Aboriginal Health Roundtable Discussions: "Why We Accept Your Invitation to Join You"

Authors

  • Donna Lester-Smith
  • Roberta Price

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.14288/cjne.v33i1.196521

Abstract

In this paper, we focus on two individual instances where non-Aboriginal scholarshave invited us, as Aboriginal community leaders, to help guide their studies aboutAboriginal peoples. We provide primary-sourced evidence of our socio-personal expe­riences within Eurocentric ideologies of control, power, and racism. By critically ana­lyzing the colonial comments made during these non-Aboriginal-led roundtablediscussions about Aboriginal peoples' health and well-being, we unearth fundamentalreasons why we continue to “accept your invitation to join you" during such projects.It is through our experiential reflections that we witness and resist oppressive dis­courses that still linger throughout some parts of academe today. From within our col­lective understanding of Indigenous worldviews—our ancestral/spiritualconnectedness—we are able to explicate what these particular discourses mean to us,as authors, and speculatively, to many other First Nation peoples. Finally, we proposesuggestions that may potentially be of value to Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal peo­ples' health research and relationships.

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Published

2021-12-10

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Section

Articles