Human Rights and Equity Q & A

Indigenous Leadership Circle chair Catherine Tanski reflects by the missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls commemoration and healing totem pole in her community of Kitsumkalum, BC.

BCNU North West region member Catherine Tanski works at an opioid agonist treatment clinic in Terrace. Born in Ontario, the RN graduated from Toronto's Centennial College nursing program in 1993 before moving to BC, where she began working for Northern Health. She has worked in several areas of the health-care system over the course of her career. This includes rural nursing, adolescent health, hemodialysis, diabetes education, public health, street nursing, gerontology and sexual health. She also served for two decades as an Aboriginal health nurse for the communities of Kitselas and Kitsumkalum, where her children belong to the Ganhada (Raven) clan and are also proud members of Métis Nation BC. 

Today, Tanski also serves as chair of the Indigenous Leadership Circle (ILC), a position she has held since her election in 2019. The ILC is a safe place for First Nations, Inuit or Métis members to identify needs and tackle issues as Indigenous people working in health care while addressing the legacy of racism and discrimination that has affected them.

Within the Circle, members work towards positive change and advocacy in a number of areas, including the way professionals provide care to Indigenous people. The Circle also supports Indigenous members' participation in their union, from becoming a steward, to attending meetings and convention, or running for top offices. 

Over its evolution, the ILC has been involved in several initiatives, from encouraging Indigenous youth to work in health care, to raising awareness about cultural sensitivity and competence in providing care to Indigenous people, lobbying governments to remove inequities in health care and social services, and enhancing the voice of Indigenous nurses in the First Nations Health Authority.

Update Magazine sat down with Tanski to find out more about her role and vision for the ILC, and the journey that brought her to nursing and union activism. 

UPDATE: What drew you to serve as Indigenous Leadership Circle chair and how have you found the experience so far? 

TANSKI: The ILC is the matriarchal backbone of First Nations, Métis, and Inuit nurses across BCNU's membership. I think it's important to first understand that, historically, Canadian unions have not always fought for the rights of Indigenous peoples. In the late nineteenth century, Indigenous peoples actively worked for wages in canneries and sawmills, and as general laborers, mining guides and dockworkers, but as these industries became organized, Indigenous workers were excluded from union membership. Unions however did make room for non-Indigenous workers newly arrived to Canada. There is a documented history marginalization, and unions have been places where Indigenous workers have had negative experiences or have not felt welcome.

The legacy of this marginalization continues to affect us to this day. In the North, it's further compounded when you're an Indigenous woman in an industry town and working in a health-care system that is already known to undervalue people who look just like you.

For us, reality has really been flipped on its head. ILC members come from a matrilineal culture where Indigenous women have always held a distinct and prominent role within society, both as life-givers and through traditional knowledges, medicines and healing practices.

The ILC works to reclaim these spaces for our Indigenous nurses, where no one member is above, below, in front of or behind another. That's why we chose to call our group a circle – to demonstrate to ourselves and other members that we are all equals.

I served as the BCNU North West region rep in the ILC before becoming chair. It was Matthew LeGresley, the current interim chair of the Men in Nursing group, who encouraged me to run. He worked down the hall from me at the time, and he told me he thought I would be ideal in the role. I'm grateful for his support. I make a concerted effort to stay connected to all of the other equity caucus chairs. We check up on one another often. Racial battle syndrome and activism burnout is real and always looming over our work.

Since becoming ILC chair, I have been mentored by many other Indigenous nurses and Indigenous colleagues, and in particular through my relationships with Indigenous peoples. All of us in the ILC have an inherent obligation to steward our knowledge in the safety of the circle and with respect to the diversity that each ILC member brings.  

UPDATE: What prompted the activism and advocacy work you do today? 

TANSKI: From a very young age I was immersed in social justice as a mixed-race child with lineage spanning across four continents. I was born in Ontario. My mother was a nurse and my father a civil engineer. My older sister and I spent a lot of time with my parents volunteering in Toronto soup kitchens, women's shelters and friendship houses.

