Trevor Hancock: Resilience and the health of First Nations – Times Colonist
June 17, 2015
June 21 is National Aboriginal Day, so this is a suitable time to reflect on the massive harm that has been done to the health of aboriginal people in Canada — and around the world, for that matter. Canada’s treatment of aboriginal people is a national disgrace, as the report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission has just made abundantly clear.
But it is important to understand that there is good news, in the astonishing strength and resilience that aboriginal people have displayed.
In at least some aboriginal communities, we are witnessing slow but steady improvements in health and in control over their own health.
To understand what has happened to the health of aboriginal people, we first need to understand they had been here thousands of years before Europeans showed up — which in the case of B.C. was just over a couple of hundred years ago — and dispossessed them.
