Finding Bundles: Examining Health, Wellbeing, and Physical Education Through a Decolonial Lens

The purpose of this study was to examine health, well-being, and physical education through a decolonial lens that focused on Indigenous worldviews, knowledges, and experiences. Utilizing a qualitative case study methodology, the goals of this project were to recognize how health and wellbeing (HWB) were understood by a small culturally diverse group of Indigenous Peoples located in the greater Tkaronto area. It additionally explored how these cultural understandings of HWB might support decolonized approaches to health and physical education (HPE) policies and curricula within York Region. The project embraced a variety of perspectives from diverse Indigenous students, educators, administrators, and Traditional Knowledge Keeper from two urban southern Ontario universities. Storytelling and thematic analysis were supported by decolonizing methodologies including the strength's perspective (Paraschak & Thompson, 2014) and two-eyed seeing offered by Albert and Murdena Marshall (Bartlett et al., 2012; Lavallée & Lévesque, 2013) that assisted in making visible how HWB were culturally understood. Indigenous Grounded Analysis (IGA) (Tuck & Gorlewski, 2016) and Traditional Indigenous Knowledges (TIK) (Maaka & Fleras, 2009) served as theoretical orientations that privileged and foregrounded Indigenous stories, knowledges, and experiences to consider how culturally diverse understandings of HWB might decolonize HPE within York Region.