The Urban Indigenous Community

In the third episode of the Creating Communities of Care Podcast, we learn more about the Urban Indigenous experience, how being separated from community can impact an individual, and one program in particular that is reuniting Indigenous women with their culture. 

The Mi’kmaq Native Friendship Centre has been a fixture in Kjipuktuk (also called Halifax) for decades, serving the Urban Indigenous community in a myriad of ways. From childcare to housing, to cultural services and everything in between, the Friendship Centre provides it all to status and non-status members of the community. In this episode, we explore how building relationships and reinforcing culture can provide a path to healing and prosperity. 

What is Creating Communities of Care?

In an effort to address the barriers and gaps in care experienced by African Nova Scotian and Urban Indigenous women in Kjipuktuk (Halifax, Nova Scotia), four organizations banded together to provide culturally-specific programming to address the issue of gender-based violence as it appears in these two communities.

Inspired by Indigenous customary law and Afrocentricity, these programs aim to address the failures of our inherited colonial systems by connecting women with other members of their community in spaces where their culture is integrated into the care they receive. Although this project has seen huge successes so far, but there is still much to learn, and much more work to do.