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

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: Historical trauma; Indigenous communities; Mental health; Resilience; Survivance.