What It Means to Witness

Two weeks ago, George and I spent an afternoon in the Feast House on Grouse Mountain, presenting to a group of health regulators. We talked about cultural safety, complaints pathways, board recruitment, licensing, all the quiet machinery that decides whether Indigenous Peoples trust a system or not—aspects of healthcare often ignored in abstract policy talk. We discussed the granular questions of who gets to define safety, and who has been carrying generations of justified hesitation toward answering that question the way it's always been answered. The room was quiet and contemplative.

As we moved towards closing the circle, George asked four people to stand. He invited them to witness what they had heard. Not to summarize it, or to perform understanding, but to name one thing, a realization, a teaching, words, that they would carry forward into their own journey.

One man stepped forward.

He talked about his wife. She is the descendant of Holocaust survivors, and he spoke about the intergenerational impacts of that history: the way trauma moves through a family long after the events that caused it. He was careful with his words. He said clearly that he wasn't sharing this to dismiss George's experience or the experience of his people, but to point at something bigger, that many people, Indigenous and non-Indigenous, may need trauma-informed care. 

I am a reflector. It often takes me time to sit with what I've heard before the words come. I've been sitting with what he shared for two weeks now. I think it took real courage for that man to bring his wife's story forward in that room, gently, without taking anything away from what George had just shared. Here is what I'd offer back to him, if he ever reads this.

It is important to provide trauma-informed care to everyone.

That sentence is simple. What it asks of us is not. It asks us to hold two things at once: the specific, particular weight of Indigenous experience in this country, and the reality that trauma doesn't move through only one people, one history, one room. It asks us not to rank pain, but to be careful with all of it.

Here's the part I keep circling back to, though. Settlers are guests on this land. It means the systems we build here, healthcare, regulation, licensing, don't get to be neutral by default. When they were established, they were built by one group, for one group.

Take midwifery. Indigenous midwives had been catching babies and caring for their communities here for generations, long before European midwives arrived on this continent. When Canada began formally licensing and regulating the profession through the 20th century, that knowledge wasn't folded in. It was pushed out. Indigenous midwifery was effectively criminalized in most provinces, families were routed toward Euro-Canadian hospitals instead, and something sacred got treated as a problem to be solved rather than a practice to be protected. The system wasn't broken. It was built exactly the way it was built, without First Peoples in mind, and it excluded them by design.

The medical system went further still. Indigenous people were segregated into Indian hospitals, separate from settler facilities and held to a different standard of care. Many "patients" were instead subjected to experimentation. Indigenous practices were demonized, and the reservation system restricted First Nations people from freely gathering their own traditional medicines on their own land. It has taken, and continues to take, immense effort to begin integrating traditional foods, medicines, and methodologies back into the health care system today.

When settlers say we are guests on this land, what does that actually mean? What does it require of us? More than gratitude. It's a responsibility to notice when a system was shaped around one group's definition of safety and normal, and to help reshape it so it reflects the people whose land it was, and is.

And here is where it connects back to that room full of regulators. Holding space for everyone's trauma does not mean flattening the differences between what people carry. That's part of why Indigenous specific anti-racism training matters, and why it can't be swapped out for a general session on inclusion. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission's Calls to Action were specific for a reason, asking for education on this land's particular history, not a generic inclusion module. Both things are true. Trauma-informed care matters for everyone who walks through a door needing help. And Indigenous specific education is not optional or interchangeable, because the harm here has a name and a timeline of its own. Holding both is the work.

I'll leave you with something hopeful, because this work isn't only about naming what was broken. Not far from where George and I live, the new Quw'utsun Valley Hospital is nearing completion on the unceded territory of Cowichan Tribes. It carries a dual name, Quw'utsun Valley Hospital and Quw'utsun Hulitun-ew't-hw, gifted by Quw'utsun Elders. The maternity ward was designed with Indigenous birthing traditions in mind. There are dedicated spaces for cultural burning practices and traditional healing, and traditional foods will be provided as a meal option. This is what it looks like when a system finally gets built with First Peoples at the table from the start, instead of built around them and asking them to adapt afterward.

Understanding population specific trauma matters. It's what lets us offer care that meets the actual person in front of us, instead of a generic version of care that meets no one fully. But understanding Indigenous specific realities isn't simply one more category inside that work. It's a distinct responsibility, one rooted in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission's Calls to Action, that belongs to everyone working inside these systems. If you're in regulation, in healthcare, in governance of any kind, this might be a good week to ask where Indigenous specific education actually sits in your own training, and where it's still missing.

🧡 Kim + the CC Team

Sources

• Ian Mosby, "Administering Colonial Science: Nutrition Research and Human Biomedical Experimentation in Aboriginal Communities and Residential Schools, 1942–1952", Social History, 2013

• Maureen K. Lux, Separate Beds: A History of Indian Hospitals in Canada, 1920s–1980s (University of Toronto Press, 2016)

• The Walrus, "How Residential School Students Became Victims of Nazi Race Science"

• CMAJ, "Medical experimentation and the roots of COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy among Indigenous Peoples in Canada"

• Policy Options, "Indigenous midwifery is stalled"

• Ng Ariss Fong Lawyers, "Professional Regulation and Traditional Aboriginal Healing"

• National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation, Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada: Calls to Action

• Island Health, Quw'utsun Valley Hospital / Cowichan District Hospital Replacement Project

• Ontario Construction News, "Cowichan District Hospital replacement project champions Indigenous knowledge and culturally safe care"