In response to the Truth & Reconciliation Calls to Action, Item # 24, all schools of medicine, nursing, and midwifery are required to introduce into the curriculum a “course dealing with Aboriginal health issues including the history and legacy of residential schools, the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, Treaties and Aboriginal rights, and Indigenous teachings and practices. This will require skills-based training in intercultural competency, conflict resolution, human rights, and anti-racism.” (Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (TRC): Calls to Action, 2015)
We humbly offer this day of consciousness-raising as a first step in fulfilling the TRC’s Item # 24, with a promise to keep the knowledge imparted from our aboriginal relatives sacred and use this knowledge to inform curricula development in Canadian Schools of Nursing, Medicine, and Midwifery, in the right way.
Mount Royal University School of Nursing & Midwifery Signature Event will bring knowledge keepers and elders together for all-day symposia that is intended as a consciousness-raising experience, as seen through a First Nations lens of the circle of life.
We will examine aboriginal birth practices and ceremony that in recent years has been bringing birth back to the community completing the circle of life that was damaged when colonialism relocated birthing to tertiary hospitals, leaving only death in the community.
We will discuss bringing child welfare back to First Nations community so that endangered children are not removed from their land, relatives and cultural practices.
We will examine the four areas identified in the TRC’s item # 24 (Health) with sessions lead by indigenous elders and knowledge keepers with expertise in human rights, anti-racism, intercultural competency, and conflict resolution.
We will equitably honour the knowledge keepers from all of the First Nations in Treaty Seven that are represented at the Event, with and an equal number of male and female elders.
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The following Webinar: “TRC’s Calls to Action: Post-Secondary Education and Reconciliation” will provide meaningful background on what the TRC’s Calls to Action mean for post-Secondary education: http://extended.adobeconnect.com/px40y2d486e6/
