 Today is 5th of March, 2018, and the time is exactly 12th of March, 2018, and you are the professor, faculty of health science, professor Currie, so we are going to do this interview with you. Great. I will have the six questions, and we will just ask one by one, so I think you will have the six questions. Hello, professor. Okay. Hello. So the first question, I think you can talk about your program, it's like what is called, you can also mention about the age group or target audience, for example individuals or families or others, you can also talk a bit about the aim of the program, so just teaching what subject, journey, land-based, community with language, etc. Okay, great. So we have a bachelor's of health sciences program with a major in Aboriginal health, and our program is all age groups, 18 and up, undergraduate university students, and we certainly have all age groups in our program. The average age tends to be in the late 20s for people in our program. The aim of the program is really, we take a two-eyed seeing lens for our program, so we have a focus on helping students understand indigenous ways of knowing about health and healing from knowledge holders and elders and different readings that think about indigenous ways of knowing in different parts of Canada and even around the world because of course indigenous cultures are all very unique, and we can learn so much from all of these different ways of knowing. And then of course it's a two-eyed seeing lens, so we work to help students think about health from a Western perspective as well, and then the most important part of the program, we're trying to teach them to look through both eyes together to see health problems uniquely because I think there's such a problem in Canada with this Western way of health promotion and people we just need to be educated to behave better. This type of attitude is really problematic and not helpful for either indigenous or non-indigenous people. So we're really trying to teach our students to think outside the box, to think about indigenous ways of knowing about health, the role of balance in health, and then in the ways we work to improve health, and we also really work to encourage our students to think about strengths and resilience and the protective impacts of indigenous ways of knowing. Objectives, what do you want to mention? Our learning objectives are to have our students go out into the world and to be able to look at the different layers in which someone can be healthy, the different layers in which in someone's life that leads them to be healthy. So we teach them to think through a life course perspective. We teach them to think about health in terms of government policies, programming, of course healthcare, and cultural safety, racism. We talk a lot about the role of racial discrimination in Canada and its impacts on indigenous health. So we really try to go beyond cultural competency and cultural safety to name things or what they really are. Sometimes this term cultural competency sort of sugarcoats or hides the fact that there's indigenous people in the healthcare system in Canada experience a lot of racism, and having an elder in the room who can speak an indigenous language for a patient is great, but we also have to address the racism that indigenous people experience in the healthcare system if we truly want to work toward health equity or inequities, address the inequities. So in your opinion, what makes it an example of excellence in indigenous education? Well, I think it's an example of excellence because we're working so hard to truly apply that two-eyed seeing lens. So we are, I'll give you an example of a course we teach. Because we're trying to apply this two-eyed seeing lens, we have courses that take that approach, but we also have courses that only teach from an indigenous perspective. So for example, we have one course that is completely traditional health concepts. So it's taught by indigenous elders and knowledge holders. So there's 12 weeks in the class. Every week is a different knowledge holder or elder that speaks. The professor in quotes who teaches the course, we call that person just the coordinator of the course. They're not delivering content. All of the content is coming from knowledge holders and we're bringing in knowledge holders from different parts of Canada as well as the United States to teach students in our program to think about the richness of indigenous ways of knowing across different territories and to think about how to address wellness from these different perspectives. So herbology even, different ways of ceremony because ceremonies are so different in different parts of Canada and the United States. So really trying to expose them and moving beyond this western principles of health to try to look at these other perspectives, traditional knowledge. Okay, how do you major the taxes of your program? Say that again. How do you major the taxes of your program? Oh, the success? So we definitely do surveys with our students. We don't have any graduates yet because we're a new program. But we definitely do surveys with our students. We have a stakeholder team who we consult of indigenous, again, knowledge holders, community stakeholders, elders who we turn to for advice and feedback on how we're doing. We ask the students directly through various modes, including a survey. And then we've just had our very first students do their practicum. One thing I think is a really important part of our program is that every student in the program has to do a practicum. So we just placed our first student in Alberta Health Services. So the student is working in government in South Zone, Alberta. At pretty high up in government, we've been able to place her. And we're hearing rave reviews from our stakeholders in government about just her depth of knowledge in terms of culture and how do you go about to address social and structural determinants of health. So what we're hearing is our students are very broad-minded. They can think beyond these narrow boxes that sometimes public health teaches students to think rather narrowly at times, some programs, or nursing programs, et cetera, can sometimes teach students to think rather narrowly about what's determining health. And so we're hearing that our students can think much more broadly and can be more creative in terms of looking for solutions. So we're very excited to hear that feedback. And we're securing practicum placements with our students wherever they would like in clinics, they can work in Indigenous organizations, they can work in a First Nations community or a Métis settlement. It's really up to the student and then we try to meet their needs. One thing I'll just make clear, our