How many times have I resolved to get my life together, straighten things out, get back on track after a hard day, bleak winter, an indulgent holiday, or a bad breakup? At this point, I’ve lost count. I am certain, however, that with each resolution, there was an encouraging Instagram post, informative Facebook article, or interesting TikTok advising me on how to look and feel better.
Healing is a compelling fantasy that has long dominated my life. Growing up on the rez, I had limited access to mental health supports and services, but an overabundance of mental health issues. My experience is certainly not unique; most if not all my peers were grappling with their own cocktail of mental health issues exacerbated by ongoing colonialism, structural racism, and systemic poverty. Not that I would have known. We didn’t talk about these kinds of things. Even if we had the language, shame bound us to secrecy.
When I finally gave voice to my depression, anxiety, and complex PTSD, I initially found support in community and ceremony. With the rise of social media powerhouses like Facebook, Instagram, and, later on, TikTok, I soon became immersed in health and wellness content. With wellness influencers just one click, double tap, or swipe away, I felt like perfection was not only possible, but desirable. As my healing journey became more reliant on social media, I feared that what was once an enriching journey had veered dangerously close to what Stacy Lee Kong describes as the “wellness-to-white-supremacy” pipeline, an approach to wellness that is rooted in racism, colonialism, capitalism, and patriarchy.
As the links between the wellness industry and white supremacy became more apparent to me, I couldn’t help but wonder if living well really is the best revenge, or does it simply maintain the settler status quo? Maybe it’s time I cut my healing journey short.
What Is the Wellness Industry?
Not to be confused with health and wellness more generally, the wellness industry is a form of commercial activity that capitalizes on peoples’ limited access to public healthcare, anxieties about mind and body, and desire to achieve idealized body standards. According to a recent report released by the Global Wellness Institute, the global wellness economy was valued at $4.4 trillion dollars in 2020 and is projected to increase to nearly $7.0 trillion dollars by 2025.
Wellness products and practices run the gamut of beauty, diet, exercise, spirituality, and paramedical treatments—typically cherry-picked from non-white, non-Western cultures. When picturing the wellness industry, yoga and meditation immediately come to mind. Does anyone else remember when Gwyneth Paltrow claimed to popularize yoga? Paltrow may be among the worst offenders, but she is certainly in good company. Industry practitioners a.k.a. wellness influencers are key to this thriving economy. Influencers often lack any cultural ties to the wellness practices they are appropriating and have minimal education, training, or experience. Instead, their credibility is based on compelling personal journey narratives and internet clout. A cursory scan of some of the more popular influencers reveals other unsettling commonalities: they are typically middle-class, cisgender, heterosexual, able-bodied white women.
I like to consider myself a discerning media consumer. I should hope so after twelve years of post-secondary training in identifying and critiquing systems of power and oppression. Yet, even I fall prey to clickbait headlines and appropriated fads that promise wholeness. This leaves me asking: when did I start taking advice from middle-class white women on the internet?
You Can Heal Your Life and Other Fictions
My healing journey began at home. Although ceremony and culture have always been within my reach growing up on the rez and in urban Indigenous cultural hubs across the Prairies, I was sixteen years old when I developed a spiritual practice. In my experience, spirituality and community are intricately woven together. Friends invited me to sweat lodge and sundance ceremonies. The words I spoke when I prayed were taught to me by my family. Some Indigenous people describe this type of healing as walking the red road. It felt to me as though I had been lifted by a red cloud. I was elated.
The wellness industry promises wholeness and community to those who feel abandoned and rejected, which basically means that anyone familiar with the alienation of late settler-capitalism is vulnerable.
It didn’t take long to come down to earth. As a teenage cisgender girl newly entering ceremonial spaces, many took it upon themselves to train me in gender protocol. Naturally, I was skeptical. I was audacious enough to ask questions. But I lacked the confidence to challenge long-standing conventions. I didn’t know why I was expected to wear long-sleeved shirts and long skirts in the middle of July, why I wasn’t allowed to sit cross-legged, or why menstruation limited my access to medicine and ceremonial space. To make matters worse, I wasn’t satisfied with the answers I received. Yet my access to ceremonial space seemed contingent on compliance and conformity.
As I matured, it became increasingly difficult to participate in healing spaces with cisgender, heterosexual men and women who gendered and sexualized me in ceremony. This decision was neither easy nor all at once. This decision, which I have made over and over again, was accompanied by unabating grief. I stepped aside because I didn’t believe I was important enough to defend if I pushed too hard.
I never intended to take this journey alone. However, observing my principles and acknowledging my intuition has required me to cobble together a solitary path with a few friends along the way. I wouldn’t say I’m better off. In fact, this solitary journey has made me more vulnerable to the siren call of the wellness industry. With minimal guidance, I commenced a self-directed healing curriculum that included exercise and diet YouTube channels, free yoga classes, self-help books, and, most recently, therapeutic Instagram and TikTok accounts. In the last few years, I have become a voracious self-help reader. I have read all the heavy hitters, including Codependent No More, You Can Heal Your Life, The Four Agreements, The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, and The Happiness Project, to name a few. I am versed in wellness discourse and will happily talk to friends for hours about complex post-traumatic stress disorder, attachment styles, and love languages.
