GOVERNANCE: BY FIRST NATIONS, FOR FIRST NATIONS Dr. Shannon McDonald, Acting Chief Medical Officer at the First Nations Health Authority in British Columbiah
Colonialism, Patriarchy, and Indigenous Health Prior to the arrival of settlers, First Nations in what is now known as Canada had complex governance systems. They possessed a full body of laws, values, and acceptable behaviour, under which they lived with full jurisdiction upon traditional territories. When Europeans settled in Canada, a system of government was imposed upon First Nations people which sought to remove them from those territories, disrupt their inherent systems, assimilate them, destroy their cultures, and destroy existing selfgoverning systems. Indigenous Rights and Title were denied and, in British Columbia (BC), very limited treaties were made with the people (First Nations Education Steering Committee & First Nations Schools Association, 2019).
Many negative assumptions were made (and persist) about First Nations people and the life they had led collectively for millennia. They were perceived as “lesser than” in all aspects of their lives. The poverty, isolation, starvation, and infectious diseases that settlers brought to the territories decimated many communities, and in the context of overwhelming colonization, traditional systems could not fully protect families and communities. To colonizers, this erroneously confirmed the thought that First Nations people could not care for themselves—a view that has had tragic outcomes. The colonial government assumed the responsibility of “civilizing” the Nations, detrimentally taking over the provision of a range of services for First Nations people, including health care services. The systems and structures built on colonizers’ racist views and enforced on First Nations people have continued to negatively impact the health and wellness of First Nations people to this time.
Self-Determination and First Nations Health Governance: A Potential Conflict of Structures for Decision Making and Service Delivery UNDRIP Article 23: Indigenous peoples have the right to determine and develop priorities and strategies for exercising their right to development. In particular, indigenous peoples have the right to be actively involved in developing and determining health, housing and other economic and social programmes affecting them and, as far as possible, to administer such programmes through their own institutions. (UN General Assembly, 2007, p. 18) First Nations have long identified the inadequacy of Canadian health systems and provided (or funded) services to sufficiently attend to the health needs of
Visioning the Future: First Nations, Inuit, & Métis Population and Public Health
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