Wasting your time: teaching indigenous women to nurse

Vincent J. Curtis

11 May 22

RE: Heading TRC calls to action in nursing.  Op-ed by Sandra Carroll, Executive Director of the McMaster University School of Nursing.

It is obvious from reading her article that Sandra Carroll is an earnest liberal.  She took to heart the calls for reconciliation by the TRC and is working hard and earnestly to heed it.  Tellingly, when she says the “McMaster School of Nursing is committed to the challenge or working alongside it indigenous nurse colleagues,” she uses the word ‘challenge’ and ‘indigenous colleagues’, as if they were something apart.  The school of nursing might achieve better health outcomes among indigenous peoples as a result of the program, but if she thinks either the effort or the results will advance reconciliation she’s desperately wrong.

By the lights of the race theorists, Sandra Carroll is irredeemably white and western.  Her approach to addressing the call of the TRC is characteristically white and western.  The medicine and methodologies she’s going to be instructing indigenous women in are the products of whiteness and western civilization, knowledge, and techniques.  The method of instruction is characteristically white.  In sum, Sandra Carroll is teaching indigenous women how to act white and western.

It doesn’t matter that a cool, unpronounceable expression in an indigenous language is used to name the program, making it a ‘learning lodge,’ for it’s still teaching indigenous women how to act white and western.

No doubt the program will achieve something positive in terms of health outcomes, but the end of reconciliation will not be achieved.  The question is, will the resentment produced by the program’s success make things worse?

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