- University of British Columbia, School of Population and Public Health, Faculty Memberadd
The premise of this article is that Aboriginal children in Canada cannot be extricated from Canada's colonial and colonizing history, nor can they be disentangled from the current socioeconomic conditions that dictate the everyday... more
The premise of this article is that Aboriginal children in Canada cannot be extricated from Canada's colonial and colonizing history, nor can they be disentangled from the current socioeconomic conditions that dictate the everyday realities of Aboriginal people. The authors argue that Aboriginal early childhood is a site of politicized potential for transformative change that may benefit communities and Nations.
In this article we discuss the interconnectivity of Indigenous people, their cultures, and ways of life with the land and the idea that the health and well-being of Indigenous children, their communities, and ultimately their Nations... more
In this article we discuss the interconnectivity of Indigenous people, their cultures, and ways of life with the land and the idea that the health and well-being of Indigenous children, their communities, and ultimately their Nations arise from their connection with the land and from a strength of culture that grows from this connectivity. We argue further that these connections, leading to a holistic understanding of health, are intrinsically linked to education.
This article critically engages the politics of inclusivity by exploring the respective advantages and disadvantages faced by Indigenous peoples as (predominantly non-Indigenous) academic institutions come to recognize the merits of... more
This article critically engages the politics of inclusivity by exploring the respective advantages and disadvantages faced by Indigenous peoples as (predominantly non-Indigenous) academic institutions come to recognize the merits of Indigenous knowledges and world views. Written in part from lived and personal experiences, we argue three specific points. First, there are certainly advantages for both Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples that result from increased inclusion of Indigenous peoples, voices, perspectives, and knowledges in the contexts of universities and postsecondary academic institutions. Second, whereas the academy has much to gain from the politics of inclusivity, Aboriginal peoples at both individual and community levels often have much to lose (or indeed have already lost a great deal) in the contours of the burgeoning relationship. Third, and by way of a conclusion, we propose a variety of suggestions to rectify what we perceive as a power imbalance between the academy and Indigenous peoples and knowledges operating therein.
Guided by feminist and community-based participatory methodologies and by efforts to decolonize health research practices, and undertaken with qualitative research methods (interviews, open-ended questionnaires, and analysis of arts-based... more
Guided by feminist and community-based participatory methodologies and by efforts to decolonize health research practices, and undertaken with qualitative research methods (interviews, open-ended questionnaires, and analysis of arts-based expressions like storytelling, journaling, and picture-making), this research identified challenges and barriers that (predominantly Aboriginal) women in northern British Columbia faced when trying to access sexual health care services related to HPV and cervical cancer screening. The research also examined the possible effectiveness of creative or arts-based strategies to promote cervical health and screening awareness among young and/or traditionally underserved or marginalized women. We review findings from data gathered over six months during multiple interactions with 22 women from a wide range of ethnic backgrounds. Results confirm that ethnicity, finances, and formal education are determinants in women's awareness about, access to, and use of cervical screening services, and that experiences of gendered victimization, feelings of disempowerment, and life circumstances all influenced women's comfort levels with, access to, and use of cervical cancer screening services.
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Colonial projects in Canada have a long history of violently intervening into the personal lives and social structures of Indigenous peoples. These interventions are associated with elevated rates of addictions and mental health issues... more
Colonial projects in Canada have a long history of violently intervening into the personal lives and social structures of Indigenous peoples. These interventions are associated with elevated rates of addictions and mental health issues among Indigenous peoples. In this paper we employ an indigenized social determinants approach to mental health and addictions that accounts for the multiple, intersecting effects of colonial discourse upon the health of Indigenous peoples, and particularly the health effects of colonial interventions into the lives of First Nations Indigenous children in Canada. We focus on both historic and contemporary discourses about Indigenous peoples as deviant, discourses that include particular ideas and assumptions held by government officials about Indigenous peoples, the series of policies, practices, and institutional structures developed to ‘address’ Indigenous deviance over time (including contemporary child protections systems), and their direct impact upon healthy child development and overall Indigenous health. From a discursive perspective, addictions and mental health issues among Indigenous peoples can be accounted for in relation to the ideas, policies, and practices that identify and aim to address these issues, something that the social determinants literature has yet to incorporate into its model.