program does not teach clinical skills. So we're not training nurses or psychologists or social workers. Our program is teaching a lot of our concepts are public health oriented, which is really what that means is we're teaching students to think about what is driving, of course, personal health, but more importantly, community health and population health. So you often think about Indigenous health as a tapestry, right? And an individual is just a little piece of that tapestry, but you really have to stand back and look at the tapestry as a whole to understand all of the different components that are influencing health of people. And so we're really trying to get our students to be able to stand back, they can work one on one a little bit with people, you know, in terms of motivational interviewing and doing some health promotion or trying to understand their needs, but also stand back and be able to do some policy work and some of that bigger picture work as well, developing programs that are needed, etc. Well, I think up into very recently there's been a very western way of thinking about these things. But I do think, I'd really like the two-eyed seeing approach that helps us to sort of be able to walk in these two worlds, that we can see the world, like I said, through the eye of Indigenous ways of knowing, the many ways of knowing, and then Western ways of knowing, again, can be many ways of knowing. And then the most important thing is teaching people to see, look at an issue, let's say we have a community that is struggling with suicide. So we have a, let's say a First Nations community struggling with suicide, we do see this often in the news. So we can stand back and look, like talk to people in the community, try to understand what's going on, but then also stand back and try to look at the big picture and try, I think Indigenous education has to sort of help people move between these worlds so that we can do a better job, because I think this Western way of doing things is not working. And we have millennia, like thousands and thousands of years of knowledge in Indigenous territories on how to live a good life and how to be healthy. And so I really think that we have to move out of these linear models and more into spiral or circular models of health and how these things feed back on each other. One thing we've been really inspired by in our program is the mental wellness continuum, which was created by the Thunderbird Partnership Foundation in Ontario. So it's called the First Nations Mental Wellness Continuum Framework. And so we've been really inspired by this model and we've actually just put forward a motion on our committee to adopt, formally adopt the First Nations Mental Wellness Continuum Model, which is a circular model that really looks at how we can work with communities and communities can, on their own, work toward wellness. And the center of the model is really focused on hope, belonging, meaning and purpose. And then around there, kind of like an ecological model gets larger and larger, we look at the different components of the life cycle. And then we move into different types of health programming, like crisis response, early identification and intervention, health promotion and prevention, support and after care, trauma-informed treatment, care planning, integrated service delivery, for example. And then we move into, okay, so if that's our focus, then how do we do that? How do indigenous peoples do that in a self-determined way? How do we measure performance? How do we look at governance of these programs and this initiative, research and then workforce development. And then you can look at the model. It kind of grows from there to really look at all the different structural and determinants of health. So what is your vision for indigenous education over the next 10 years? Well, to be honest, in our program, we're very excited about this model from the Thunderbirds Partnership Foundation. So we are actually really working now as a committee to see how we can achieve this so that our students can leave our program and really be able to speak to different components of this model. Now, some students will have different interests, so some students might be very interested in a certain component, let's say health promotion and prevention, or perhaps they're interested in early identification working with children who, you know, support resilience and strength, or perhaps they're really interested in crisis response, or they're really interested in service delivery models in different communities. So it's up to them to choose, but to make sure they leave our program and can really speak to health in this broad way. They have their own targeted interests, but can speak to, well, how does policy inform health and how do personal choices inform health and how do different cultures inform health and determinants of health, how does that inform people's health? So, yeah, that's what we're, our ultimate goal is now to try to work toward this model with that center of the model being that health and mental wellness and physical wellness is really based on this idea that people have to have hope in their lives, belonging in their lives, they have to feel meaning that their life has meaning and their work has meaning, and they have to feel a sense of purpose in order to thrive. Information materials, resources do need to add participation, like is it from the funding or the others? What do we need? So in terms of materials, resources, do we need? One thing we're really working toward is we really want to have, we have quite a bit of student interest in the program, we're very excited and we have some indigenous people teaching in the program, but we want more. We're really looking for scholars who have lived experience working, you know, as indigenous people or working very closely with indigenous people to teach our students and we're looking for people with varied experiences, for example, indigenous people working government or who have worked in different parts of the health care system or as policy advisors or they've worked in health in indigenous communities and to teach our students so that our students leave here with practical skills with a very strong strength-based focus, not a deficit focus, and I think it's people who have lived experience, who've worked in the health system, who really can teach our students, give them the vision they need to be successful and to fill all of the gaps, I think, that are currently out there. We have such a disease-focused health system rather than a wellness-focused health system so trying to make that shift includes faculty members who can kind of go beyond the ivory tower, who have practical experience, who