IMAGE BY: ELLA THOMAS
NationTalk: The Queen’s University Journal – The declining life spans of the Indigenous community is a cry for Canadian healthcare systems to change their ways. However, their solution is a bit too simplistic for an issue that runs generations deep.
The British Columbia First Nations Health Authority recently reported a six-year drop in life expectancies of Indigenous people, between 2017 and 2021, totalling a staggering 15.3 years less than non-Indigenous individuals in the province.
The quality of life for a community depends a lot on the quality of healthcare they’re receiving, so given the stark absence of Indigenous healthcare providers in our current healthcare system, it’s easy to correlate the two. Instead of filling the void by pushing more Indigenous professionals into a predominantly white field, Canada should question its own role in perpetuating their absence.
The desire to see more Indigenous people as healthcare providers and high-level decision-makers stems from distrust for Canadian healthcare and its practitioners. Canada’s medical system is indeed a product of Eurocentric, colonial practices that are steeped in a history of discrimination and oppression. As with other members of marginalized communities, the Indigenous patients’ health concerns haven’t and aren’t being treated with equal severity by Canadian healthcare providers. When patients receive incomprehensive care or get dismissed, they turn to their own community.
What we need is proper education across the board. Rather than appointing Indigenous members to be the only ones responsible for implementing their healthcare practices, current Canadian medical professionals, especially aspiring ones, must undergo ethics training and education concerning traditional Indigenous practices. It shouldn’t take a single Indigenous doctor within a flawed system for their community to receive adequate healthcare—any professionally trained doctor should provide this promise.
Canada can drive up the numbers of Indigenous representation all they want, but the same issues coming from entrenched discrimination and cycles of oppression will persist. It’s almost naive to suggest more representation in the medical field will resolve the Indigenous quality of life crisis.
No longer can Canada stay ignorant to the barriers faced by the Indigenous community—ongoing barriers like racism, poverty, addiction, and lack of access to resources, will impact their ability to pursue higher education, let alone a career in healthcare. The problem won’t end there, especially when medical institutions have always worked against the Indigenous community’s needs, values, and beliefs.
Yes, our healthcare system is in urgent need of more Indigenous representation. But this remains an idealistic outcome until all Canadians take responsibility for this problem and express interest in tackling the systems that still hinder Indigenous communities from accessing better healthcare.
Indigenous representation in Canadian healthcare systems must be welcomed through a thorough re-working of policies and the whole healthcare system, not used to an end.
—Journal Editorial Board