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This is a paper about Alice Ravenhill, an under-scrutinized early twentieth-century colonial settler in British Columbia, Canada. It is also a paper about the relationship and deep connections that I developed with her through archival... more
This is a paper about Alice Ravenhill, an under-scrutinized early twentieth-century colonial settler in British Columbia, Canada. It is also a paper about the relationship and deep connections that I developed with her through archival research, a relationship and set of connections that I suggest open new spaces to (re)consider present-day colonial power in British Columbia. Specifically, I propose that ‘against the grain’ archival readings of BC’s past, with an emphasis on finding evidence of resistance to colonial power, can serve to distance the present from the past, thus positioning both contemporary geographies and researchers at work in the province today as existing in a different time and place than those of Alice Ravenhill and other colonial subjects. If, by reading ‘along the archival grain’ as I attempt to do in this paper, we (particularly those of us who live and work in BC today) instead understand ourselves as deeply and emotionally connected to colonial settlers like Alice Ravenhill, and if we understand their lives and work as similar to our own, there is a chance we might avoid some of their more egregious undertakings.► Discussion of Alice Ravenhill, twentieth-century advocate for ‘Indian’ rights in B.C. ► Critique of ‘against the grain’ reading methods and resistance theory. ► Documentation of colonial subjects’ contradictory, serendipitous, emotional work. ► Theorization of positionality & self-reflexivity in anti-racist, decolonizing research.
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Health disparities between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples persist globally. Northern interior British Columbia, where many Indigenous people live on Indian reserves allocated in the late nineteenth century, is no exception. This... more
Health disparities between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples persist globally. Northern interior British Columbia, where many Indigenous people live on Indian reserves allocated in the late nineteenth century, is no exception. This article reviews findings from fifty-eight interviews with members of thirteen First Nations communities in Carrier, Sekani, Wet'suwet’en, and Babine territories. The results suggest that colonial geographies, both physical and
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This is a paper about child-welfare regulations, policies, and practices as they impact Indigenous families and communities. I take as my starting point that child welfare, and geographies of Indigenous homes and families, are... more
This is a paper about child-welfare regulations, policies, and practices as they impact Indigenous families and communities. I take as my starting point that child welfare, and geographies of Indigenous homes and families, are under-scrutinized ontologies worthy of more investigation especially by geographers interested in understanding neo settler-colonial power – and how to unsettle it. I track historical logics of state intervention into Indigenous families through to the present day, reviewing the empirics of child removals and state interventions into contemporary Indigenous families in British Columbia, Canada. Curtailing the state’s ongoing disruption of Aboriginal families and communities, I conclude, requires understanding child welfare ontologically, as historically contiguous with other colonial projects, and as premised in great part on ungrounded logics of ‘common sense’ that (re)produce Indigenous families and communities as rarified and othered geographies in constant need of intervention.
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Research Interests: Rural Sociology, Human Geography, Cultural Geography, Historical Geography, Archaeology, and 9 moreHistorical Anthropology, Indigenous Studies, Historical Archaeology, Landscape Archaeology, Postcolonial Studies, Environmental History, Historical Ecology, Historical Studies, and Archaeology of Colonialism
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Available online at: https://www.novapublishers.com/catalog/product_info.php?products_id=22894. This paper argues that the health and wellbeing of Indigenous children, their communities, and ultimately their nations, arises from... more
Available online at: https://www.novapublishers.com/catalog/product_info.php?products_id=22894. This paper argues that the health and wellbeing of Indigenous children, their communities, and ultimately their nations, arises from connection with the land and from cultural strengths linked with this connectivity. We provide critical reflection on contemporary discussions about impacts that climate change will have on the social, ecological, cultural and historical determinants of health of Indigenous children in Canada. Our analysis highlights overlooked opportunities, perspectives and priorities that demand attention in order to prevent climate change from exacerbating the already unacceptable health inequities experienced by Aboriginal children across Canada.
Aboriginal children's well-being is vital to the health and success of our future nations. Addressing persistent and current Aboriginal health inequities requires considering both the contexts in which disparities exist and innovative... more
Aboriginal children's well-being is vital to the health and success of our future nations. Addressing persistent and current Aboriginal health inequities requires considering both the contexts in which disparities exist and innovative and culturally appropriate means of rectifying those inequities. The present article contextualizes Aboriginal children's health disparities, considers 'determinants' of health as opposed to biomedical explanations of ill health and concludes with ways to intervene in health inequities. Aboriginal children experience a greater burden of ill health compared with other children in Canada, and these health inequities have persisted for too long. A change that will impact individuals, communities and nations, a change that will last beyond seven generations, is required. Applying a social determinants of health framework to health inequities experienced by Aboriginal children can create that change.