My last memory of us all together was in the summer of 1990. My parents were calling excitedly for us to come to the TV where the news was broadcasting. At the time, Quebec was fighting politically to be recognized as a distinct society from the rest of Canada, and a series of proposed amendments to the Constitution had to be unanimously agreed upon by each province's legislature. When it came time for Manitoba's vote, an Indigenous politician stood up and quietly said "no," causing a national stir. The politician was Elijah Harper, an Ojibway-Cree man from Red Sucker Lake who up until that moment was unknown to greater Canada. Harper stood alone, with a black ponytail and holding an eagle feather. It would become one of the first iconic photos in Canada's history of Indigenous resistance to colonialism. My family was cheering and clapping in front of the TV, and it's the last good memory I have of us all. 

It was that summer my sister went missing. In the weeks ahead, there were organized searches to keep looking for her after the police had given up. I was driving from Toronto to meet a search group in Port Perry when I stopped on the highway to rest. A vehicle pulled over. It was driven by an Indigenous woman and her sister, and they said they wanted to see if I was okay. They told me they were driving to bring food and supplies to help their people in the Kanesatake Resistance and its standoff against Quebec police, the RCMP and the Canadian Army.

I told them about my sister, and I was distraught and crying. There, on the side of the Trans-Canada Highway, the women prayed over me in a language I had never heard. That summer was a pivotal moment in my life. I did not know that these two memories would impact me for decades to come.  

The Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples was established the following year to address growing Indigenous resistance, and to acknowledge the complicated relationship between Canada and Indigenous peoples. The commission took five years to issue a final, 4,000-page report in 1996.

By this time, I had left Ontario and was working as a nurse for Indigenous populations in northwestern BC. The Commission report set out a 20-year agenda for implementing changes to better the lives of Indigenous people in Canada. This became the impetus for an intensive examination of residential school experiences of Indigenous peoples through the 2008-2015 Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). Its final report offered 94 Calls to Action to redress the legacy of residential schools and to advance the process of Canada's reconciliation.  

UPDATE: Seven years after the TRC issued its calls to action, it appears that much work remains to remedy the many harms done to Indigenous people and achieve reconciliation –  in health care as well as in the broader society. In November 2020, the provincial government released a report authored by Mary Ellen Turpel Lafond, 'In Plain Sight': Addressing Indigenous-specific Racism and Discrimination in BC Health Care, which confirms that colonization, racism and systemic discrimination remain endemic in our care systems. The report also makes it clear that BC needs more Indigenous nurses to help foster a culture of safety. How can BCNU members support this goal and the work of the ILC? 

TANSKI: Today, Indigenous people continue to fight for their rightful place in Canadian health care. The ILC encourages nurses to listen more and talk less, follow more and steer less, advocate more and comply less, invite more and exclude less, and collaborate more and control less.  

The ILC is also a vessel of the Indigenous worldview, an ideology in health care that has not always been listened to or respected. The resilience and resourcefulness of Indigenous nurses can and will make a significant and positive impact on nursing, but only if we have the opportunity to regularly contribute Indigenous expertise. Indigenous nurses carry traditional customs, ancient language, medicinal knowledge, and unique wisdom passed down over thousands of years, and we envision a safer future in the health care of our peoples.  

Non-indigenous nurses have an obligation to re-examine nursing models that do not honor cultural belief systems and Indigenous worldviews, and to re-think assessment techniques and procedures that have conveyed misleading and inaccurate messages about the abilities and capacities of Indigenous peoples. The wider nursing community should also question research that only benefits the careers of researchers rather than improve lives of Indigenous participants, or treatments that have ignored Indigenous approaches to healing and that have dismissed the importance of culture and spiritual wellbeing. Non-indigenous nurses can also speak up and advocate on important policy matters that have resulted in the removal of Indigenous children from their communities.

UPDATE: BCNU has recognized the critical importance of acknowledging the ways in which colonization, racism and systemic discrimination have profoundly impacted the lives of Indigenous peoples and their ability to access holistic, culturally safe health care. The union has also committed to fostering Indigenous cultural safety through cultural humility and eliminating Indigenous-specific racism throughout the organization. This commitment is framed through an ongoing undertaking to establish a genuine and just process of reconciliation with Indigenous peoples. Is the union meeting its stated commitments? 

