Thank you.
We've seen through our work with the mental wellness teams that there has been a lot of effort to give people access to cultural teachings and cultural activities.
We've seen a shift to being able to have people go on medicine walks. People can stay in their homes and watch somebody do a medicine walk, or they're able to organize and say, “We're going on a medicine walk today and we need you to go to this part of the community and look for these types of medicines.” Everybody is given an opportunity to pick the medicines and to come home, harvest them and move them into a tea or something that can help with health and wellness.
We've also seen that mental wellness teams have gone out and picked the medicines, dropped them at people's doors and then helped them to harvest them. Getting people on the land to harvest and to look for things, and then helping them to learn some cultural teachings around that, has been really helpful.
We've also seen that mental wellness teams have encouraged people to go outside and do cultural practices. For example, one community talked about having people go out on their front steps at certain times of the day with their drums and sound the drums and, if they wanted to, to sing. They talked about how sounding the drums was really soothing and supportive to people. It made them feel safe and helped them to feel connected to other people in the community when they were feeling disconnected.