Beyond Window-Dressing Reconciliation in Health

This workbook is an offering that emerged from a series of research projects led by Dr. Cash Ahenakew, Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Peoples’ Well-Being.

The project was funded by a UBC Catalyzing Research Clusters grant by the same name, a SSHRC Insight Development Grant, “Towards the Ethical Integration of Different Knowledge Systems: Lessons from STEM and Health,” and a SSHRC Insight Grant, “Decolonial Systems Literacy for Confronting ‘Wicked’ Social and Ecological Problems.”

The workbook was led by Cash Ahenakew, with contributions from Indigenous and settler members of the research team, including Dani Pigeau, Sharon Stein, Bjorn Stime, Vanessa Andreotti, Will Valley, and Andréa Monteiro. Several health practitioners and scholars also generously reviewed the workbook, including Francisco Medina, Stacey Prince, Avery Fischer, inabel uytiepo, Christine Gibson, Mariana Jimenez, and Kristine Madsen.

This workbook is not a checklist, a curriculum, or a blueprint. It is a pedagogical invitation into a different relationship with the unsettling work of confronting the violence of colonial systems that continue to shape health practices and institutions. It was created for those who are committed to walking the path towards a deeper sense of responsibility and relational accountability with Indigenous Peoples. It invites settler clinicians and others in healthcare professions to slow down, to sit with dissonance, and to engage beyond the surface of performative, absolution-seeking, or procedural forms of reconciliation.

The workbook makes visible the patterns through which Western health systems often universalize their own logics and invisibilize Indigenous ones. It invites readers to notice their complicity in these patterns, not to induce guilt or shame, but to nurture the stamina to accept responsibility without deflection and to show up to this work with humility.

Although the workbook is grounded in the context of what is currently known as Canada and focused on the field of medicine, the dynamics it explores may resonate across health and mental health professions and in other settler colonial contexts. It can be used individually or collectively for cultivating the intellectual, emotional, and relational muscles that are necessary to face the converging crises of our time with humility, discernment, and care. This is part of the longer work of composting colonial habits of thought and practice, and preparing the ground for different futures to take root.