Abstract

This article reports on the work of an interdisciplinary research team involving faculty and students from Anthropology, First Nations Studies and Ecosystem Health (Medicine) working in collaboration with a Native community in Southwestern Ontario, Canada. Community-driven projects brought to the team focus on the correlation of human health with environmental degradation from the nearby petrochemical centre, the loss of clean water and uncontaminated fish as subsistence resources and increasing endangerment of plant and animal species (affecting the continuity of traditional medicine). Collaboration of Aboriginal community experts with academics is providing an increasingly explicit theory of how these variables are interrelated, and how balance or well-being can be sustained in a world where it is highly endangered. Because Native peoples already acknowledge the inseparability of ecosystem and human health and the health of all living beings, there is a mutually reinforcing convergence of interdisciplinarities from First Nations and academic directions.