Honours Bachelor of Science - Nursing Degree

Indigenous peoples globally have a keen understanding of their health and wellness through traditional knowledge systems. In the past, traditional understandings of health often intersected with individual, community, and environmental relationships of well-being, creating an equilibrium of living well. However, colonization and the imposition of colonial policies regarding health, justice, and the environment have dramatically impacted Indigenous peoples' health. Building on Indigenous knowledge systems of health and critical decolonial theories, the volume's contributors--who are academic and community researchers from Canada, the United States, Sweden, and New Zealand--weave a narrative to explore issues of Indigenous health within four broad themes: ethics and history, environmental and ecological health, impacts of colonial violence on kinship, and Indigenous knowledge and health activism.

This textbook for Canadian nursing and allied health students explores the major health issues of Indigenous populations and how to improve their overall health. The second edition addresses a key development since the first edition was published: an increasing consensus among Indigenous peoples that their health is tied to environmental determinants, both physical and philosophical. This text describes what is distinctive about Indigenous approaches to health and healing and why it should be studied as a discrete field. It provides a framework for professionals to approach Indigenous clients in a way that both respects the client's worldview while retaining a professional epistemology.

Gary Geddes turns the investigative lens on his own country, embarking on a long and difficult journey across Canada to interview Indigenous elders willing to share their experiences of segregated health care, including their treatment in the "Indian hospitals" that existed from coast to coast for over half a century. The memories recounted by these survivors from gratuitous drug and surgical experiments to electroshock treatments intended to destroy the memory of sexual abuse are truly harrowing, and will surely shatter any lingering illusions about the virtues or good intentions of our colonial past.

Under-Served brings together the perspectives of academics, front-line health care providers, and policy-makers to examine the historical, political, and social factors that influence the health and health care of under-served populations in Canada, focusing particularly on Indigenous, inner-city, and migrant populations. This text broadens the traditional determinants of health--the social, economic, environmental, and behavioural elements--to include factors like family and community, government policies, mental health and addiction, homelessness and housing, racism, youth, and LGBTQ identity.