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The subject of this paper is the production of creatively informed geographic knowledge as a means of under-standing place, specifically a small community in northwestern British Columbia. The paper reviews calls by geographers for the... more
The subject of this paper is the production of creatively informed geographic knowledge as a means of under-standing place, specifically a small community in northwestern British Columbia. The paper reviews calls by geographers for the creation of artistic geographic knowledge, considers strategies for achieving a synthesis of geographic and creative knowledge, and culminates in a personal narrative meditating on a community situated in northwestern British Columbia.Following D.W. Meinig’s (1983) appeal for geographers to become artists and S. Quoniam’s (1988) contemplation of how a landscape artist might be a geographer, I argue and demonstrate that literary practices and visual arts are more than sites from which to draw geographic information (Salter and Lloyd, 1977; Bunkse,1990) but are rather geographic practices unto them-selves.
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Although not fully conceptualized as such by geographers, children and concepts of childhood were focal points of colonialism. Well into the twentieth century, Aboriginal peoples in Canada were discursively constructed by colonists as... more
Although not fully conceptualized as such by geographers, children and concepts of childhood were focal points of colonialism. Well into the twentieth century, Aboriginal peoples in Canada were discursively constructed by colonists as child-like subjects in need of colonial intervention in order that they ‘grow up’ into de-Indigenized Canadian citizens. Further, an important aspect of the colonial project entailed confining
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Ongoing colonial violence, I argue in this paper, operates through geographies of Indigenous homes, families, and bodies that are too often overlooked in standard geographical accounts of colonialism. Contiguous with residential school... more
Ongoing colonial violence, I argue in this paper, operates through geographies of Indigenous homes, families, and bodies that are too often overlooked in standard geographical accounts of colonialism. Contiguous with residential school violence and other micro-scale efforts to eliminate Indigenous peoples, colonial power continues to assert itself profoundly through intervention into and disruption of intimate, ‘tender’ (Stoler, 2006), embodied, ‘visceral’ (Hayes-Conroy & Hayes-Conroy 2008; Hayes-Conroy and Hayes-Conroy 2010), and biopolitical (Morgensen, 2011a) geographies of Indigenous women and children. Drawing on feminist and decolonizing theories, along with the concept of ‘slow violence’ (Nixon, 2011), I offer in this paper a grounded account of spatial forms of governmentality in ongoing colonial relations in British Columbia, Canada. I critique dominant geographic inquires into colonialism as being primarily about land, natural resources, and territory. These inquiries, I suggest, risk perpetuating colonial violence in their erasure of Indigenous women and children's ontologies, positing this violence as something ‘out there’ as opposed to an ever-present presence that all settler colonists are implicated in.
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"Unequal access to health care is a problem in Canada much studied by journalists, academics, and policy makers. There is a growing recognition that existing theories on, and approaches to, health inequities are limited in their ability... more
"Unequal access to health care is a problem in Canada much studied by journalists, academics, and policy makers. There is a growing recognition that existing theories on, and approaches to, health inequities are limited in their ability to capture how these inequities are produced through changing, co-constituted, and intersecting effects of multiple forms of oppression. Intersectionality offers itself as a research paradigm capturing the complexities of illness and care, and this volume brings together Canadian activists, community-based researchers, and scholars from a range of disciplines to apply interpretations of intersectionality to cases in Indigenous health, mental health, migration health, community health, and organizational governance. By addressing specific health issues including cardiovascular disease, dementia, post-traumatic stress disorder, diabetes, and violence, this book advances methodological applications of intersectionality in health research, policy, and practice. The authors ultimately reveal how multiple variables are influencing health and healing in Canada -- not simply race, class, and gender but also age, religion, geography and place, and the state of the economy."--Publisher's description.
The format of this small anthology is striking: 34 brief, personal essays mostly by academics from MIT or Harvard, each framed by a short theoretical text. For her framing texts, Turkle, a self-proclaimed bricoleur, draws upon... more
The format of this small anthology is striking: 34 brief, personal essays mostly by academics from MIT or Harvard, each framed by a short theoretical text. For her framing texts, Turkle, a self-proclaimed bricoleur, draws upon representatives of philosophy, old and new; psychology; ...
