Aboriginal Health Roundtable Discussions: "Why We Accept Your Invitation to Join You"
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.14288/cjne.v33i1.196521Abstract
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.