Research Guides: Indigenous Peoples Research Guide: Indigenous Health

Web Resources on Indigenous Health

In Her Circle: The influence of the COVID-19 pandemic on Indigenous Women’s Health in BC
In Plain Sight: Addressing Indigenous-specific Racism and Discrimination in B.C. Health Care
Published in 2020, this report makes 24 recommendations to address what is a systemic problem, deeply rooted in colonialism.
First Nations Health Authority
Jordan's Principle
Jordan's Principle makes sure all First Nations children living in Canada can access the products, services and supports they need, when they need them.
Indigenous Health - Government of Canada
Indigenous Health - Province of British Columbia
National Aboriginal Council of Midwives
Native Health Database
Database that contains bibliographic information and abstracts of health-related articles, reports, surveys, and other resource documents pertaining to the health and health care of American Indians, Alaska Natives, and Canadian First Nations. Log in is optional.

Scholarly Articles on Indigenous Health

Most of the recent material on Indigenous Health will be found in scholarly/peer-reviewed articles.

This search returns more than 50,000 peer-reviewed articles on Indigenous Health.

To add focus to the search, click on Advanced Search and add a specific health issue of interest.

This is the search string:

indigenous n3 health OR "first nations" n3 health OR aboriginal n3 health OR "native canadian*" n3 health

Search notes:

n3 is a proximity operator that looks for two concepts within 3 words of each other in either direction.

OR joins synonyms or near-synonyms, finding any of the terms.

"first nations" - double quotation marks search for the enclosed words as a strict phrase, including the exact word order.

Searching Online (Grey) Literature

Grey (or gray) literature is research and material published outside of the academic publishing and distribution channels. Common grey literature includes reports, government documents, white papers, working papers, evaluation, statistics, patents and conference papers.

Below are a number of suggestions of how to set up a Google grey literature search.

Indigenous Peoples	AND	Health	AND	Other Variables, e.g. jurisdiction, band or nation's name, specific health condition, etc.
Choose the contents of one cell		Choose the contents of one cell		Choose one or more cells
indigenous OR "first nations"		"Traditional knowledge"		Canada
aboriginal OR native		"Traditional medicine"		"British Columbia"
		"Traditional healing"		"Sto:lo"
		"Traditional healthcare"		diabetes
		wellness
Limiters: Filetype:pdf – this helps to focus results on formatted, published results. Usually this means fewer, better results. Date – A rather imprecise limiter that may refer to the date an item was uploaded rather than when it was published. -com – Will remove publications from the .com domain.
Other search suggestions: Use Google, NOT Google Scholar or Bing. Keep the searches relatively simple. Complex searches from library databases don't work well in Google. Once you have a search string in your browser and have reviewed the results, it's easy to replace search terms in the string and re-run the search to get different results. Set your browser preferences so it displays 100 results per page, which makes it much easier to scan results.
Example search string: indigenous OR "first nations" "traditional healing" "Sto:lo" filetype:pdf canada

E-books on Aboriginal Health

A search of e-books on Aboriginal health in Canada. Click here to run the search (requires TWU login).