It is a foul-smelling, purulent sore. It would be easier to cut back and ignore the past, to live in denial. We will have to rewrite the history books, rethink our role, revisit the narrative. It’s not a fad woke self-righteously, these are facts written in Canadian DNA. It seems to be easier to ask forgiveness for Joyce Echaquan, forgiveness for girls and women missing without being sought, forgiveness for residential schools and children buried in a hurry, than to recognize the words “systemic racism” and “genocide” which require accepting responsibility.
At Place Émilie-Gamelin, on September 28, Samir Shaheen-Hussain was active behind the scenes even though there was no stage, only a circle, a drum, sage and tears. He was one of the organizers of this commemorative evening for the sad anniversary of the death of Joyce Echaquan and in 2018 he launched the “Hold my hand” campaign so that indigenous children can be accompanied by a parent during evacuations. air medical.
Coming from a modest family of politicized immigrants in Brossard, the Dr Shaheen-Hussain is an emergency pediatrician during the day and an activist by night (or vice versa, it depends). He approached me – then he followed me – seven months ago for me to read his book No more indigenous children uprooted. The 450 pages denounce Canadian medical colonialism, the complicity and duplicity of the medical profession in the indigenous genocide in order to monopolize territories and resources.
I came out revolted, as after having read the investigation report of the coroner Géhane Kamel on the death of Joyce.
Based on a mass of historical documents and sources such as the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, Dr Shaheen-Hussain does not go there with surgical pliers to remove the dressing and show off this lively wound, this political massacre that the boys’ club medical and religious throughout the XXe century to this day. All nursing staff; doctors, nurses, attendants, who precipitated the death of Joyce Echaquan is only the last link in a long chain of hatred.
From smallpox to forced sterilization
We had heard of smallpox exposures to wipe out the Natives, but the Nazis have nothing to envy of what the Canadian medical profession employed as methods, ranging from studies of starvation imposed at the residential school to transplants. skin, clinical trials of drugs on children – who were refused the said drugs once marketed -, forced or hidden sterilizations (still today), restraint, bed rest in a straitjacket or in casts until ” on the chest (to prevent them from moving), children brought into contact with tuberculosis patients (in one of the boarding schools, 69% of the children died of it) or never found during emergency air evacuations, etc.
We have effectively “killed the Indian in the child”, or the child at all. 165,000 of them have tasted this medicine, in addition to physical and sexual abuse.
When the system folds back on itself, that’s the very definition of systemic racism.
For the Dr Shaheen-Hussain, systemic racism encompasses institutional and relational racism: “Canada does not want to use the word genocide because it is not a given period like in Rwanda. It’s anchored. It spans over a century. “
Psychiatrist Marie-Ève Cotton has been visiting Nunavik for the past 22 years, three months a year, and she also denounces systemic racism in a medical profession that she would like to be more feminist, more humble and less greedy. “I was in Nunavik when Joyce Echaquan died. It revives painful memories. There is a traumatic reverberation for them seeing that it continues. Almost all of them have a story in which they have felt objectified, inferior. “
It is 150 years of medical colonialism; it won’t change in a year
The Dre Cotton is also an assistant professor at the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Montreal; she teaches a course on racism against aboriginal people. “I became interested in Aboriginal people because I wondered why they were invisible. In fact, they break our identity balance. Quebeckers have built an image of victims against Anglophones, but when you look at the Aboriginal reality, it is us, the aggressor. This would explain, according to her, the difficulty for nationalist governments like that of François Legault or for the PQ to recognize systemic racism (included in Joyce’s Principle), which even the very progressive College of Physicians admits.
To die of insults
There is no doubt for the emergency pediatrician as for the psychiatrist that Joyce Echaquan’s state of health could have been greatly aggravated by racist and violent words. The Dr Shaheen-Hussain tells me about “stress cardiomyopathy or Takotsubo syndrome”, better known as “broken heart syndrome”, and the Dre Cotton, hyperadrenergy and physiological stress response due to high cortisol levels in the ceiling.
One thing is certain, after talking with Pierre-Paul Niquay, an Atikamekw from Manawan who just lost his son Jeffrey, 41, on September 27, we can assume that the Joyce incident continues to claim indirect victims, in silence. . Jeffrey Niquay hid his abdominal pain from those around him. His mother is an Echaquan… He would have died of peritonitis. “We are fighting against systemic racism,” notes Mr. Niquay. For generations we have been told to stop complaining. “
Of all the inequalities, the injustices affecting health are the most shocking and the most inhuman
Three factors inherited from intergenerational trauma contributed to Jeffrey’s loss, he said: “My son didn’t want to complain, he preferred to endure when he was in pain. Then we were taught not to love each other at residential school. It affects our value as a human being. And then he always said: if I go to the hospital, how are they going to treat me? “
Jeffrey Niquay did not want to suffer the fate of Joyce Echaquan. He is notably survived by a spouse, twelve children and four grandchildren who will inherit despair and helplessness if we do not collectively recognize institutional racism, directly or indirectly, unproductive holiday or not.
It is unacceptable that large sections of our society deny such a well-documented reality
As Coroner Kamel pointed out, asking the government to recognize systemic racism: “To be detected, racism must be understood as camouflaged in the dominant culture. To say Kwei (greeting), that’s good, but it’s not enough. “
cherejoblo@ledevoir.com