March 27, 2014
Treena Wasonti:io Delormier is a Kanienke’há:ka (Mohawk) woman from the Mohawk Territory of Kahnawá:ke. Her research is primarily community-based with Aboriginal communities and participatory. Dr. Delormier’s research interests include food, nutrition and health, social perspectives of food, indigenous research methodologies, qualitative methodologies, public health and health promotion, food security, traditional food systems, diabetes and obesity prevention, and aboriginal conceptions of health.
Over the past 18 years Dr. Delormier has been involved in multiple academic and community researcher roles with the Kahnawá:ke Schools Diabetes Prevention Project (KSDPP), a long-standing community/university partnership based in her home community, which received the Canadian Institutes of Health Research 2010 partnership award. Dr. Delormier was involved in developing the KSDPP Code of Research Ethics in 1994 which bases ethical research on traditional Mohawk decision making, which served as a model for ethical research with Aboriginal peoples in Canada.
Dr. Delormier has done research with the Eastern James Bay Cree in Northern Quebec studying changing traditional food use, and had done nutrition consulting. She recently returned from Tulita, where she assisted the Dene/Metis community in the Sahtu Northwest Territories in their dietary study to assess the risk of mercury exposure from fish consumption. Her current projects aim to translate community understandings of health issues to guide actions to support healthy lifestyles at the community level, and aim to use social perspectives and theories of food choice to better understand the experience of food insecurity at the family level.
Dr. Delormier holds a Bachelor’s degree in nutrition from McGill University and is a registered dietitian in Quebec. She completed her Master’s research in nutrition at McGill University’s Centre for Indigenous Peoples’ Nutrition and Environment (CINE). She has PhD in Public Health (Health Promotion) from Université de Montréal.
“In my research and professional work, I strive to use respectful approaches to building understandings and knowledge that will serve to support indigenous peoples’ goals for well-being now and for the future generations.”