newspaper article – Mah-Skall-Ick

Indigenous communities are denied the most important medicine people can receive: Kindness – Globe and Mail

James Maskalyk is an emergency physician, associate professor in the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Medicine and author of the forthcoming book Doctor: Heal Thyself. Dave Courchene is the founder of the Turtle Lodge International Centre for Indigenous Education and Wellness and chair of its National Knowledge Keepers’ Council.

Emergency department visits are down across the country because people are not sure they are safe. For First Nations, the uncertainty is familiar, but has little to do with COVID-19. The hesitation comes from reports that continue to emerge suggesting the care one receives in hospitals depends on who you are. Or aren’t. Like Joyce Echaquan. Lillian Vanasse. Sarah Morrison’s unborn baby, who died en route to a distant hospital in British Columbia after being turned away from her closest one.

If you need other stories, read the 2020 report on racism in health care, “In Plain Sight,” commissioned by the government of British Columbia. Some will argue their details, that these deaths would have happened even if these people weren’t First Nations seeking medical care. Even if true, it misses a larger point. The Indigenous community is systematically denied, more than any other group, the most important medicine a person can receive when they are suffering: kindness. Their fight for it is one that will lift us all.

If you’ve listened to Ms. Echaquan’s last video, the absence of empathy is glaring. She is told she doesn’t belong in a place all governments have pledged to flex beyond capacity to accommodate those infected with the coronavirus. For many First Nations, the sentiment is familiar, as it is to other deliberately oppressed groups. To whomever it is directed, the message sent, and received, is that in these shared spaces, some people’s pain matters less.

It is not true. We are all beautiful, down to our last cell, and deserving of grace. Suggesting otherwise, especially as a final injustice delivered to a person after a lifetime of them, eats away at the safety of the people who mourn them. While there are innumerable examples of kind and effective care delivered to people, regardless of background, that a person never knows which she might encounter, creates chronic stress and a reluctance to seek help. Further, the refusal to engage at a human level means the system can neither learn about, nor meet, her true challenges. These echo against each other, and emerge as worse health outcomes in individuals and their communities, including from COVID-19. To remedy this, the cause must be addressed.

The root of these erosive attitudes, whether is it formed around race, sex, age, income or some other arbitrary line, comes from the colonial belief that nature is a pyramid, with humans at the top, animals below, bugs near the bottom. This type of hierarchical thinking continues within each stratum, with some members of the human family certain they occupy a superior, or as worryingly, a less deserving position. This attitude of dominance, first over the earth, and by extension one person over another, kindles pandemics, climate change, insurrection, violence, inequity and addiction. Only by appreciating our true place in nature as equal to and dependent on every other part of it, will we know freedom from these.

There is no greater goal than safe spaces centred on respect and compassion. With that intention, particularly to address anti-Indigenous racism in health care, a meeting occurred in late January between provincial and federal governments, with representatives from Inuit, Métis and First Nations. At its conclusion, the federal government promised to develop legislation devoted to improving Indigenous health, and strike a National Consortium for Indigenous Medical Education.

These are familiar steps. No law, so far, has succeeded, and if a more effective one was written, the behaviour it prohibits will emerge another way. Further, the problem is larger than health care, and the education must address all manners of discrimination woven into our institutions. They are, after all, made only of people.

A national curriculum should be developed for Canada’s youth, Indigenous and non-Indigenous, teaching natural laws seen from a First Nations perspective, as passed down for thousands of years. Developed and led by First Nations across the country, it would do more than introduce the youth to the depth of a culture right in their midst; it would teach them, through experience, ancestral ways of stewardship, and kindle in them a spiritual relationship with the planet. To live in peace, a person must learn the kindness of the Earth as directed toward all living things, for when we feel that love, it grows through us to include all of humanity. Once this occurs, it is not possible to look at another person, particularly one who is struggling, with anything but kindness.

