The Canadian Medical
Association (CMA) apologized for its role and the role of the medical
profession in past and ongoing harms to First Nations, Inuit, and Métis
Peoples in the health system.
In presenting the apology at a ceremony held on Wednesday, Sept. 18,
in Victoria on the ancestral lands of the lək̓ʷəŋiʔnəŋ-speaking people
of Songhees and Xwsepsum Nations., CMA President Dr. Joss Reimer spoke
of the organization's commitment to being accountable and working
together with Indigenous Peoples to do better in the spirit of humility
and reciprocity.
“We have not lived up to the ethical standards the medical profession
is expected to uphold to ensure the highest standard of care is
provided to patients and trust is fostered in physicians, residents and
medical students,” she said. “We realize we have left Indigenous Peoples
out of that high standard of care.”
The ceremony also included singers, drummers, dancers, musicians and storytellers.
Approximately 225 guests, including local and national Indigenous
leaders, members of the CMA Indigenous Guiding Circle and Indigenous
Survivors listened as CMA leadership outlined the organization’s path to
an apology.
“Today,
we turn the first page of a new chapter in the CMA’s history,” said Dr.
Alika Lafontaine, CMA president (2022–23). “It's a chapter that we hope
First Nations, Inuit and Métis Peoples can write with us together, as
we work toward a health system that provides Indigenous Peoples with the right care, at the right time, in the right place, in a good way.”
That path included an in-depth review of more than 150 years of
archives, which revealed the role the CMA, and the medical profession,
have played in the mistreatment of Indigenous Peoples, whether through
action or inaction. These harms include the devastating impacts of
Indian hospitals, forced medical experimentation, forced sterilization,
child apprehensions, systemic racism, neglect and abuse within the
health care system.
The CMA’s first Indigenous president, Dr. Lafontaine announced the
association’s commitment to an apology in June 2023, as an important
part of the CMA’s response to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of
Canada’s Calls to Action. With the goal of creating meaningful change
in health care and in the relationship between physicians and
Indigenous Peoples, the CMA is hoping the apology inspires members of
the profession and medical organizations to begin their own
reconciliation journeys.
Building on past reconciliation work, the CMA’s ReconciliACTION Plan
outlines how it will advance health and well-being for Indigenous
Peoples, support the medical profession’s journey toward truth and
reconciliation, and promote internal reconciliation as an organization.
The Healing Stone will remain at the cultural center for two years
before returning to New Zealand for the next World Indigenous Suicide
Prevention Conference. Alongside the stone, the Seneca Nation received
other gifts from previous conference hosts, which will also be displayed
at the cultural center.
The Onöhsagwë:de’ Cultural Center is open six days a week and offers
exhibits, collections, and educational programs. To learn more visit
their website.
Ahead of its release, we sat down with Fancy Dance
director Erica Tremblay to talk about her narrative debut with Lily
Gladstone.
Fancy Dance will mean different things to different people. For a start, no one seems able to describe what genre of film it is. Since its Sundance debut last year, it’s been described as a road trip
movie, a coming-of-age story and a crime drama. More than those, though,
it feels like a window into life on a modern-day Seneca-Cayuga Nation
reservation; a snapshot still rarely put on the big screen, let alone
one given a profile like Apple have given this one.
Starring Lily Gladstone as tough-as-nails grifter, Jax, and Isabel
Deroy-Olson as her niece, Roki, the film starts days after the
disappearance of Jax’s sister (and Roki’s mother), Tawi. Together, they
fight child services and Roki’s white grandparents to track Tawi down –
and prepare for a dance at the upcoming powwow while they’re at it.
With a profile boosted by Gladstone’s Killers Of The Flower MoonOscar
nomination, the film arrives on Apple TV+ on Friday. We sat down with its
director, Erica Tremblay, to talk Gladstone, building believable
characters and making the jump from documentary filmmaking.
Why don’t we begin with how Fancy Dance got started?
Well, Lily Gladstone and I had done a short called Little Chief
together that had premiered at Sundance in 2020. And people were really
drawn to that film and kept asking me if I was going to do something
bigger with that story. I called [Lily] up and said: “If I create a
story in the same world with a similar kind of character, would you be
interested?” And she said she would.
And, you know, we started developing the project, she read all the
versions of the script, and she really helped inform her character along
the way. I was doing a three-year language immersion programme in my
ancestral language, Cayuga, at the time, and I was learning family
words. I learned that the word for mother is knó:ha, and the word for auntie is knohá:’ah,
which means little mother. And that just excited me to tell a story
about an aunty and a niece as a kind of mother-daughter story.
Did learning Cayuga at the same time inform what you were writing?
I think the language was one of the things that inspired me to do
this film, because currently there aren’t young people that speak the
language fluently, or there aren’t very many. And so it was
aspirational, in a sense, to see young people speaking the language.
