How Indigenous art weaves education, inclusion and healing into patient care spaces
Story by Meagan Easton
A few years ago, Sara Roque found herself in a hospital imaging department she hadn’t been in before, despite countless appointments related to her cancer diagnosis. “It had no windows and was really dark and dingy, which made an already lonely experience worse,” she says. “But just outside the waiting room, there was this large painting by Rita Letendre, one of my favourite Indigenous artists. I was so emotional when I saw it. Feeling an Indigenous presence and spirit totally changed my relationship with that place.”
Roque — a documentary filmmaker of Anishinaabe descent and a former Indigenous Arts Officer at the Ontario Arts Council — is the sister of Lisa Richardson (PGME ’05 & ’08), the associate dean of inclusion and diversity at the Temerty Faculty of Medicine. They share a belief in the power of Indigenous art to not only create a more welcoming space for Indigenous patients, health care providers and students but to assert Indigenous world views on medicine and healing in the Western health care system.
“I’ve always loved art and years ago, I realized that Indigenous art facilitates any teaching about Indigenous health and ways of knowing and being,” says Richardson, an associate professor in Temerty Medicine’s Department of Medicine. “When people are engaging with art, they tend to be in an open-minded state. They’re less reactive, less critical and more receptive to considering things that are unfamiliar to them.”
Throughout her career as a clinician, educator and researcher, Richardson, who previously was the strategic advisor on Indigenous health at Temerty Medicine, has worked to attract and support Indigenous medical students and faculty while integrating Indigenous perspectives into medical education at the University of Toronto and across Canada. “One of our country’s biggest ongoing health inequities is Indigenous Peoples’ poor health outcomes,” she says.“ Part of my job involves ensuring that health care providers truly understand the historical trauma and ongoing racism that affect Indigenous People, so they can get the culturally safe and appropriate care they deserve, but often don’t receive.”
Richardson uses Indigenous art as an educational tool in most aspects of her work. “I always include some pieces in major presentations,” she says, adding that the artwork naturally starts difficult — but vital — conversations.
Roque agrees, saying, “Art is a much more effective starting point for dialogue because it’s not as contentious as language.”
Richardson, Roque and Allison Crawford (PGME ’05), an associate professor in Temerty Medicine’s Department of Psychiatry, are producing an arts-based learning resource that explores how to incorporate Indigenous medicine and knowledge into mainstream health care. For the first phase of their project, called The Good Medicine Collective, they gathered stories digitally from Indigenous health care providers and Elders. Now they’re complementing those narratives with Indigenous art and producing a book to be used by medical faculty and students.
Until the pandemic, Richardson and Crawford also taught a course in which they brought medical students and residents to the Art Gallery of Ontario to spend an evening viewing Indigenous art. “The best sessions were when an Elder or Knowledge Keeper joined us,” says Richardson, who hopes to resume the course soon. “I remember one medical student looking at Norval Morrisseau’s ‘Man Changing into Thunderbird’ and commenting that the circles seemed flat and one-dimensional. The Elder explained that the circles are portals to the spirit world. It was a memorable demonstration of how we have different ways of looking based on our backgrounds.”
Visitors from all backgrounds encounter artwork by female-identifying and two-spirit Indigenous artists dispersed throughout Women’s College Hospital, where Richardson is the Strategic Lead in Indigenous Health. Co-curated by Roque and Nêhiyaw artist and curator Elwood Jimmy, the “Seeds of Change” collection share a common theme of healing. Roque says she relied on her experience as a patient when deciding where to place the pieces, opting for a number of locations known to induce anxiety, such as the security desk, acute-care waiting room and blood collection lab.
Nadia McLaren, an Anishinaabe artist and filmmaker and the manager of Indigenous Health Education at the hospital, is collaborating with Roque to ensure that a QR code is created for every piece in the art collection. The code will link to information about the artist, and the themes and meaning in their art. “It will be an important addition to Indigenous Health education here at WCH,” says McLaren, who often uses art as a tool in her staff workshops on cultural sensitivity and Indigenous healing strategies.