This is not the ground Ms. Echaquan’s pleas found, but we maintain her aim as the only thing that makes sense for all of us. As we change, our system does with us, and everyone will be included in our healing.

The real cure for COVID is renewing our fractured relationship with the planet

JAMES MASKALYK AND DAVE COURCHENE
CONTRIBUTED TO THE GLOBE AND MAIL PUBLISHED DECEMBER 18, 2020

If humanity is to endure, the coming months must hold healing, not just of populations across the globe from the coronavirus, but of the Earth herself. As is true of many zoonoses (diseases that jumped from animals), this virus emerged from pressure humans put on a global ecosystem.

A lack of healthy, natural habitat weakens the immune systems of animals and the resulting sicknesses pass rapidly through them. Birds, prairie dogs, pigs, bats. With each infection, a chance for a virus to mutate into one that can sicken humans, and sometimes, global livelihoods. As such, a vaccine alone, no matter how effective, will not tip the balance toward health because COVID-19 is not a disease; it is a symptom of an exhausted planet. The renewal of a healthy relationship to our one shared mother, planet Earth, is the cure.

There is good news. We do not need to wait to determine how, because the answer is already here, and has been known for thousands of years. It is in the wisdom and sacred teachings of Indigenous people across the world. They have the deepest connection to the spirit of the Earth and its history, and from this intimacy, healing can occur.

This is neither speculation nor fantasy. A 2019 study from the University of British Columbia, looking at biodiversity in Canada, Australia and Brazil, found more species of birds, animals and amphibians on land managed by Indigenous people, even greater than in national parks. In the same year, a collaboration involving 50 countries and more than 500 scientists, the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), concluded that human activity and the resultant lack of biodiversity allowed for five new diseases to emerge every year with the potential to infect humans. They noticed that Indigenous land, though it faced the same pressures, was eroding less quickly. Capturing their knowledge, and expanding their stewardship, was cited as necessary for a healthier world.

No one created the problems that threaten to overwhelm us from malice. Not the plagues, nor climate change, nor extinctions. They have occurred as side effects of a system whose rapid growth is both encouraged at all costs, and blind to natural limits.

If the Earth is as alive as both climate scientists and Indigenous peoples say, and like a body, kept well by a diversity of cells, deeply connected, then the medical diagnosis that fits most neatly our modern sickness is not an infection, but a malignancy. If unaddressed, it threatens to use every last joule of energy, not from need, but from appetite until only it, and a husk, remain. As the IPBES concluded, we must “decouple the idea of a good and meaningful life from ever-increasing material consumption.” This must be the priority of our Group of 20 leaders, who met recently to talk about “recovery.” The solution will not be found by beating back the symptoms so we might return to business as usual, but fanning the flame of aliveness of the beautiful and healthier world beyond them that is in retreat.

This past summer, at Turtle Lodge in Manitoba, a sacred Anishinaabe lodge of traditional teaching and wellness, Indigenous knowledge keepers from coast to coast met and discussed challenges affecting their communities and the world. Their main concern was a disconnect of people from the land and its lessons. In that rupture, like a break in the body’s immune system, sickness has crept. Opiate and alcohol addiction, anxiety and depression. COVID-19. We can learn from the line of inquiry of some traditional healers, who instead of asking their patients first about their pain, start with a more direct question: Who are you?

We have forgotten who we are. There is a remedy held in the gathering statementof the Turtle Lodge National Knowledge Keepers’ Council, and endorsed by Indigenous people across six continents. On Dec. 21, as the Earth reaches equilibrium and begins its solstitial yaw, we are all invited, Indigenous and those of us displaced from our traditional lands, to light a sacred fire, and keep it burning throughout the day. A fireplace, a candle. In its flame, the sun’s light, the Earth’s gifts, and our own spirit. It is the first step toward knowing our nature, and that of the planet, as not two, but one.

We are of the Earth, and have everything we need to heal. The cure for COVID-19 is here. It is us.