The challenges facing Aboriginal health

As Aboriginal communities reclaim control of their own health, and deal with the
effects of multigenerational trauma, theres an opportunity to join hands with
Jewish communities because we too have been down this road before. We
understand what it means to be separated from the mainstream and the historic
impact that has had on the health of our community.
However, first we must begin to understand the Aboriginal perspective of health.
Aboriginal health is conceptualized around the medicine wheel. The wheel is
divided into four quadrants: physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual. When the
four are in balance, the individual, family, community, and nation are healthy.
Historically, Aboriginal people were extremely healthy. Anthropologists who
studied the bones of plains First Nations who lived prior to contact and ate a
protein-rich diet that consisted essentially of buffalo meat, concluded that they were
among the healthiest and best nourished people in the world.
In 1938, the American psychologist, Abraham Maslow spent time among the
Blackfoot community. Most freshman psychology students are familiar with
Maslows hierarchy of needs: food, clothing, shelterwith self-actualization at the
top. Maslows view of the Blackfoot was that they were among the most emotionally
secure individuals he had ever encountered, largely because of their tough yet
supportive parenting style.
Some Aboriginal health practices are difficult for Westerners to understand. Fourday long fasts, the thirst dance, and the sun dance played an essential role in
keeping the medicine wheel in balance. Prolonged fasting carries the risk of
dehydration and renal failure, and the sun dance involved a surgical procedure done
without anesthetic under non-sterile conditions, followed by excruciating pain on

the part of the participantsometimes for days on end. The practice continues to
this day in some communities, but it would be wrong to pass judgment on any of
these practices since they formed part of a holistic approach to health that produced
demonstrably beneficial results.
Health researchers talk of an Aboriginal health space that is distinct from a
Western health space. There is some overlap between the two, but there are
culturally-specific practices that would appear strange to the other side. Just as
Westerners find it hard to understand the basis for the sun dance, members of the
Aboriginal community reject the Western concept of 18-hour workdays and
constantly chasing after material wealth.
A special mention should be made of tobacco, which is a sacred plant in Aboriginal
culture. Tobacco forms part of every major Aboriginal ceremony. It is offered as a
gift from one person to another, offered to bodies of water and the earth, and
smoked. Any effort to initiate a smoking cessation program in an Aboriginal
community is usually met with boisterous laughter.
Since contact with the West, and especially in the past 150 years, the state of
Aboriginal health has deteriorated significantly. In essence, Western
microorganisms, trauma, and diseases have colonized the Aboriginal health space.
Prior to contact with the West, Aboriginal people had never encountered chicken
pox, cholera, diphtheria, influenza, measles, scarlet fever, typhoid, typhus,
whooping cough, or even the common cold. When these diseases, in particular
smallpox, first spread through the Aboriginal populations, the impact was
devastating. Each time an infectious disease encountered a new community, the
death rate would be upwards of 75%, and sometimes as high as 100%. As a preindustrial, hunter gatherer society with no written records, the loss of oral history
and cultural knowledge must have been particularly devastating.

The residential schools were institutions of cultural genocideperhaps even worse.

Attendance was mandatory, and some 150,000 children were systematically
separated from their families by Indian Agents, humiliated and punished for
speaking their mother tongue, never touched or hugged by an adult, often
emotionally and physically abused, deliberately malnourished, and allowed to die of
treatable infectious diseases, most notably, tuberculosis. The mortality rate in
residential schools was typically between 25 and 50%. No school was built without
an adjoining cemetery. Today, attachment disorders and substance abuse disorders
run rampant among survivors of the residential school system.
The medicine wheel is broken, but it can be fixed. Aboriginal wellness researchers
(the term wellness is now preferred over health) are de-colonizing the aboriginal
health space, in an effort to make it culturally safe again.
Even though our histories are very different, we have much to learn from each other
and much to share in the pursuit of individual, family, community, and national
wellness. Let the healing begin.
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Dr. Michael Dan is a progressive philanthropist, president and CEO of Gemini

Power Corp working in partnership with First Nations to develop sustainable and
healthy economies on reserves. Bernie M. Farber is his Senior VP, the former CEO
of Canadian Jewish Congress, a human rights advocate and journalist.