For a minute there, I actually bought into the belief that if I could commit to a life of self-improvement and optimization, I would finally achieve a state of wholeness that would confirm my worth.
A Fractured System: Canadian Healthcare
The wellness industry promises wholeness and community to those who feel abandoned and rejected, which basically means that anyone familiar with the alienation of late settler-capitalism is vulnerable. In the United States where healthcare is privatized, the wellness industry has taken on particular prominence. While it may be tempting to claim that the wellness industry is less harmful in Canada, a country with an international reputation for universal healthcare, healthcare services and resources are not evenly distributed to different segments of the population.
Canada’s healthcare system is in part organized by a fee-for-service model, which itemizes and calculates the cost of services offered by family physicians to patients in a clinical setting. This model has been criticized because it pressures family doctors to book higher volumes of patients, thus resulting in longer wait times and shorter appointments not intended to deal with the complex health issues many patients experience. Under this model, family physicians complain of limited support covering overhead costs for running a clinic and patients complain of less attentive care.
Sometimes physicians’ efforts to interpret Canada’s healthcare system for the benefit of patients are punished. In 2009, Dr. Roland Wong came under scrutiny by the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario (CPSO) for prescribing up to $250.00 monthly of a special dietary allowance to low-income patients over a span of four years, without verifying reported dietary restrictions. It should be noted that Dr. Wong’s vigilantism yielded for himself a hefty profit of $1.8 million. Still, Dr. Wong was a local hero to many and became known as the “Robin Hood” doctor. By 2014, his licence to practice medicine was suspended for six months. When asked if he had any regrets, Dr. Wong stated, “Regrets? Only that the government doesn’t help the poor.”
In addition to systemic class inequities, Canada’s healthcare system is anti-Indigenous and racist. In 2008, Brian Sinclair (Ojibwa) died in Winnipeg’s Health Sciences Centre after waiting thirty-four hours in the emergency waiting area without treatment. Initially, Sinclair visited the Health Action Centre with abdominal pain and having not urinated in twenty-four hours likely from a blocked catheter. The doctor provided Sinclair with a referral slip and told him to seek emergency treatment. The subsequent inquest concluded that Sinclair’s death was entirely preventable and racism played a role in his death. Even with increasing community oversight and public discourse, anti-Indigenous racism persists in Canadian healthcare. In 2020, Joyce Echaquan (Atikamekw) livestreamed two nurses berating her with anti-Indigenous slurs prior to her death.
Despite Canada’s international reputation for universal healthcare, access appears stratified by race, gender, class, ability, and other social factors. It seems that the wellness industry has identified feelings of frustration and disenfranchisement with the healthcare system; however, the wellness industry has done little more than to profit off of this growing discontent.
New and Self-Improved
Much has been written about the whiteness of wellness, but what about the industry’s imperial and colonial foundations? Self-improvement is easily one of the most compelling propositions on the internet in the last ten years. Within the space of wellness, self-improvement is considered the pathway to health. Little appreciated are the ways in which Western imperialism has relied upon improvement discourse to justify conquest, domination, extraction, and settlement.
Archival documents reveal early missionaries’, traders’, and officials’ preoccupation with Indigenous peoples’ “laziness” and the lands they left “idle.” “Europeans resorted to their “labour theory of value,” crystallized by John Locke and Emmerich de Vattel in the mid-eighteenth century, which accorded ownership of land to those who removed it “from a state of nature” and improved it. Installing capitalism within the newly settled territories required Europeans to invalidate Indigenous socio-economic structures.
European settlers deployed improvement discourse for the purpose of managing the original inhabitants. From the late-eighteenth century onwards, Canada implemented a number of laws, policies, and institutions designed to civilize Indigenous peoples, including: the Gradual Enfranchisement Act (1869), Indian Act (1876), reserves and civilization villages, residential and day schools, and agricultural programs, to name a few.
Underlying official intervention is the inherent belief that Indigenous peoples are inferior to white settlers. Canada’s civilizing policies and programs presumed to “save” those assimilable Indigenous peoples. Duncan Campbell Scott, the deputy superintendent of the Department of Indian Affairs from 1913 to 1932, once stated:
I want to get rid of the Indian problem. I do not think as a matter of fact, that this country ought to continuously protect a class of people who are able to stand alone. That is my whole point… Our objective is to continue until there is not a single Indian in Canada that has not been absorbed into the body politic, and there is no Indian question, and no Indian department, that is the whole object of this Bill.
While these colonial initiatives have caused tremendous intergenerational harm in the lives of Indigenous peoples, very few were successful in convincing Indigenous peoples to willingly denounce their Indigeneity. Nevertheless, improvement discourse has many of us in a colonial chokehold.
