Louis Busch: weaving knowledge to heal and teach differently   

When Louis Busch saw the job posting for his current position, “it was like being hit by a lightning bolt,” he says. “I got really excited at the prospect of working with these great minds across a variety of disciplines to incorporate Indigenous perspectives in a way that could be beneficial for those disciplines and beneficial for Indigenous people.” 

Mr. Busch started in the position of special projects officer, Indigenous curriculum and pedagogies, at the University of Toronto Mississauga’s Robert Gillespie Academic Skills Centre in January 2025. He works with faculty to develop and adapt courses and content with Indigenous approaches or Indigenous histories relevant to their field, while also trying to foster broader institutional change to integrate Indigenous perspectives in university teaching and learning. 

A registered psychotherapist and board certified behaviour analyst, Mr. Busch has over two decades of experience in mental health. He is also a doctoral student in the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education’s adult education and community development program, where he is a Vanier Scholar and was awarded the 2024 Talent Award from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. He says his original training was very quantitative – “evidence-based practice is the word that we love in the mental health world” – but he experienced a turning point that shifted his approach: his own experience with mental health struggles. 

“Many Indigenous people or First Nations people understand that our communities are filled with constant loss and constant unresolved grief, and this impact of intergenerational trauma is very real,” he says. In his 20s, he had his first real panic attack. “I did the whole classic ‘I think I’m dying’,” he says. “I knew that people who had panic disorders immediately think they’re having a heart attack. They try to find a medical explanation. They refuse to believe that this could possibly be psychological.” Despite knowing this, he followed the same path and went about trying to “cure himself in the most scientific way possible,” he says. While there was some benefit to this approach, the anxiety continued to occupy him and he decided to look elsewhere. 

A Bear Clan member of Nisichawayasihk Cree Nation, a community in northern Manitoba, Mr. Busch was well connected to cultural practice when he was young. However, after suffering intense racism during his teenage years in Saskatchewan, he says he had distanced himself from his Indigeneity. For years, his mother and other relatives encouraged him to attend Sundance, one of their most important ceremonies. “When I started to really struggle with my own mental wellness and I wasn’t finding answers anywhere, I thought, well, what the hell?” and “the first time I attended Sundance was just a radical change in my perspective,” he says. 

He says that he doesn’t think that healing within First Nations communities will come from external mental health systems. “I think it will come from the development of the natural helping systems that are already there,” he says. Western institutions not only fail to acknowledge these systems, he says, but they actively suppress them. “There’s so much potential for those resources to be leveraged in a way that could be really meaningful.” 

He became interested in the idea of helpers and helping work in all forms, “whether it’s a mental health professional, an elder, a knowledge keeper, a traditional practitioner, a natural helper in community,” he says. They don’t all have a designated role, but they’re seen by the community as leaders and as helpers. His doctoral research reflects this, and he hopes to articulate the conceptual, practical and relational aspects of helping work as described by Indigenous helpers. He has been visiting communities in Ontario, Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta, focusing on Cree helpers. “My hope is that by developing a coherent theory of helping work it could be applied in the development of culturally relevant mental health practices,” he says. 

Mr. Busch’s doctoral supervisor Jennifer Wemigwans says that his grounding in Indigenous knowledge has enabled him to “take that paradigm and use it in the health field – in a colonial field and space but bring in this diverse knowledge.” By doing that, he is “really shaking up and creating a new space in health research, in health in the community and in health resources,” she says. “I really feel that it’s important that we start to honor and acknowledge Indigenous knowledge within its own right and start to say how this is a valuable contribution in these spaces,” says Dr. Wemigwans. 

In his new position, Mr. Busch has the opportunity to extend his impact across a range of disciplines. He says he is hoping to take “a teach-a-man-to-fish approach” to the role, where faculty work with communities to develop resources and materials that could be used on an ongoing basis. “There’s a finite amount of knowledge resources in community,” he says. “It’s a bit challenging for institutions to rely fully on Indigenous knowledge keepers, elders, scholars, researchers, to do the work of indigenization, decolonization, reconciliation, etc.” An important part of his role will be supporting faculty to do some of that work in a way that is informed by communities and is Indigenous-led, but that it isn’t a brain drain on the communities.  

One of Mr. Busch’s first projects has been working on a workshop on the terminology associated with Indigenous pedagogies. “We throw these words around – indigenization, decolonization, resurgence, reconciliation – and there is a lot of discussion on all of those terms,” he says. He is working on a resource for faculty that would discuss these terms, their meaning, considerations, controversies and their practical application. He is also conducting an environmental scan of Canadian universities to see what others are doing on Indigenous pedagogy and curriculum development. “I know that there are some folks out there, Indigenous scholars that are just doing some really incredible groundbreaking work in this area and I’m really eager to learn from them.” 

Mr. Busch says both of his parents are lifelong helpers and he has always felt a sense of responsibility to give back to community. “I’m also a Bear Clan member,” he says, “and in this clan system, there is a kinship responsibility.” Each clan has different responsibilities to community, such as leadership or education. “Bears have their nose to the ground and are always sniffing out the different medicines,” he says. “The idea is that the Bear Clan are kind of the carriers of medicine. They’re like the helpers and healers. I take that responsibility seriously and I try to align my values with those kinship responsibilities.”