PANEL DISCUSSION | Confronting Medical Violence: Conversations to Decolonize Healthcare with Samir Shaheen-Hussain and Guests

Free virtual event | Registration required

Author of Fighting for a Hand to Hold: Confronting Medical Colonialism against Indigenous Children in Canada, Samir Shaheen-Hussain, joins panel discussion Confronting Medical Violence: Conversations to Decolonize Healthcare.

This panel will discuss the history and ongoing medical colonialism that prevents Indigenous communities from attaining internationally recognized measures of health and social well-being because of a pervasive culture of systemic anti-Indigenous racism that persists in the Canadian public health care system—and in capitalist settler society at large. Panelists will draw on the innovative work of Indigenous scholars and activists to conclude that calls for reparations, restitution (including land reclamation), and self-determination for Indigenous Peoples is critical to achieve reconciliation in Canada.

Samir Shaheen-Hussain is assistant professor in the Faculty of Medicine at McGill University and works as a pediatric emergency physician in Montreal (Tio'tia:ke).

ABOUT THE BOOK

Fighting for a Hand to Hold exposes the medical establishment's role in the displacement, colonization, and genocide of Indigenous peoples in Canada. Launched by healthcare providers in January 2018, the #aHand2Hold campaign confronted the Quebec government's practice of separating children from their families during medical evacuation airlifts, which disproportionately affected remote and northern Indigenous communities. Pediatric emergency physician Samir Shaheen-Hussain's captivating narrative of this successful campaign, which garnered unprecedented public attention and media coverage, seeks to answer lingering questions about why such a cruel practice remained in place for so long. In doing so it serves as an indispensable case study of contemporary medical colonialism in Quebec.