Decolonizing Health Care: Reconciliation Roles and Responsibilities for White Settlers

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to enhance a nascent discussion to white settlers about how they can be active participants in reconciliation action to decolonize health care—by way of truths. I start with an examination of settler denial and settler truth-telling about Indigenous genocide, along with the deadliness of white settler health care racism, which results in embodied oppression—oppression that is the root of Indigenous inequities in the social determinants of health (SDH). White settler privilege is emphasized, including persistent impacts of Western, Eurocentric, and biomedical knowledge dominance in health care, and related suppression of Indigenous knowledge systems and healing traditions. I analyze how white settlers can engage in performing decolonization with critical perspectives on the SDH, allyship, and anti-racist, anti-oppressive health care. Although persistent white settler acts of racism, including systemic racism in health, legal, and educational systems, make reconciliation seem an impossible goal, we continue to be ethically bound to walk alongside Indigenous peoples in the Truth and Reconciliation’s Commission’s Calls to Action.