'Time to understand the history, trauma that people bring to medical encounters': First-ever Indigenous CMA president-elect

Article content

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

Article content

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

Alberta’s devastating fourth wave of COVID-19 offers an opportune time for non-Indigenous people to consider health care funding disparities rife in Indigenous communities for decades.

“Canadians are realizing that if you need health care it might not be there,” Lafontaine said. “The reality that people (now) aren’t getting surgeries (and) they can’t have routine follow-ups with doctors, really helps illustrate the lived experience of First Nations, especially in remote communities.”

Article content

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

“There have been Indigenous patients mentioning kidney or liver failure but saying they don’t drink alcohol and then being interrogated and told ‘you must have been drinking.’

“But because of the culture and what we’ve normalized in medicine we project onto Indigenous peoples what we think has happened instead of 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 shot a video of hospital staff insulting her as she lay dying in a Quebec hospital in September 2020.

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

Article content

To dispel that culture, health care providers need to learn about the history of colonization and the experiences of Indigenous people in the medical system.

Many providers, Lafontaine said, don’t know about the Charles Camsell Hospital in Edmonton where Indigenous tuberculosis patients 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’s a myth that not knowing about the person across from you isn’t 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’ll 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 Sept. 30 as a day for all Canadians to learn.

Article content

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

“This oppression is felt through poor funding to schools on-reserve, a lack of clean water, overrepresentation in prisons and as victims of violence; purposeful misrepresentation in the media, a lack of representation in every industry and at every level of government; the foster care system (and) lack of quality healthcare” Alexis writes to Trudeau.

“(The Justin Trudeau) government has been voted back in with yet another promise of reconciliation and we want to see real movement. What will your government do to take ownership of the policies and laws that uphold the racist systems still in place today?”

bmcbride@postmedia.com

Twitter.com/BlairMcBride