Canada’s Indigenous Social Workers’ Medicinal Plant Knowledge: A Land-Based Way of Knowing for Indigenous Practice
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Canada’s Indigenous people of Treaty 7 region have experienced intergenerational trauma resulting from colonization perpetrated by the Canadian government. While the use of medicinal plants, are employed by Indigenous social workers, their integration into mainstream human services organizations remains limited. The gaps in Indigenous social work practice hinders client culturally competent care and the acknowledgement of Indigneous knowledge systems in colonial systems. This generic qualitative study explored the experiences of participants who integrate medicinal plant healing and ancestral knowledge into practice. Informed by indigenous wholistic theory, the study aimed to understand how Indigenous social workers navigate the challenges and opportunities of integrating medicinal plant traditional healing within colonial social work settings. Data were collected through semi-structured interviews with seven self-identitifed Indigneous social workers practicing in the Treaty 7 region. Participants were selected using purposive and snowball sampling techniques. Thematic analysis was used to analyze the data. Seven interrelated themes emerged, including the role of medicinal plant knowledge, colonial systemic barriers in mainstream organizations, resilience in cultural preservation, ceremonial practices, land-based healing, decolonization, and identity reclamation. The implications for positive social change include the potential for Indigenous social workers to lead advocacy efforts that promote culturally informed Indigenous medicinal plant healing ways of knowing, support client healing from the trauma of colonization, and influence systemic change within human service organizations through traditional ways of knowing informed leadership.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.024 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 it