All posts by Guest Post

Health

In Plain Sight: widespread racism in Health Care system

By Moira Wyton, The Tyee, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter

An Indigenous woman wakes up in a hospital far from her rural community in 2018 and again in 2019, dry heaving after both of her  surgeries.

She thinks she could be  allergic to the sedative, but the nurse assumes she is going through  withdrawal, despite the fact she hadn’t been drinking before either  surgery. “You people drink too much,” the nurse says, and moves the  woman to a bed where she doesn’t get further care for three days.

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Indigenous Nations History, Politics

After almost 170 years: the truth of Indigenous sovereignty.

By Bayleigh Marelj, The Discourse, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter

Jesse Wente says that there is power in truth-telling moments. And the truth he spoke about on Nov. 25, was the truth of Indigenous sovereignty.

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Food Security, Indigenous Nations

First Nations reawaken ancestral agricultural practises

By Marc Fawcett-Atkinson, Canada’s National Observer, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter

As a kid, Delbert Good remembers that he would come home from a day of picking potatoes to find a meal made from the fruits of his family’s garden.

“While I was growing up, we were pretty self-sufficient,” said Good, economic development officer for the Gitanyow Band and a lifelong resident of Gitanyow, a community northeast of Terrace, in northern B.C.

“We had garden plots everywhere. Our family stuck to growing potatoes — we had about 100 rows of potatoes every year — but everybody shared in the community and everybody had their own strengths when it came to growing vegetables.”

Not anymore. In the past hundred years, a suite of colonial policies suppressed traditions that were essential to many Indigenous people’s access to food, including agricultural ones that were practised for generations. For Good, reawakening them could help pave a better-fed future for his community.

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