DETERMINATION DROVE DOCTOR
Dr. Veronica Mckinney didn't let discrimination against Indigenous people get in her way
Dr. Veronica Mckinney was a lab technician and a nurse before becoming a doctor. Whatever the job title, her work has always been informed by her connection to her Cree and Métis heritage.
Mckinney, now the Director of Northern Medical Services at the University of Saskatchewan's College of Medicine, said her medical career was first inspired by the stories her mother passed on about her great-grandmother.
Her mother was born several months premature, weighing barely two pounds, and had to be kept in a tiny bread pan by the stove for warmth, cared for nearly round the clock.
“My great-grandmother would have been a traditional midwife and healer and so was able to deliver my mom and recognize that she was going to be in trouble,” she said.
A doctor eventually came and signed both a birth certificate and a death certificate for the child, Mckinney said.
The death certificate kept her from being taken away to residential school.
“I guess no one really knew she existed,” Mckinney said.
Instead, Mckinney said, her mom grew up “kind of in the bush” near Midnight Lake, where she assisted her Cree great-grandmother in her work as a midwife. Mckinney's great-grandfather was one of the “road allowance people” — Métis people who were left landless after the North-west Rebellion and often found themselves forced to eke out a living on marginal scraps of Crown land.
Mckinney said her own childhood in Saskatoon was filled with stories about her great-grandmother and the knowledge she passed on.
“So my mom talked about that a lot, and about the different medicines my great-grandmother would collect. And she used that in our home.”
A pediatrician she visited as a child also helped steer her toward becoming a doctor, she said.
“He even shut down his office to drive us to go get an x-ray because he was worried about us and we didn't have another way to get there. So that level of caring, you know? That kind of person.”
While she drew on the positive examples from her family doctor and the stories about her great-grandmother, Mckinney said her path to medical school was also fuelled by a sense of injustice after seeing her mom get short shrift from the medical profession throughout her life.
“The assumptions around being `a drunken Indian' and that kind of thing, these were just the assumptions that were made when she'd go into a doctor's office,” Mckinney said.
When she first got to the University of Saskatchewan in the early 1980s, she hadn't quite worked up the belief in herself to be a doctor, she said.
Her grades languished and she recalls feeling out of place as one of the few Indigenous people on campus, but she knew she had to find something.
“Most places wouldn't hire me — even Mcdonald's — because of the colour of my skin kind of thing. So I knew I had to get a very strong education in order to get something going.”
Mckinney said a friend suggested a lab technician course at what was then the Central Saskatchewan Technical Institute, now Saskatchewan Polytechnic. Mckinney signed up, graduating in 1986, and ended up taking a job in Calgary, where she came to realize that being a lab tech wasn't for her.
“I saw how people were being treated in some ways, or how they didn't really feel connected,” she said.
She worked in Calgary's northeast quadrant, which was becoming increasingly diverse by the late 1980s and early 1990s. She found that patients seemed to gravitate to her if they felt they weren't getting adequate attention from their doctor or nurses, she said.
“They would grab on and they wanted to talk and they wanted to make sure that someone heard them.”
Those experiences led her to think about a health care career involving more hands-on work with patients, but she still wasn't quite ready to take a run at being a doctor. Instead, she returned to Saskatoon in 1991 and signed up for nursing school at the University of Saskatchewan.
Even as she moved through her nursing program, she always thought about getting her M.D., Mckinney said.
“I can't even tell you how many times I walked by the office of medicine, just to pick up a form to fill out. I could never walk in.”
By the fourth year of her fiveyear nursing program, it was finally time to submit her application.
“I thought, `If I'm ever going to do this, I've got to get it out of my system so I can be told `no,' and then I can go on,' ” she recalls. She even had the next steps planned for after she was rejected — she would pursue a career as a nurse practitioner.
“And then they totally ruined my plans, because they actually accepted me,” Mckinney said, erupting into laughter.
Her path to becoming the College's director of northern medicine started with clinical work during medical school.
“I wanted to go up north. I already knew I wanted to go up north. I already knew I wanted to work with Indigenous people. I couldn't understand why I couldn't do that,” she said of doing her early clinical work in Saskatoon.
Mckinney said she found plenty of support to create a different program for herself. Rather than working out of Saskatoon, she went to various communities in northern Saskatchewan, including Ilea-la-crosse, La Ronge and then emergency room work in Prince Albert. She returned to work in La Ronge after graduating from medical school in 1998.
Mckinney said she was drawn back to Saskatoon to work in the emergency department at St. Paul's hospital, followed by jobs in northern Ontario and a stint working for an air ambulance service doing international patient transport.
She eventually landed in British Columbia, where she took on a role as a site director for a program meant to train doctors to work in Indigenous communities.
By this time, she had already returned to the U of S to deliver talks on working in Indigenous and northern communities, and she was asked to apply when her current position opened up.
She admitted it took some thought before she decided to return to Saskatchewan.
“Our province is very tough in terms of the racism, but also within our communities, the diversity and the challenges and the strengths in our communities,” she said.
She's found plenty of rewarding work since her return.
“The best days are when I can be in the clinic and just be with people, or when I can be up north and be with our Indigenous people,” she said.
Val Arnault-pelletier, the College of Medicine's Indigenous co-ordinator, said Mckinney's willingness to step up to serve on boards and committees and to help set up student placements in the province's north have all been tremendously helpful to her in her own role.
She thinks Mckinney's greatest legacy will be the impact she's had on students and colleagues, Arnault-pelletier said.
“I think her biggest role is just that she has been a tremendous role model, a mentor. She has paved the way.”
Mckinney said years working in some of the province's most challenging health care settings have left no doubt that more investment is needed. She still sees plenty of opportunities to get better outcomes for patients without necessarily adding large amounts of resources.
In particular, she said helping encourage Indigenous people to reconnect with their own cultures can have powerful benefits.
“The thing is, our ways aren't always about the medicines, it's about how you live your life. And I think there's a lot to be learned in our Western world about that.”
She tries to apply that lesson when she works with non-indigenous people, too, she said.
“It's not a linear path. There are many pieces that lead to health and there's a lot of pieces that have nothing to do with actual taking of a medication, per se.”