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Apres plus d’une demi-decennie en preparation, le rapport final de la Commission de verite et reconciliation du Canada a ete rendu public en decembre de l’annee derniere. L’ensemble du rapport compte des milliers de pages, pese plus de 10... more
Apres plus d’une demi-decennie en preparation, le rapport final de la Commission de verite et reconciliation du Canada a ete rendu public en decembre de l’annee derniere. L’ensemble du rapport compte des milliers de pages, pese plus de 10 kilos et relate les histoires et les te
Research Interests: Humanities and Art
L e 25 mars 2016 marquait pour de nombreux Canadiens la celebration du Vendredi saint, quoique ce ne soit pas le cas pour nous tous. Mais ce l’etait sur le calendrier du Dr Bob Henderson. C’est une journee ou des gens de partout dans le... more
L e 25 mars 2016 marquait pour de nombreux Canadiens la celebration du Vendredi saint, quoique ce ne soit pas le cas pour nous tous. Mais ce l’etait sur le calendrier du Dr Bob Henderson. C’est une journee ou des gens de partout dans le monde reflechissent a la puissance transformatrice de la mort et du mourir. Ce Vendredi saint en particulier, autour de midi, Cathy, la conjointe du Dr Henderson, l’appelle depuis la Maison Bridge, un centre residentiel de soins palliatifs a Warkworth, en Ontario, une communaute rurale situee a environ 1 heure a l’est de Toronto. Cathy a faim parce qu’elle ne s’est pas prepare de repas avant de partir pour son quart de benevolat a la maison de soins palliatifs. Les quelques restaurants dans cette region majoritairement rurale sont fermes en ce jour ferie. Bob est sensible aux besoins de son epouse; il va devoir bientot arreter son entrevue au sujet de la maison de soins pour prendre soin d’une personne qu’il aime et qui travaille de fait dans ce cent...
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Quelque part dans un coin isole de la plage, le long du basin Minas en Nouvelle-Ecosse, vous trouverez probablement le Dr Michael Cussen qui apprend par cœur un poeme. Apres avoir recite tout haut le poeme pour lui-meme et pour les... more
Quelque part dans un coin isole de la plage, le long du basin Minas en Nouvelle-Ecosse, vous trouverez probablement le Dr Michael Cussen qui apprend par cœur un poeme. Apres avoir recite tout haut le poeme pour lui-meme et pour les vagues, a peaufiner sa memoire et son intonation, il
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Geographers have long reflected on our discipline's colonial history. Both Indigenous and non‐Indigenous geographers have discussed ways of engaging Indigenous geographies and sought new ways of opening and expanding spaces for... more
Geographers have long reflected on our discipline's colonial history. Both Indigenous and non‐Indigenous geographers have discussed ways of engaging Indigenous geographies and sought new ways of opening and expanding spaces for Indigenous peoples and Indigenous ways of knowing and being in our discipline. Like many social scientists, geographers name and frame this work in different ways; of late, decolonizing concepts and practices are increasingly deployed. As documented by especially Indigenous scholars, however, the discipline has yet to achieve much semblance of decolonization. This paper takes as a starting point that, despite good intentions, efforts at decolonizing geography are inherently limited because colonization continues to structure the field of geography and the academy more broadly. We begin by placing ourselves in conversations about Indigenous geographies and colonial violence, using this placement as a jumping off point for discussing ways geographers past a...
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Research Interests: Geography and Colonialism
Mental health service users experience high rates of cardiometabolic disorders and have a 20-25% shorter life expectancy than the general population from such disorders. Clinician-led health behavior programs have shown moderate... more
Mental health service users experience high rates of cardiometabolic disorders and have a 20-25% shorter life expectancy than the general population from such disorders. Clinician-led health behavior programs have shown moderate improvements, for mental health service users, in managing aspects of cardiometabolic disorders. This study sought to potentially enhance health initiatives by exploring (1) facilitators that help mental health service users engage in better health behaviors and (2) the types of health programs mental health service users want to develop. A qualitative study utilizing focus groups was conducted with 37 mental health service users attending a psychosocial rehabilitation center, in Northern British Columbia, Canada. Four major facilitator themes were identified: (1) factors of empowerment, self-value, and personal growth; (2) the need for social support; (3) pragmatic aspects of motivation and planning; and (4) access. Participants believed that engaging with ...
