Niagara Health researchers reflect on accomplishments and inequities
Niagara Health Knowledge Institute’s research team reflected on the challenges and inequities Indigenous health-care researchers face, while celebrating the research conducted at local hospitals in the past year.
Thursday’s Research Day event, held at Niagara College’s Niagaraon-the-Lake campus, marked a full year since the Knowledge Institute was founded to formalize Niagara Health’s role as a Canadian leader in community hospital research.
“This is a big day for health care in Niagara,” said Dr. Jennifer Tsang, the organization’s executive director and chief scientist.
She said, “none of this could have happened” without the support of health-care researchers “who understand the importance of doing research locally.”
“Today, we showcase your effort and it’s something we can be very proud of as health-care professionals and Niagara residents,” she told her audience of dozens of researchers, during the event.
“We look forward to all the incredible things that you will accomplish in health-care research over the coming year.”
McMaster University associate dean of Indigenous health Bernice Downey presented the keynote address during the event, sharing insights into the challenges Indigenous researchers face as a result of a lack of understanding of Indigenous knowledge which is often dismissed as “simplistic or primitive.”
“To me, that becomes a problem when I’m thinking about my research. Is it going to in fact have a societal impact at the end of this study that I’m doing?” she said.
“This is an important critical issue, and it’s based on this challenge— this situation and epistemological difference.”
Downey said the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, adopted by Canada in 2017, recognizes their knowledge, culture and traditional practices.
“It’s an understanding and awareness that Indigenous peoples are scientists in their own right,” Downey said, adding they needed to have a strong connection to the land to ensure their survival.
“It’s a way of seeing and knowing that is dynamic, holistic, intergenerational and time tested. It has existed for thousands of years,” she said. “It’s more than just survival. It’s a way of life that nourishes Indigenous ways of knowing.”
However, she said that knowledge “has been devalued by Eurocentric institutions that have deemed it to be simplistic or primitive.”
“When you think about the impact of colonization and how some Indigenous tribal groups were forcibly relocated from their ancestral lands to pave the way for development … they lost connection to their land, to their medicines to their histories to the scientific knowledge that was passed on through millennia.”