‘It is time to understand the history, the trauma that people bring to medical encounters’: first indigenous president-elect of the CMA

Article content

At the heart of reconciliation is taking responsibility for the unequal treatment of indigenous peoples and finding a new path, says Dr. Alika Lafontaine of Grande Prairie, the first indigenous president-elect of the Canadian Medical Association.

Article content

“(We need to) confront the idea that this is someone else’s problem. Health care is supposed to be designed to support people in the lowest stage of life, ”said Lafontaine, who is a Cree-Anishinaabe anesthesiologist at Queen Elizabeth II Hospital in Grande Prairie.

The devastating fourth wave of COVID-19 in Alberta offers an opportune moment for non-indigenous people to consider the disparities in health care financing that have abounded in indigenous communities for decades.

“Canadians are realizing that if you need medical care, you may not have it,” Lafontaine said. “The reality that people (now) don’t have surgery (and) can’t have routine follow-up with doctors really helps illustrate the First Nations experience, especially in remote communities.”

Article content

Reconciliation also means facing the reality of culture in doctor-patient relationships that Lafontaine describes as “hostile.”

“There have been indigenous patients who mentioned kidney or liver failure but said they didn’t drink alcohol and then they were questioned and told ‘you must have been drinking.’

“But because of the culture and what we have standardized in medicine, we project onto indigenous peoples what we think happened rather than what actually happened.”

Lafontaine cited a particularly tragic example of that culture in the case of Joyce Echaquan, a 37-year-old Atikamekw woman who recorded a video of hospital staff insulting her as she lay dying in a Quebec hospital in September 2020.

“We were all horrified by what people were saying to him. It’s easy to project onto those people who are inherently bad, but that person was in a system where they could do that, ”he said.

Article content

To dispel that culture, healthcare providers must learn about the history of colonization and the experiences of indigenous peoples in the medical system.

Many providers, Lafontaine said, do not know about the Charles Camsell Hospital in Edmonton, where patients with indigenous tuberculosis were treated. Former patients allege they were sexually abused and even subjected to medical experiments in the decades before the hospital closed in 1996.

“It is a myth that not knowing about the person in front of you is not necessary to provide good care. If we don’t take the time to understand the history and trauma that people bring to medical encounters as indigenous peoples, we will run into the same problems. “

Chief Tony Alexis of the Alexis Nakota Sioux Nation, about 85 km west of Edmonton, echoes Lafontaine’s sentiments about using September 30 as a day for all Canadians to learn.

Article content

Residential schools are gone, but their legacy remains in the “racist systems” that still oppress indigenous people, Alexis explained. He has written a letter to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to that effect.

“This oppression is felt by the scarce funding of schools in the reserves, the lack of clean water, the over-representation in prisons and as victims of violence; Willful misrepresentation in the media, lack of representation in all industries and at all levels of government; the foster care system (and) the lack of quality healthcare, ”Alexis writes to Trudeau.

“The government (of Justin Trudeau) has been voted in again with another promise of reconciliation and we want to see a real movement. What will your government do to appropriate the policies and laws that defend the racist systems that still exist today? “

[email protected]

Twitter.com/BlairMcBride