TANSKI: There are Indigenous members who feel that their culture and spirituality is not being valued when they can't take time off to attend an Indigenous People's Day ceremony and yet all dominant Christian holidays are acknowledged. There are workplaces where staff meet at lunch to exercise in an empty room or visit an on-site chapel for religious needs, but there's nowhere for Indigenous workers to perform a traditional smudge for self-care and spiritual connectivity.

We see it in the mandatory annual CPR courses that never show how to look for "paleness" or "turning blue" in a patient with darker skin. I've applied thousands of bandages over the course of my career that were only packaged in one color.

We also see it in the performative use of land acknowledgements in work bios where people state that they "work and play" on a particular traditional territory, suggesting they are not only employed as a result of forcibly coming upon a territory, but having a good time doing it.  

When you're non-Indigenous, you don't really notice these seemingly small inequities because they don't affect you, and that fact that you've never had to think about it shows how well the inequity has been engrained. In many respects there is still a lot of work to do around inclusivity.

I'd like to see us moving into the second phase for the United Nations Declaration of Rights of Indigenous Peoples. It took over 20 years to write and it's not going to be worth anything unless we implement it. It's hard to comprehend that we had to go there and create minimum human rights standards for ourselves. The next step now is to implement those rights, to protect those rights, to defend those rights and to assert those rights.

ILC stands on a human rights platform as do the other equity-seeking caucuses and together we need to be the ones to move that ball forward because no one else will be doing that for us. 

UPDATE: What are the Indigenous Leadership Circle's priorities for the year ahead and for the near future? 

TANSKI: We would like to see the Truth and Reconciliation Commission's calls to action embedded in our provincial collective agreement. This has already been done in other unions.

In my 30 years as a nurse, I have worked for only a handful of Indigenous managers, and those were all in nursing positions outside of the local health authority. I'd like to see actual diversity sitting around the boardroom table, and not just as a statement on a company banner.

Many Indigenous BCNU members are carrying the weight of colonial trauma, be it through survival of the residential school system, the 60's Scoop or living as an intergenerational survivor of these imperialist systems.

We also want to better know our Indigenous membership – this part has been challenging. It's hard to build up ILC networks if surveys and collected demographic information are not made transparent.

We would like to see a representative workforce across all regions where Indigenous rights are supported. That means hiring more Indigenous people, including Two-Spirit people. Our hiring shouldn't be viewed as discrimination against any other group. Targeted hiring and job postings for positions where the clients are largely Indigenous also helps meet realities for these clients in a way that is reasonable, equitable, and culturally appropriate.

Our nurses should be provided with better access to workshops, professional development, and career path support. But Indigenous nurses, nurses of color and racialized nurses are too often streamed into areas of practice that offer little opportunity for advancement or professional development. When I became a union rep, I started paying more attention to who is always delegated to redundant duties versus acute assignments, or regularly given heavy workloads that can quickly lead to burnout. More often than not, these nurses don't even realize they're being streamed because they're always in survival mode trying to make it through another shift.  

UPDATE: You earlier made reference to a circle. Do you see your role in ILC as "coming full circle?" 

TANSKI: The summer of 1990 affected my life profoundly, and many years later I would connect my happiest and saddest memories to two major events that year: the historic failure of the Meech Lake Accord and the Kanesatake Resistance, or Oka Crisis.

For many Canadians, the Oka Crisis was the first instance where they recognized the struggles of First Nations peoples in Canada and realized that Indigenous voices mattered and could change the course of history. This steered the path of my nursing career and commitment to transformative change. And 30 years later, it still matters.

Looking back to where I was then to what I'm doing now just goes to show you how everything really does come full circle (laughs). I don't see a circle as a means to an end, though. A circle just keeps on going. When you keep on going, that's resilience. I have about two years left in my ILC chair role but I will always move this work forward – with or without the title. BCNU has given Indigenous nurses a voice. I'm grateful and honored to be a part of the ILC.•

UPDATE (Summer 2022)