Dr. Michael Anderson clearly remembers a First Nations child flown into the Toronto pediatric ward where he was working 30 years ago. Standing in front of the nursing station, Anderson overheard a doctor he considered a mentor say the child’s parents will “be drunk for a week.
” “‘We won’t see them. They’ll come and pick them up when it’s time for him to go home,’” Anderson, a surgical oncologist and palliative care physician in Toronto, recalls hearing. Anderson, who has Mohawk ancestry with family roots in Tyendinaga Mohawk Territory, says he learned to hide his Indigenous ties after that incident.
“Because if they know that I’m First Nations, they’re going to be thinking about me exactly the same as they are about this family. And I need these people to write me letters of recommendation,” Anderson says of his thinking at the time. While conversations have become more inclusive since then, Anderson says discrimination persists in Canada’s medical field.
Despite making up more than 4.5 per cent of Canada’s population, less than one per cent of the country’s physicians identify as Indigenous, according to the Canadian Medical Association. In 2019, Canada’s 17 medical schools vowed to increase Indigenous enrolment in response to eight of the 94 calls to action by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
Dr. Nel Wieman, chief medical officer of health at First Nations Health Authority in British Columbia, says that while there are more Indige.