Simply having the art visible at the hospital communicates an effort toward making spaces “safer” for Indigenous Peoples, says McLaren. It can also help health care providers spark conversations and build relationships in a more organic way than bluntly asking patients about their Indigenous identity. “A clinician may notice a patient staring at a painting, and they could ask, ‘What do you think of that?’” she says. “It can be a meaningful beginning for sharing stories, rather than just a process of ticking off boxes.”
Indigenous art speaks from and to our hearts. It reminds us that health is about our whole selves.
For non-Indigenous patients and health care providers, McLaren sees the art as a visual cue for re-evaluating ingrained perceptions. “It’s important to be reminded of and celebrate the beauty, presence and strength of Indigenous People because the Canadian educational systems, based on colonial agendas, taught us all that our ceremonies, languages, governance and our own educational systems (including our art forms) were ‘uncivilized’ and ‘less than,’” says McLaren. “We know, and there is heartbreaking proof, that these attitudes still show up in Western biomedical health care systems.”
There’s a tendency in medicine to take a negative, deficit-based approach to Indigenous Peoples’ health, says Richardson. “The power of Indigenous art is that it can flip that to a strengths-based lens with its striking presence.”
The Office of Indigenous Health at Temerty Medicine has some Indigenous artworks on display, but Richardson is thinking bigger by considering how the new Temerty Building, now in the planning stages, can include Indigenous works and design features. Still, she emphasizes that what appears on the walls of medical institutions is just a first step. “It’s a very powerful symbol to see your own people and identity represented, but hanging Indigenous art should be part of larger systemic changes,” says Richardson.
Along with highlighting themes of resilience, Indigenous art can reveal the harms that need acknowledgement and redress in medical institutions. It can be overtly political, with images that illuminate the damaging historical and contemporary effects of colonialism on Indigenous Peoples’ health. “Sometimes it’s disrupting rather than soothing,” says Roque. “It’s meant to unsettle and unseat people’s assumptions.”
Richardson often features Indigenous art on her Twitter feed, and this fall she posted a photo by Anishinaabe artist Rebecca Belmore called “Fringe” which depicts a reclining woman with a long scar across her back. What appears to be blood trickling from the wound is, in fact, strings of beads. “It represents the ongoing effects of colonialism on Indigenous bodies in a dramatic way that’s totally different from policy, journalism and any other texts,” says Richardson. “It intrigues people, making them want to know more.”
Both Roque and Richardson are quick to point out that there’s no single Indigenous perspective on medicine but there are some shared concepts of health and healing evident in Indigenous art. “In the usual biomedical model of health, we think about physical health in isolation from emotional, spiritual and mental dimensions,” says Richardson. “Indigenous teachings have a much more holistic vision of health that includes all of these factors.”
Take the work of Dene artist and bioethicist Lisa Boivin. In Boivin’s digital painting “Sharing Bioethics,” the traditional Dene circle of medicine (replete with images of sacred land-based medicine such as strawberries, flowers and a tobacco pouch) literally overlaps with the biomedical circle of medicine (represented by a white coat, X-ray and medical instruments), creating a new circle of possibility. Several pieces in the Women’s College Hospital collection feature plant-based medicine, signaling the institution’s openness to their presence alongside biomedical treatments. In late 2020, the hospital’s Centre for Wise Practices in Indigenous Health — where McLaren is based — and Temerty Medicine opened the Gathering Space, a dedicated area for Indigenous students, staff, faculty and community members to safely access traditional medicines and exercise their ceremonial practice rights.
“Surveys show that more than half of Indigenous People are interested in — or have received — care from Traditional Healers, Elders or Knowledge Keepers,” says Richardson, noting that these spiritual guides frame illness and health differently from Western medicine. Pointing to Morrisseau’s “Man Changing into Thunderbird” as an illustration, she says that Indigenous wisdom considers sickness a transformation or transition, not a loss of self. “When my sister [Roque] was first diagnosed, her healers encouraged her to think of herself as different from — not less than — before.”
Roque says that shift in perspective helped, just like it helped to see that beautiful painting on the hospital wall a few years back. “Medical knowledge and medical spaces are all centred in the head,” she says. “Indigenous art speaks from and to our hearts. It reminds us that health is about our whole selves. Bringing that art into medical education and patient care spaces will maybe bring a little heart into health care. And if it makes one person feel better, that would be really meaningful.”