The COVID-19 Pandemic: Challenges and Needs Experienced by Indigenous People in Urban Areas

The world was caught off guard by the swift spread of the COVID19 pandemic at the beginning of 2020. For vulnerable populations such as the urban Indigenous, the first wave of the pandemic was even more challenging, for multiple reasons. Because many of their usual culturally safe services were interrupted, they found themselves struggling on different levels. Our team conducted a needs assessment to shed light on how urban Indigenous people living in the Saugenay-Lac-Saint-Jean region in the province of Quebec, Canada, dealt with this situation, and what holistic health services they most wished they could have relied on. To respect Indigenous culture, data collection was completed through sharing circles in addition to a web-based survey. The results indicated that participants experienced anxiety and psychological distress during the pandemic. They identified unmet needs related to family services, support in homeschooling, access to traditional medicine, and spiritual and cultural practices, among others. Future work should involve the implementation of culturally safe services, adapted to the pandemic era, for Indigenous people living in urban areas.