Iqaluit org to monitor impact of land-based programs on mental health

A group of Cambridge Bay youth took part in a Makimautiksat land-based camp in the summer of 2011. New funding will help researchers look specifically at how those types of programs impact on the mental health of Inuit men and boys. (QHRC PHOTO)

Land-based camp programs in Nunavut got a major boost last month with a multi-million dollar grant to look at how much the program improves mental health among Inuit boys and men.

The Movember Foundation’s Canadian Mental Health Initiative awarded $3 million in November to deliver and evaluate land-based programs from Yukon to Labrador.

Four of those projects are Nunavut-based: the Young Harvester’s program in Arviat, Qimmivut and Fathers and Sons on the Land programs in Clyde River, justice-related programs run through the Tukisigiarvik Society in Iqaluit and Makimautiksat youth camps run by the Qaujigiartiit Health Research Centre in Iqaluit.

Qaujigiartiit, led by its director, Gwen Healey, will serve as the project’s co-lead, along with Memorial University’s Dr. Michael Jong.

“We all know intuitively that they work, but we’ve never really had the statistics or the data to prove how they work,” Healey said.

That prevents organizations like Qaujigiartiit from making an argument for funding, she added.

Together, the two organizations will gather qualitative storytelling from participants of land-based programs, and assess the impacts of the programs on cultural identity.

Healey said Qaujigiartiit has already done some monitoring of its own programs; this new funding will allow the organization to finally adapt its evaluation tools.

The hope is that the research will validate cultural programming as a way to support positive mental health, not only among Inuit men and boys -— for whom the research is focused — but for all Nunavummiut, she said.

Elsewhere in Nunavut, Ottawa-based researcher and masters student Rebecca Mearns has also been exploring the use of land camps as an education and research tool, a subject she talked about at ArcticNet’s Arctic Change 2014 conference earlier this month.

Mearns took part in and observed a semi-annual land camp that’s brought together elders and youth from Gjoa Haven over the last few years.

Only now is she sitting down to listen to and process 30 interviews she recorded with the camp’s participants, but she’s already seen certain themes emerge.

Mearns calls one of these themes najursijiq, which means to care for something or someone in Inuktitut. Another theme is pittiarniq — the ethical treatment of people or nature.

In most cases, the land programs are focused in small, intimate camps, Mearns said, where you really get to know the people and environment around you.

“You come away with not only us having built relationship, but you see the students and elders who’ve been living there for nine days, that there’s this new appreciation for each other,” she said.

“And hopefully connections that will live on in the community.”