I was studying eight hours a day and then writing at night. So it was
certainly an influence, and all the folks – the other seven in my
cohort – we’d be driving around at lunch, and I’d be pitching ideas and
we’d be talking about it. So it was a very formative time to be
creating, yeah.
Isabel Deroy-Olson stars as Jax’s niece, Roki (Credit: Apple TV+)
I’d like to talk about Frank, Jax’s father in the film. He’s a
much less black and white, Hollywood-style villain than he first
appears.
Yeah, you know… That relationship isn’t exactly my relationship with
my white dad, but it’s definitely a place in my own personal life that I
was able to draw from. I think when you have one side of your family
that’s native and the other side that’s not, there are going to be these
areas of cultural divide, and there are gonna be these things that just
aren’t understood on either side.
Michiana, my co-writer and I, when we were writing Frank
specifically, we didn’t want him to just be a trope: he’s the
antagonist, and he’s gonna be a bad guy. We wanted there to be grey
areas, and we wanted the audience to sometimes wonder, “Where should
Roki be?” Frank very much loves his children in the best way that he
knows how. And sometimes that’s very heartbreaking to a child, when
their parent loves them like that.
One line that particularly stood out to me was from Frank’s
wife, Nancy. I’m paraphrasing, but it was something like: “We know how
important it is for you to stay connected to your culture.” It’s meant
in a really lovely way, but it almost assumes that Roki’s native culture
is something she’s going to lose by default, that she’ll have to make
an effort to stay connected to these traditions.
Nancy really stood in for a lot of relationships that Michiana and I
have with non-native folks. I think Nancy is fine that her adopted
grandchild is native, but she kind of only wants Roki to be native in a
way that’s comfortable for her. So, when she says, “We want you to
remain connected”, she wants her to remain connected so she can talk
about this with her friends at the Rotary Club. But not if it starts to
push up against things that she holds valuable.
And Nancy provides that feeling of: “I’m certainly not a bad person.
And I’m certainly not a racist. And I’m certainly not all these things.
But this is really scary, and I’m only going to engage with this in a
way that’s safe for me.” And that safe space ends up being oppressive.
“I learned that the word for mother is knó:ha, and the word for auntie is knohá:’ah, which means little mother…”
The film’s been described as so many things, from a road trip
to a coming-of-age movie… You said you started with the idea of that
aunty-niece relationship, when did the missing person element come in?
Yeah, the idea of an aunty-niece story, that kind of came first. But
women and relatives going missing in our communities, and being murdered
in our communities is something that’s very prevalent, and it’s
something that all native communities handle. This seemed to be a way we
could talk about that, but through a central relationship between two
people left behind.
Then them being wanted by the authorities gives us an instant
antagonistic force, one that’s making the characters move and make
choices. And then we’re dealing with the Indian Child Welfare Act, with
the forced removal of native children, as well. So there’s all these
things that you think existed in the past, but are actually still really
actively existing in communities today.
The crime element does provide this really interesting
flashpoint, it puts the characters in such a heightened state. How much
do you think about what these characters are like in any other week,
before Jax’s sister went missing? Because that could almost completely
change their personality, how they react to things.
Yeah, I think my muse for a lot of my characters – and for both of
the characters that I’ve written for Lily – it’s been my mom. And my mom
is an incredibly talented, kind, strong native woman. And the thing is,
is that when you’re traversing a world where you’re constantly having
to play defence and offence at the same time, you have these walls built
up around you. Because the moment that you allow yourself to laugh or
the moment that you allow yourself to be goofy, or the moment that you
allow yourself to fall in love, or, you know, put in anything that makes
you vulnerable in a way that you know, is perhaps different for native
folks than some others.
Jax is very loving, and she’s very giving, and she’s extremely
passionate about the things that she cares about. But she can seem
gruff, and she can seem distant, and she can seem like she’s not
connected, because she has to operate in that way to protect herself. And I think what’s great about a character like that is that despite her
stoic, exterior, we really get to see her go on a journey. When you
write a character, you want to know, well, what was her relationship
with this person last week? Where’s it gonna go in two weeks, and you
really want to be able to live in that world.
So you come from a documentary background, and Fancy Dance is your first narrative feature. Were there any habits you had to stop during filming?
What’s funny is that I kind of only ever made documentary films
because they were cheaper and you could do it when you had a camera on
your arm. And while I was making documentaries, I started to question my
ethics as a documentary filmmaker because as I would make docs all I
wanted to do was make it up, like, “This isn’t as entertaining as it
could be. If they would have said this or done this, it would have been
way better story.”
So I think a couple of things that I’ve brought with me are, number
one, probably don’t hire me as a documentary filmmaker. But two, I
really do love people’s real lived experiences, but I have to say, I’m
better suited making up what happens in the world, rather than
documenting what’s happened.
