HIST-3590 Indigenous Health History with Dr. Mary Jane Logan McCallum

Miranda Jimmy: Three Sides to Every Story: Official Records, Community Knowledge, and Living Memory Tell the Truths of the Indigenous Hospital Experience

Biography: Miranda Jimmy is a passionate Edmontonian and member of Thunderchild First Nation. She is a community connector and fierce defender of truth. Miranda is committed to the spirit and intent of the treaty relationship and finds ways each day to demonstrate to others what this looks like. Miranda’s professional life has focused on contributing to her community in a variety of ways. She has training in arts and cultural management, conflict resolution and negotiation, and communications. She has made a career in the arts and heritage sector, working with many different non-profit organizations, nations, governments, and private businesses. For more than 10 years, Miranda has been elevating the voices of Indigenous Peoples impacted by colonial institutions, like Indian Hospitals, and supporting them in accessing their own archival records.

Senator Yvonne Boyer: Rights, Healthcare and Indigenous People

Biography: Senator Boyer is a member of the Métis Nation of Ontario with her ancestral roots in the Métis Nation-Saskatchewan, Manitoba and the Red River. She started her professional life as a nurse and then transitioned to practice law to help remedy the injustices that Métis, First Nations and Inuit Peoples face in Canada. For over 22 years Senator Boyer has practiced the law and published widely on Indigenous health and the intersection with Aboriginal rights and treaty law. She is a member of the Law Society of Ontario and the Law Society of Saskatchewan and received her Bachelor of Laws from the University of Saskatchewan, and her Master of Laws and Doctor of Laws from the University of Ottawa. In 2013, she completed a Post-Doctoral Fellowship with the Indigenous Peoples’ Health Research Centre at the University of Regina. She was a full professor and former Canada Research Chair in Aboriginal Health and Wellness at Brandon University. Along with managing her own law practice, prior to joining the Senate she was the Associate Director for the Centre for Health Law, Policy and Ethics and a part time professor in the Faculty of Law at the University of Ottawa. Previously she was general counsel to the Native Women’s Association of Canada, legal advisor to the Canadian Nurses Protective Society, and an executive with the Aboriginal Healing Foundation and the National Aboriginal Health Organization. She is also a former Canadian Human Rights Commissioner and an appointed Member of the Federation of Sovereign Indigenous Nations, First Nations Appeal Tribunal. You can also find Senator Boyer as one of eight people from across Canada chosen to be a holographic narrator in the Turning Points for Humanity Gallery at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights in Winnipeg.Senator Boyer has a long history of giving her time to non-profit organizations and the charity sector. For example, she has served on the boards of the Minwaashin Lodge Indigenous Women’s Support Centre, the Champlain Local Integrated Health Network and Save the Children Canada. In 2018, her many contributions to the country, including her ongoing work, was recognized by Nipissing University with an Honorary Doctorate in Education.

Senator Boyer was appointed to the Senate on March 8, 2018, International Women’s Day. She resides near the beautiful village of Sharbot Lake, Ontario with her husband Marv Fletcher and their two dogs and three cats. She is the mother of four children and has four grandchildren.

Travis Hay: The Legacy of Josias Fiddler: Resisting Healthcare Inequities On-Reserve in Sandy Lake First Nation

Biography: Travis Hay is a Canadian historian of settler colonialism and federal Indian policy. Born and raised in Thunder Bay, Ontario, Travis moved to Treaty 7 territory in 2021 to take up a position as an Assistant Professor in the Indigenous Studies Program with the Department of Humanities. Travis also currently sits on the Board of Directors for the Alberta Civil Liberties Research Centre and acts as the English Language Book Review Editor for the Canadian Journal of Health History. His first monograph - Inventing the Thrifty Gene: The Science of Settler Colonialism (2021) - is available through the University of Manitoba Press. 

Adria Imada: An Archive of Skin, An Archive of Kin: Disability and Life-Making during Medical Incarceration

Biography: Adria L. Imada was born and raised in Honolulu, Hawaiʻi. A descendant of immigrant settlers to Hawai‘i, Imada now lives on the ancestral homelands of the Acjachemen and Tongva peoples. She is professor of History at the University of California, Irvine, where she also teaches in its Medical Humanities program. Her first book, Aloha America: Hula Circuits through the U.S. Empire, received four awards, including the Lawrence W. Levine Prize for best cultural history from the Organization of American Historians. Her second book, An Archive of Skin, An Archive of Kin: Disability and Life-Making during Medical Incarceration (University of California Press, 2022), analyzes the visual culture of Hansen’s disease and kinship in Hawai‘i during the longest medical quarantine in modern history. Named an Andrew Carnegie Fellow in 2021, she is researching a new project about ordinary people surviving epidemics in the twentieth century.

Note: This session was not recorded for public viewing.

Samir Shaheen-Hussain: Fighting for A Hand to Hold: Confronting Medical Colonialism against Indigenous Children in Canada

Biography: Samir Shaheen-Hussain has been involved in anti-authoritarian social justice movements – including Indigenous solidarity, anti-police brutality and migrant-justice organizing – for two decades. He is a member of the Caring for Social Justice Collective, and has written or co-written about state violence and health care for several publications. He is the author of the award-winning book, Fighting for A Hand to Hold: Confronting Medical Colonialism against Indigenous Children in Canada (recipient of both the Concordia University First Book Prize and the Mavis Gallant Prize for Non-fiction by the Quebec Writers’ Federation). Samir is an associate professor (Department of Pediatrics) and associate member (School of Population and Global Health) in the Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences at McGill University and works as a pediatric emergency physician in Tio’tia:ke (Montreal).

(Image: Wulaapasihkan by Donna Noah)