‘I Am on a Path of Discovering My Own Racism’ – The Tyee

Returning to her home province, a settler physician seeks to improve healing approaches for her Indigenous patients. An excerpt.

The elevator door opens, and I walk out into a long corridor. I’m still feeling that this hospital is new to me. I’m not settled in. My thoughts are scattered. I’m focused on getting home after work and making an overdue phone call to a friend in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, 3,000 kilometres away.

Ahead of me I hear the voice of a woman, agitated, shouting in Cree. Outside, it is a bright, cold, windy fall day. The city rolls away from the hospital in every direction, the legislature and the most affluent streets in the south and east, the railway tracks and the poorest districts to the north. Surrounding it all is the south Saskatchewan plain: flat, almost treeless, drawn into neat grids of roads, fences and cultivated farms. Harvest is in full swing and the crops are golden. Inside, everything is beige or stark white with fluorescent light. Neutral. Antiseptic.

Institutional.

I enter the room where my patient waits. She is sitting up in bed, picking at something in the air, dark eyes blazing. Her husband and middle-aged son are sitting on institutional chairs close by, wearing tired, forlorn faces. The patient calms somewhat when I enter the room in my uniform — the white lab coat, the stethoscope.

Read More: https://thetyee.ca/Culture/2024/03/20/Path-Discovering-Own-Racism/