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Beyond resilience: A scoping review of Indigenous survivance in the health literature

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 July 2023

Rachel E. Wilbur Open the ORCID record for Rachel E. Wilbur [Opens in a new window]  and
Joseph P. Gone Open the ORCID record for Joseph P. Gone [Opens in a new window]
Rachel E. Wilbur*
Affiliation:
Department of Global Health and Social Medicine, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA
Joseph P. Gone
Affiliation:
Department of Global Health and Social Medicine, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA Department of Anthropology, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA
*
Corresponding author: R. E. Wilbur; Email: rachel.elizabeth.wilbur@gmail.com
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Abstract

Health inequity scholars, particularly those engaged with questions of structural and systemic racism, are increasingly vocal about the limitations of “resilience.” This is true for Indigenous health scholars, who have pushed back against resilience as a descriptor of modern Indigeneity and who are increasingly using the term survivance. Given the growing frequency of survivance in relation to health, we performed a scoping review to understand how survivance is being applied in health scholarship, with a particular interest in its relationship to resilience. Results from 32 papers indicate that health scholars are employing survivance in relation to narrative, temporality, community, decolonization, and sovereignty, with varying degrees of adherence to the term’s original conception. Overwhelmingly, authors employed survivance in relation to historical trauma, leading us to propose the analogy: as resilience is to trauma, so survivance is to historical trauma. There may be value in further operationalizing survivance for health research and practice through the development of a unified definition and measurement tool, ensuring comparability across studies and supporting future strengths-based Indigenous health research and practice.

Keywords

SurvivanceIndigenous communitiesHistorical traumaResilienceMental health
Type
Special Issue Article
Information
Development and Psychopathology , Volume 35 , Issue 5: Special Issue: Resilience in Development: Pathways to Multisystem Integration , December 2023 , pp. 2226 - 2240
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Copyright
© The Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press

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