitations as well as racism and community disconnection as barriers to oral health. Facilitators to oral health included knowledge transmission facilitated by Métis women’s kinship systems and ways of being. The women in this kinship group remembered and recognized the integration of public health promotion in community schools from the 1970s through the 1980s as embedded into these same knowledge systems. Reflecting on factors influencing their oral healthcare seeking behaviors and their experiences of oral healthcare services, the knowledge holders visioned futurisms of resilience fostered through women’s cultural supports and culturally safe, decolonial oral healthcare systems and spaces with relational oral healthcare provision. Conclusion: This study provides a descriptive understanding of attitudes and beliefs Métis women hold towards oral health for themselves and their families. Further insight was gathered about barriers and enablers Métis women have experienced in relationship to oral health services. Findings from this thesis demonstrate individual and collective beliefs of holistic oral health as connected to overall health, as well as pragmatic and adaptive attitudes to attend to the oral health needs of themselves and their families in the face of socio-economic, systemic, and structural barriers to care. The study is limited to one Métis women’s kinship group and may not speak for all Métis women. However, the stories that were gathered with this Métis women’s kinship group does resonate with emerging Métis specific, community-led health literature. The findings attended to individual and cultural promotive factors facilitating oral health such as women’s cultural wellness and visioning for relational, culturally safe service provision.

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