Indigenous-led health care should improve health outcomes for everyone – APTN News
March 14, 2020
A new partnership between the University of Manitoba and Turtle Lodge in Sagkeeng First Nation is putting traditional Indigenous medicine at the forefront of health care.
“We have evolved with an understanding and a knowledge that we understand and support the health and wellness of our people,” Elder Dave Courchene, executive director of Turtle Lodge on the Manitoba First Nation, told InFocus host Melissa Ridgen.
”We have a lot of healers out there that have been gifted to work with medicines, and what we’re seeing and witnessing today we are being advised by our own knowledge keepers to really bring back the traditional medicines.”
First Nation, Inuit and Métis still face many barriers to accessing health care for a variety of reasons: remote locations, racism, disrespect in the doctors’ office, language barriers and unrecognized ways of healing from western medicine.
