TRC Call to Action 18
We call upon the federal, provincial, territorial, and Aboriginal governments to acknowledge that the current state of Aboriginal health in Canada is a direct result of previous Canadian government policies, including residential schools, and to recognize and implement the health-care rights of Aboriginal people as identified in international law, constitutional law, and under the Treaties (TRC, 2015a, p. 2).
Intergenerational/Historic Trauma
Aboriginal peoples' experiences are rooted in multigenerational, cumulative, and chronic trauma, injustices, and oppression. The effects of trauma can reverberate through individuals, families, communities and entire populations, resulting in a legacy of physical, psychological, and economic disparities that persist across generations.
From Aboriginal Peoples and Historic Trauma: The process of intergenerational transmission.
Content advisory
The content in this section of the research guide may trigger unpleasant feelings or thoughts of past abuse. This information is intended to acknowledge the history of medical colonialism and continued presence of culturally unsafe care that exists in the health system, and begin the process of addressing it.
The Indian Residential School History and Dialogue Centre has collected healing and wellness resources for residential school survivors and family members, Indigenous peoples and community members, students, and UBC faculty and staff. Please use these resources and strategies for care if they are needed.
Colonialism and Indigenous Health
"Recent reports draw attention to racism’s prevalence within the healthcare system. Examples, like the stories of Brian Sinclair who, in 2008, died in the waiting room of Winnipeg’s Health Sciences Centre after waiting 34 h to be seen for a treatable illness, which would have required a fairly minute procedure [36], and the many women in Saskatchewan who received tubal ligations without their consent, are examples of blatant racism against Indigenous peoples and are numerous [37]. Understanding effects of racism on health behaviours requires an understanding of the history of intergenerational trauma caused by the residential school system with what Boyer called “it’s myriad tentacles of physical and sexual abuse” [38] and other policies rooted in colonialism. History has established a platform upon which a substantial power imbalance between healthcare providers and First Nation patients may persist."
Phillips-Beck et. al. (2020). "Confronting Racism within the Canadian Healthcare System: Systemic Exclusion of First Nations from Quality and Consistent Care."
Indigenous Health History & Colonialism
- Starvation, Experimentation, Segregation, and Trauma: Words for Reading Indigenous Health HistoryThis article discusses the most important recent contributions in the field of Indigenous health history. This scholarship implicates health and medicine in the complicated work of the long and continuing project of colonization and the building of a white settler nation in Canada.
Colonizing Bodies: Aboriginal Health and Healing in British Columbia, 1900-50 by Call Number: SAA K45 C36 1998ISBN: 9780774852333Publication Date: 1998Kelm begins by exploring the ways in which Aboriginal bodies were materially affected by Canadian Indian policy, which placed restrictions on fishing and hunting, allocated inadequate reserves, forced children into unhealthy residential schools, and criminalized indigenous healing. Kelm reveals how Aboriginal people were able to resist and alter these forces in order to preserve their own cultural understanding of their bodies, disease, and medicine.
Inventing the Thrifty Gene by ISBN: 9780887559402Publication Date: 2021Though First Nations communities in Canada have historically lacked access to clean water, affordable food, and equitable healthcare, they have never lacked access to well-funded scientists seeking to study them. Inventing the Thrifty Gene exposes the exploitative nature of settler science with Indigenous subjects, the flawed scientific theories stemming from faulty assumptions of Indigenous decline and disappearance, as well as the severe inequities in Canadian healthcare that persist even today.
Medicine unbundled : a journey through the minefields of Indigenous health care by ISBN: 9781772031645Publication Date: 2017An investigative exploration of the separate "Indian hospitals" that existed in Canada for many decades, told through memoir, archival research, and interviews with survivors.
Moving aboriginal health forward : discarding Canada's legal barriers by Call Number: SA B69 M68 2014ISBN: 9781895830798Publication Date: 2014A historical examination of Canadian legal regimes and the negative impact they have had on the health of Aboriginal peoples.
Revenge of the windigo : the construction of the mind and mental health of North American Aboriginal peoples by Call Number: SP W35 R48 2004ISBN: 9780802086006Publication Date: 2004James Waldram looks at conceptual knowledge of Aboriginal mental health: its form and substance, its construction and dissemination, and its implications for Aboriginal peoples. Waldram shows how three disciplines--anthropology, psychology, and psychiatry--have together constructed a profoundly distorted portrait of Aboriginal peoples, based on a tangled web of theory, method, and data rife with conceptual problems, shaky assumptions, and inappropriate generalizations.
