Working in Aboriginal Communities: What Kind of Health are we Promoting?
In this paper, I will explore the paradoxes and dilemmas embedded in intercultural health care practice. It is the intent of this work to reflect on theories and practices of Western-trained health care providers, consider the implications of our practice in an intercultural environment, and accept the invitation to the visitors on Aboriginal territory by Umeek to find guidance in scholarship from the world views as handed down over generations in First Nations creation stories (Atleo, 2004) to explore an Aboriginal understanding of health and health promotion.
Othmar F. Arnold, unpublished manuscript, University of Victoria BC, 2004
Individual beings are designed to help one another in order to fulfill the requirements of wholeness, balance and harmony, interconnection, and interrelationality. Therefore, to practice vanity as a lifestyle can be destructive. (Atleo, 2004, p. 35)
In the traditional Cree language of the Whapmagoostui, there is no word that translates directly into health (Adelson, 2000). In many Aboriginal worldviews, health is a desired state of the universe (Atleo, 1997). In our North-American context, it seems that health as an abstract and isolated concept that can be discussed and analyzed in a pure scholarly manner, a standard that needs to be achieved, is a phenomenon imported by the European colonizers of the continent. In the European tradition, physical and mental health are researched and discussed at least since the ancient Greek times. Since health is mostly defined as a state of physical and mental wellbeing, and therefore linked to the absence of disease and illness, it is associated with the biomedical sciences (Anderson & Reimer Kirkham, 1999). However, only within the last century was the medical profession successful in appropriating the definition of health and therefore dominating the health care system. Continue reading “Working in Aboriginal communities: What kind of health are we promoting?”
Bei der Askese, wie auch bei der freiwilligen Armut, geht es nicht um den schmerzhaften Verzicht oder beabsichtigtes Leiden, sondern einfach um eine Haltung des Schaffens von Raum für das Wesentliche.
To mention the word God in conjunction with a well defined professional discipline seems rather strange in a secularized and science-informed society. Based on my own lived experience with human beings, whom I was able to accompany in living and in dying, I would yet dare to apply such a provocative point of view for some thoughts.
In einer säkularisierten und wissenschafts-orientierten Gesellschaft scheint es eher ungewohnt, im Zusammenhang mit einer gut definierten Fachdisziplin, das Wort Gott in den Mund zu nehmen. Aus meiner Erfahrung mit Menschen, die ich im Leben und im Sterben begleiten durfte, möchte ich es trotzdem wagen, einen solch provokativen Blickwinkel als Ausgangspunkt für einige Gedanken zu nutzen.
Der Verein Tenna Hospiz hat nun seinen eigenen Webauftritt!
OFRADIX 