are, yeah, who can give our students the applied skills they need. That means the people, right? Yeah, so what we really need, I think, is people and so we are advertising for new faculty because there's student interest in our program and there seems to be good feedback and we're hoping people will get more excited about it as we go along so that we can get more and more, I don't know, attract more people. Okay, so my last question, like, you have these modern documents, do you want to share with us? Like you can give the photocopy of these or something? Yeah, like I can definitely share on our website we have quite a bit of information about our program. And then I can also share, I could share this some syllabi, so I could share a few syllabi with you, just to kind of give you a sense of our different, some of our different Indigenous health courses that we're teaching, what else could I share? And yeah, you can look at our website as well and if you, yeah, I think our website is probably the best place to go for now and then one of the big frameworks we're using is from the Thunderbird Partnership Foundation, so you can look at their First Nations Mental Wellness Continuum Framework online and it's really inspired us quite a bit and informed our work and then any readings that you can do on two-eyed seeing, there's quite a bit out there that really help people understand what our work is about and yeah, I think that's... And any outdoor exercise documents, like classroom or exercise something, any documents? Yeah, I mean I teach one of the Indigenous health courses and I certainly have a lot of different exercises that we do in the classroom to kind of ask people to think about what informs health. So for example, one of the weeks we talk about why we have to heal our connection to the land and the role that the land plays in health beyond, you know, just farming and, you know, hunting, but just having that connection with the land, like what role does that play in our health and our well-being? So we have exercises like that. We also think quite a bit about healing in urban Indigenous communities because we know that more than 50% of Canadians live in Indigenous Canadians live in cities so we have a strong focus as well on urban Indigenous health and what can be, you know, what's needed from that perspective so that people don't fall through the cracks. Yeah, definitely we could probably share a few things. One thing we do in, at least in my classes, instead of term papers, I have students write briefing notes because I was, I worked in government myself for a while and often in government we don't communicate through term papers, right? Yeah. The big paper. You're writing a two-page briefing note. It's to the point. It tells the health minister or the minister that you're working for what they need to know. It's, you know, it gets to the heart of the matter and you have to write it in plain language and that's just a practical skill. And so in the class I teach, an introduction to Indigenous health, I have students write instead of term papers, they write two briefing notes about a health issue that they care about and they have to find the information and help them along the way. And then they actually have to pick the minister. If they were to, if they were to be writing this for a minister, either in the province or federally, they have to go online and figure out which minister this would be going to and explain why this briefing note would be best for the portfolio of a specific health or, you know, economic minister or perhaps its environment. So they have to give an explanation for that. And then again, learn to write in this succinct way. So that's kind of a challenge. But again, it's about skills-based learning. And so that people leave with good ideas and creative ideas and big picture thinking and all of those important things, but also with skills that they can take into a job interview and say like, hey, I can write a briefing note. You know, when I went interviewed for government, they interviewed me. And then they put me in a room with a computer and some articles and said summarize these, but they didn't explain what I was supposed to do, which is fine. But I had just, I had had no training and briefing note writing. That's what they were trying to get me to do. But all I had was academic writing. And I got the job, but I don't think I did well on that test, to be honest, because no one had ever trained me to think and to write and to summarize information outside of the typical term paper. And I think that does students a disservice. We have to teach them to write for the real world and the different ways that we write in the real world. And then oral tradition in, in my class, we don't just read chapters. We watch videos of elders. So we listen to audio of elders and we have elders come in the classroom. And they might be assigned, you know, to study for an exam. The students will rewatch the video at home and they will have to learn to study for the exam by listening to the elder. And I think we have to also, you know, think about not just Western ways of knowing, but, but oral traditions, right? We learn through oral traditions. And so having students study and students complain, you know, they, what? I have to, I have to go into an exam and there's nothing written. I have to just rewatch a video and I have guided questions for them that they can work on as they watch the video, but it scares them because in their training so far, you know, they're often, most of our students have, you know, some of them finished a degree already. Others who are of transferred from other undergrad. So they've been in an undergrad for two years and then transferred into ours and some are coming straight from high school. But no matter who they are, in academia, at least, none of them have been asked to learn and study through oral means. They all panic when they don't have the chapter in front of them. So again, you know, many indigenous are indigenous students that understand that when they're at home, this is how they're learning. They're learning through traditional stories. They're learning through listening to elders. And so trying to bring that way of, of learning into the academia, into academia, I think it's a bit of a challenge and yet, you know, I, they can do it. They always succeed. I've taught this course four times and the students succeed and, and they like it in the end, but it scares them in the beginning. So that would just be another example. I think it's very interesting and very like practical implications. Yeah, you are listening to someone and you learn and you can write by yourself and also you can apply when you would be doing a job. Thank you.