Chantelle Richmond, FRSC

Dr. Chantelle Richmond is a First Nation scholar who has trained primarily in health geography. Both from a personal and academic perspective, she is deeply concerned with the current health and social inequalities endured by Indigenous Canadians, and the contributions of environmental change to these realities. Dr. Richmond completed her undergraduate and master’s degrees at McMaster University, and her PhD at McGill University.

Her research draws from various methods to examine the social and environmental determinants of Indigenous health, and to better understand the dimensions linking health and place among Indigenous peoples in Canada and around the world. Dr. Richmond has research interests in the ways that social, environmental, economic and political processes – broadly defined — work to affect the environments within which Indigenous peoples live. She is particularly interested in understanding how these environments shape access to, and the quality of, social determinants of Indigenous health.

Dr. Richmond has two on-going community-based projects with First Nation communities in Ontario. The first is a CIHR-funded project designed to preserve local Indigenous knowledge among Anishinabe youth and elders on Northern Lake Superior. The objective of the project is to create multiple sites of knowledge transfer between elders, youth, community collaborators and university partners to preserve local knowledge and use it in tangible ways to protect local environments and improve health. The second project, funded by the Heart & Stoke Foundation of Ontario, seeks to describe dietary patterns and better understand the social determinants of food choice among First Nation people in London and at a nearby reserve. This project is a collaborative effort of university partners (Western, Toronto) and dietitians and other staff at the Southwest Ontario Aboriginal Health Access Centre (SOAHAC).

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