Decolonizing Healthcare Education and Practice

In their new book, Inflamed, doctors Rupa Marya and Raj Patel explore how colonialism makes us sick while also shaping our core beliefs about how healthcare providers should make us better. For example, Lakota elders in the book describe the forces that led to widespread prevalence of diabetes in their communities: colonizers arrived and dammed a river that traditionally fertilized a rich river valley where nutritious food and medicinal plants utilized by local peoples grew. As this ecosystem was erased, and as the impacts of erasure and assimilation took hold, the Lakota became less active and were forced to rely on the food and medicine of their oppressors, rather than their ancestors. Marya and Patel point out that skeletal evidence backs up these claims, showing a marked difference in Indigenous remains excavated before and after European invasion. However, they also point out a paradox that comes with this data, writing:

If you find yourself more convinced by studying skeletal remains than by listening to the oral histories of Indigenous people, you’re a participant in a colonial system of organizing truth. Reconstructing history through bones misses much that oral histories capture. Yet, in a colonial world, stories passed down by Indigenous elders cannot be considered true until they are validated by the empires that colonized them.

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