For many years now NAIITS has been exploring topics of interest and concern to a wide variety of people engaged within the wider Indigenous community. At each symposium there have been clear articulations of the landscape in which we found ourselves, and there have been cutting edge insights about how we might more effectively engage as Indigenous people within our communities and with those from other socio-cultural backgrounds and contexts.

Our focus this year will be on the overall health and well being of human beings with themselves, their Creator/Restorer, one another, the land, and the rest of the creation of which we are a part. Presentations will describe a holistic and Asset-based, or non-disease based approach to dealing with historic and intergenerational trauma.

Of particular interest will be how the interplay of a theology that shifts its starting points and practice from a deficit framework to an asset-based one might transform our understanding of the human community environment, the practical issues of social context, and relationships with the living creation of which humanity is a part.