Members of the community talked, laughed and shared food on Jan. 13 at the first ever Indigenous Health Fair hosted by the Centretown Community Health Centre.
More than 10 agencies had tables set up offering information, events calendars and even “Indigenous feminist condom case making.” Guests enjoyed fresh caribou, Arctic char and bannock as they viewed pamphlets and handouts on the unique health services available to Ottawa’s aboriginal community. The event also featured performances by First Nations hand drummers, Métis jiggers and Inuit throat singers.
The fair was organized in partnership with multiple grassroots indigenous agencies as a way to raise awareness about the need for culturally appropriate health services says Lindsay Snow, a community engagement worker with the CHC and one of the event’s organizers.
Aboriginal leaders say the impacts of colonization continue to negatively affect indigenous people. Inadequate funding for education, poverty both on and off-reserve and ongoing land claim negotiations are examples of the continuing impacts.
Frontline workers and grassroots organizers point to the need for health organizations to understand the specific requirements of indigenous people.
“Health for us is something that balances all parts of who we are as human beings, the physical aspect is just part of it,” says Sharp Dopler, a featured speaker who is of Cherokee, Sauk/Fox and Irish descent.
“Some would suggest that the reason for our physical illness is because our spirits have been damaged so much by the process of colonization.”
Colleen Cardinal, an Ottawa-based organizer with Families of Sisters in Spirit and the Indigenous Adoptee Committee, agrees.
“A lot of our health problems come from forced colonial policies like residential schools, the Sixties Scoop and the ongoing child welfare (system),” she says.
The residential school system was a tool of cultural genocide used by the Canadian government from the early 19th century until the last school closed in 1996. Multiple generations of aboriginals suffered physical, mental and sexual abuse and the loss of their culture at the church-run schools. The Sixties Scoop saw indigenous children forcefully removed from their families and “adopted” into mainstream white families throughout the ‘60s, ‘70s and ‘80s.
Dopler says medical institutions are not immune to Canada’s systemic racism, making it necessary to ensure indigenous people can feel safe and comfortable when seeking health services.
“If you think what happened out west . . . where an indigenous man died after spending 30 odd hours in an ER because the staff couldn’t be bothered to look at him, (if) you think that doesn’t happen in Ottawa you’re delusional,” says Dopler, referring to Brian Sinclair, a First Nations man who was ignored by hospital staff as he waited for 34 hours in a Winnipeg emergency room before dying in his wheelchair in 2008.
“I faced a lot of discrimination going to emergency rooms and walk-in clinics when I lived out West,” says Cardinal, who is from the Saddle Lake Cree Nation, east of Edmonton. She says she is routinely asked unfounded questions such as, “Do you drink?” and told “We don’t give out prescriptions for narcotics here.”
Those involved with the health fair say connections between health services agencies are vital.
“I would never ever send a client to a place I had never been to meet somebody I had never met,” Dopler says of her frontline work with the Ontario Aboriginal HIV/AIDS Strategy organization. “I always do my best where its possible to check out those connections and check out those people.”
She says events such as the health fair allow indigenous people to get acquainted with the CHC while increasing the cultural awareness of those non-indigenous peoples who attend.