For generations, the Nlaka’pamux people have turned to ceremony, story, medicine, and land to care for our bodies, minds, and spirits. We’re not reinventing health care - we’re reconnecting to what always worked.
Tradition Is Not Separate from Healthcare
Healing isn’t new to our Nation. Traditional healing and wellness are central to how we serve the community. We believe care should feel like home. That means making space for teachings, for Elders, for the land, and for every part of our identity that colonial systems tried to separate from health. Too often, traditional ways have been treated as “alternative” or “non-medical.” At NHSS, we reject that thinking. Traditional healing is essential. It’s part of how we prevent illness, how we recover from hardship, and how we stay connected during life’s hardest moments.
That’s why we continue to:
- Work with Elders and knowledge holders to guide programs and services
- Include teachings, language, and spirituality where appropriate in service delivery
- Ensure clients have access to both traditional and Western approaches, without choosing one over the other
- Support cultural camps, gatherings, and ceremony as part of wellness care
Our aim is not to blend the two systems but to honour both and give clients the choice and support to access what they need.
Spaces That Make Room for Ceremony
A clinic isn’t the only place where healing happens. NHSS is building flexibility into its infrastructure planning so that traditional healing can happen where it feels right, whether that’s in a gathering circle, on the land, or in someone’s home.
Future infrastructure planning includes:
- Private rooms for confidential ceremony and spiritual care
- Community space for Elder-led programs, circles, or teachings
- GRoom for growth utilizing traditional food and medicine practices
- Outdoor spaces designed to host cultural gatherings and healing work
Healing doesn’t always need equipment. Sometimes it just needs space—and someone to hold it with care.
Wellness Through Language, Story, and Land
Traditional healing is about more than medicine. It’s about reconnecting with the relationships that sustain us: to family, to story, to the land, to community, and to ourselves. Our traditional wellness efforts are shaped around:
Land-based activities that promote mental, physical, and spiritual health.
Language reclamation as part of healing identity.
Food and medicine knowledge passed down through generations.
Storytelling and circle work that help people process grief, trauma, and disconnection.
Many of these practices are already being delivered in partnership with other NHSS programs, especially youth support, home care, and mental health services. Wherever we can braid them in, we do.
Guided by Elders, Shaped by the Community
None of this work happens in isolation. NHSS is taking clear steps to elevate traditional knowledge through leadership and structure, including:
- Our Community members, traditional teachings, and our employeess
- Including cultural advisors in planning, training, and evaluation
- Offering traditional knowledge opportunities to new staff and youth
- Listening closely to community members about what healing means to them
We don’t decide what tradition looks like—we ask. And that’s how it stays alive.
Healing is a Responsibility
This isn’t a trend. It’s not a line in the budget or a checkbox on a grant. Supporting traditional healing is our responsibility—because healing is already in the Nation. Our job is to make sure it’s honoured, resourced, and protected. We will keep making room for it. In our buildings. In our budgets. In our staff training. And most importantly, in our hearts and schedules. Because real care starts by remembering who we are.