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Rural, remote, northern, and Indigenous communities on Turtle Island are routinely—as Cree Elder Willie Ermine says—pathologized. Social science and health scholarship, including scholarship by geographers, often constructs Indigenous... more
Rural, remote, northern, and Indigenous communities on Turtle Island are routinely—as Cree Elder Willie Ermine says—pathologized. Social science and health scholarship, including scholarship by geographers, often constructs Indigenous human and physical geographies as unhealthy, diseased, vulnerable, and undergoing extraction. These constructions are not inaccurate: peoples and places beyond urban metropoles on Turtle Island live with higher burdens of poor health; Indigenous peoples face systemic violence and racism in colonial landscapes; rural, remote, northern, and Indigenous geographies are sites of industrial incursions; and many rural and remote geographies remain challenging for diverse Indigenous peoples. What, however, are the consequences of imagining and constructing people and places as “sick”? Constructions of “sick” geographies fulfill and extend settler (often European white) colonial narratives about othered geographies. Rural, remote, northern, and Indigenous geographies are discursively “mined” for narratives of sickness. This mining upholds a sense of health and wellness in southern, urban, Euro‐white‐settler imaginations. Drawing from multi‐year, relationship‐based, cross‐disciplinary qualitative community‐informed experiences, and anchored in feminist, anti‐colonial, and anti‐racist methodologies that guided creative and humanities‐informed stories, this paper concludes with different stories. It unsettles settler‐colonial powers reliant on constructing narratives about sickness in others and consequently reframes conversations about Indigenous well‐being and the environment.
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Dr Daniel Boudreau’s golden Lab spent a lot of time barking the other night. So Dan thought that whatever was in his yard must be being kept at bay. When he woke up the next morning, however, it was clear the barking hadn’t done much... more
Dr Daniel Boudreau’s golden Lab spent a lot of time barking the other night. So Dan thought that whatever was in his yard must be being kept at bay. When he woke up the next morning, however, it was clear the barking hadn’t done much good. All Dan’s delicious Nova Scotia Honeycrisp apples
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Dr Daniel Boudreau’s golden Lab spent a lot of time barking the other night. So Dan thought that whatever was in his yard must be being kept at bay. When he woke up the next morning, however, it was clear the barking hadn’t done much... more
Dr Daniel Boudreau’s golden Lab spent a lot of time barking the other night. So Dan thought that whatever was in his yard must be being kept at bay. When he woke up the next morning, however, it was clear the barking hadn’t done much good. All Dan’s delicious Nova Scotia Honeycrisp apples
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You let us die here,” a resident of the isolated Bella Bella community in remote British Columbia once said to Dr Stuart Iglesias, “but you don’t let us be born here.” This short statement, made not so long ago to rural family physician... more
You let us die here,” a resident of the isolated Bella Bella community in remote British Columbia once said to Dr Stuart Iglesias, “but you don’t let us be born here.” This short statement, made not so long ago to rural family physician Iglesias, who is also an economist by early training,
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The subject of this paper is the production of creatively informed geographic knowledge as a means of understanding place, specifically a small community in northwestern British Columbia. The paper reviews calls by geographers for the... more
The subject of this paper is the production of creatively informed geographic knowledge as a means of understanding place, specifically a small community in northwestern British Columbia. The paper reviews calls by geographers for the creation of artistic geographic knowledge, considers strategies for achieving a synthesis of geographic and creative knowledge, and culminates in a personal narrative meditating on a community situated in northwestern British Columbia. Following D.W. Meinig’s (1983) appeal for geographers to become artists and S. Quoniam’s (1988) contemplation of how a landscape artist might be a geographer, I argue and demonstrate that literary practices and visual arts are more than sites from which to draw geographic information (Salter and Lloyd, 1977; Bunkse, 1990) but are rather geographic practices unto themselves.
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Legs swung up. Over. Stretching, bending. Behind the head. A torso curving so gracefully it’s almost more than human. The contortion, highlighted with deep red backlighting, is made all the more surreal by the strange clown figure (a... more
Legs swung up. Over. Stretching, bending. Behind the head. A torso curving so gracefully it’s almost more than human. The contortion, highlighted with deep red backlighting, is made all the more surreal by the strange clown figure (a nurse? a resident?) resting, prone, behind the arching “
Research Interests: Creativity and Medicine
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Well-documented disparities in health status persist between Indigenous and non- Indigenous people in Canada. Medical schools have a responsibility to address underlying causes of these inequities, in part by developing future physicians’... more
Well-documented disparities in health status persist between Indigenous and non- Indigenous people in Canada. Medical schools have a responsibility to address underlying causes of these inequities, in part by developing future physicians’ cultural humility and their capacities in cultural safety by increasing critical anti- racism knowledge and understandings about First Nations, Inuit, and Métis Peoples. Undergraduate medical education relies heavily on, among other pedagogies, experiential learning. Moreover, a growing body of research is evidencing the value of applying humanities-informed approaches to medical education in order to produce “better doctors” (i.e., physicians who are more empathetic, compassionate, and attuned to wholistic orientations to patient wellness). The combined impact of these two approaches (experiential learning and humanities-informed pedagogies) on medical students’ development of cultural humility and capacities in cultural safety with Indigenous Pe...