language – ACAM 330 (fmr. 320B) student submissions

Everyone in Canada deserves to have the same access to healthcare.

Creator:
Claire H.

Despite the ideals behind the Canadian healthcare system – that it is universal and accessibile to all, the reality reveals a slightly different scenario. This occurs for numerous reasons, including language barriers and geographical distribution of medical services. This is further complicated by the labyrinthine intersections of local, provincial, and federal approaches to health care provision, which means that any potential solutions will undoubtedly have to be difficult, multi-faceted, and subject to the partnership of all three levels of government despite potentially wildly different political perspectives and goals. In this letter to her Member of Parliament, Claire lays out her perspective of what lie at the heart of inequity in access to health care in Canada, and what may be done about it. Have you, or those around you, experienced difficulty in accessing health care, and how might that be related to people’s varying identities?

Growing up in Canada my whole life, I didn’t know [the Japanese language or Japanese traditions], and I felt a sense of shame.

Creator:
Miranda (Kimiko) Tsuyuki (she/her)

Trauma isn’t something that just one person experiences – it’s something that a whole community can experience. This kind of trauma can even have intergenerational effects that ripple through time. The Canadian government is no stranger to inflicting this kind of pain given its historical and ongoing genocidal actions against Indigenous people. While on a much smaller scale, Japanese Canadian communities along the west coast were forced to reckon with its own collective trauma. The Japanese internment during World War 2 ripped families apart, forcibly extricated citizens from their homes, confiscated citizens’ property, and even forcefully repatriated Japanese Canadians back to Japan despite it being a completely foreign land to many affected people. This led many Japanese Canadians to make the difficult choice of eschewing their own culture in hopes that future descendants would not be subject to such painful and humiliating discrimination. So how does one living amidst all of this find their way back?

Tag: language

Make Health Care Accessible to All

Lost in Language