Overwhelmingly, it is Indigenous cis- and trans women and non-binary people who report undertaking self-improvement programs as part of their healing journey. In a March 13, 2022, Facebook post, Andrea Landry observed:
It must be the age where we begin to realize that we have trauma we have to work on and baggage we need to heal… I notice that women are the ones often sharing that they are on their healing journeys, or that they are going to therapy, or that they are working on childhood trauma… And men. Very, very, very, very rarely are saying the same or doing the same.
Landry raises the crucial point that healing from colonial violence is necessary for the individual and collective survival of Indigenous peoples.
My aim here is not to uniformly dismiss the significance of healing or wellness for Indigenous peoples. Rather, I expose the insidious ways in which self-improvement discourse has become embedded in Indigenous healing models. The significant number of Indigenous cis- and trans women and non-binary people concerned with improvement and healing neatly aligns with broader societal expectations that ciswomen must remain in a perpetual state of transformation or self-improvement. As for societal expectations about trans women and non-binary people, there remains an abiding belief that these identities are deviations simply requiring correction.
I will continue my personal health, wellness, and beauty practices. In moving toward a collective healing framework, I no longer view these practices as part of a self-improvement project in pursuit of optimization or perfection.
“Having it all” is not gender liberation; it is a condition of Western femininity. “Having it all” for Indigenous cis- and trans women and non-binary people often involves taking care of immediate and extended family, cultural reclamation, language revitalization, political engagement, seeking or maintaining paid labour, education and schooling, eating a balanced diet that for some comes with a hefty inflation, navigating reproduction pressures, being beautiful in beaded earrings, and all the while being fearful that you will be the target of gender-based colonial violence.
In a white settler society, “having it all” or appearing to have it all is a necessity for Indigenous cis- and trans women and non-binary people who must continually navigate encounters with police, social workers, nurses and doctors, teachers, and other state officials. Television shows like Girls or Broad City celebrate messy white women who make mistakes as they navigate extended adolescence. When Indigenous women are messy, police and social workers are dispatched. Giving the appearance of “togetherness” is a survival tactic, but it must not be confused with collective healing work.
Healing in the Legal Arena
Individual and collective healing is tricky for Indigenous peoples living under settler colonialism. This is particularly true in Canada where colonial violence is predominantly described as intergenerational trauma. Canada has a long history of pathologizing Indigenous peoples’ responses to state violence and oppression. By appropriating Indigenous peoples’ healing discourse, Canada seeks to undermine Indigenous peoples’ political authority.
Indigenous Studies scholar Dian Million considers the emergence of Canada’s Indian residential schools in public discourse from the late 1980s to describe the challenges of seeking political redress in Canadian and international justice forums that control the rhetoric of harm. She explains that Canadian justice mechanisms require Indigenous peoples to maintain a position of victimhood, which ultimately reinforces uneven power dynamics that both assert settler superiority and undermine Indigenous political authority and autonomy.
To be clear, the language of victimhood is a feature of Canada’s justice system and not Indigeneity. In order to participate in official justice processes and mechanisms, Indigenous survivors of residential school are compelled to assume an injured posture in order to provide testimony against Church and State. The question then becomes, “How can Canada help Indigenous peoples heal?,” thus bolstering Canada’s dominion over Indigenous peoples.
How do these collective matters trickle down to the individual? The collective pathologization of Indigenous peoples as broken and unable to cope undoubtedly informs individual self-perception. This can result in damage-centred beliefs like “there must be something inherently wrong with me” as opposed to something inherently wrong with this social order.
Toward a Collective Healing
It is important to wrest the topic of health and wellness from the grip of white wellness influencers so that we can renegotiate our relationships with these concepts. When examining health and wellness through a critical lens, the colonial underpinnings espousing white supremacist, anti-Indigenous ideologies are glaringly apparent.
Earlier I indicated a desire to cut my healing journey short. I don’t mean to suggest that health is cancelled. I am proposing a paradigm shift away from depoliticized, individualist constructions of health and wellness toward a collective healing grounded by land-based, liberationist frameworks. Jeffrey Ansloos has issued a similar call in his research on Indigenous suicide, urging for critical examinations into forms of colonial violence that make “life unliveable” while exploring “material practices which promote holistic wellbeing for and with Indigenous peoples.” In both calls, health and wellness are not possible without justice and liberation.
To be clear, a shift away from depoliticized, individualist health and wellness frameworks is not a move toward self-sacrifice or self-abandonment for the collective. Absolutely not. I will continue my personal health, wellness, and beauty practices. In moving toward a collective healing framework, I no longer view these practices as part of a self-improvement project in pursuit of optimization or perfection.
There is an intimacy between individual and collective health that is not so easily disentangled. And perhaps that’s for the best. Taking care of myself is necessary for community wellbeing and, conversely, collective care is crucial for my personal wellbeing.
