About
Meena (Minosa’ins) is a citizen of the Haliwa-Saponi Tribe and of Indo-Fijian descent. She holds an MPH with a focus on community health education from Bastyr University and an MS and PhD in prevention science from Washington State University. She collaborates with urban and reservation-based Indigenous communities, government entities, and grassroots organizations to advance health promotion through decolonial praxis and Indigenous informed systems of care. Her research focuses on various behavioral health outcomes with a specific focus on trauma transmission prevention by centering kinship systems, caregiver-child relationships, traditional healing modalities, and protective socio-ecological factors to offer culturally grounded, community- and strength-based prevention and intervention strategies.
She has been guided by her lived experience, and that of her broader community, family, and our more than human relatives, to uplift land- and water-based practices, reflexivity, multi-ethnic identity, and cultural strengths as the focal point of health promotion and advancements in research methodologies. She is also a practicing community herbalist and is based in Portland, OR.
