BSN NURS 353 (Promoting the Health of Indigenous People) Students Observe National Truth & Reconciliation Day and Orange Shirt Day, 2021
National Truth and Reconciliation Day 2021
September 30th, 2021 is National Truth and Reconciliation Day & Orange Shirt Day. Both commemorate a new understanding of the harms to victim, survivors, and descendants- direct and indirect, of the Indian Residential School System across Canada specifically. The UBC School of Nursing’s Indigenous Cultural Safety Committee and the Bachelor of Nursing Upper Cohort students stand in solidarity with residential school survivors, their families, loved ones and communities and the children who never made it home. Our BSN students joined their collective voices to name how nurses’ must act to address the historical and ongoing trauma, racism and harms directly stemming from colonial policy in Canada. Today focuses on the wrongs of the residential school concept and realities. We therefore seek to optimize and promote the health and wellbeing in allyship with Indigenous Peoples. We stand together to lift one another up in the necessary work of Truth and Reconciliation.
Action Call
We encourage people to take action!
- Read The Truth and Reconciliation Commission's 94 calls to action
- Read The United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples
- Develop a personal reconciliation action plan
Land acknowledgement
Our students and graduates work and learn in a variety of settings and on indigenous lands all over the world, but it all begins here at the School, located on the Point Grey campus in Vancouver. We gratefully acknowledge that our students, faculty, and staff gather on the traditional, ancestral, unceded territories of the Coast Salish people, particularly the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam) First Nations. In our work and in our curriculum, the School of Nursing at UBC is committed to enacting the recommendations of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and to upholding the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People. The School aims to increase the number of Indigenous health care providers in Canada and works to improve indigenous health and cultural safety and humility for all nurses. A number of our faculty focus on indigenous health, working in partnership to address the concerns of Indigenous peoples, to confront inequities in the health care system, and to advocate for changes that will benefit all Canadians.
