In this interview, Sydney Blackston (N‘25), the inaugural recipient of the Maeve McKean Global Health Award, discusses her fellowship experience traveling to Canada and researching how the wildfires there have affected Indigenous groups, specifically in relation to health care access and quality. During the 2023 – 2024 academic year, she also worked with Assistant Professor Jessica Kritz, a member of the Department of Global Health at Georgetown University’s School of Health, on Kritz’s projects in Ghana that address the disproportionate burden of climate change on workers in the informal sector.
I was inspired to pursue this issue because of the red smog that enveloped the northeast United States in the summer of 2023. I remember just being curious about what was causing that air pollution. I started researching wildfires in Canada, specifically the ones in British Columbia which had been unprecedented that year. The reason I wanted to focus on the perspective of Indigenous people was because of how connected they are to the land and ecosystem. I often feel like their voices are excluded from climate change discussions, and so I wanted to center my research on their perspectives. I ended up focusing specifically on Indigenous knowledge keepers/elders because of how much they know about their community and the importance of their role in passing down traditions and knowledge to younger generations.
A common theme I noticed through interviews was that community centers and hospitals all got overwhelmed with the intensity of people evacuating. That made getting proper care and resources difficult. Additionally, there were a lot of mental health exacerbations related to stress and fear that don’t have designated resources to address those needs. I would also say that the aftermath of wildfires and the damage it does to the ecosystem also affect Indigenous communities. In the traditional territory of the Syilx Okanagan people, it often dries out the soil and can result in landslides that then enter the lakes and rivers that Indigenous people are reliant on for fishing. This forces Indigenous communities to rely more heavily on grocery stores and impairs their traditions and culture.
Community plays a huge role in resilience to wildfires. All of the participants I interviewed identified community as integral to overcoming wildfires and natural disasters. Community centers were the one of the first locations that evacuees would go to. The participants also noted that family and friends opened their homes up to help people when they had to evacuate their homes. One participant said that “people offer their land for people to bring their livestock or their horses, and we just wrap around each other as family.” This same participant also described how other Indigenous centers in nearby towns opened up their centers to accommodate people in need.
Yes, absolutely. In Kelowna, British Colombia, there’s a real movement within the town to recognize the harms of colonialism and give recognition to the value of Syilx practices and traditions, like renaming roads and buildings and having several museums dedicated to teaching that history. There’s an effort to teach and learn the native language, and universities have comprehensive programs dedicated to studying Indigenous history and issues. Even in the hospital, there were Indigenous artworks and pictures that were dedicated to providing a more welcoming and safe environment to people who might feel unfamiliar in the clinical setting.
I found it interesting how well integrated this decolonial framework was in the town of Kelowna, especially at University of British Columbia (where I was taking a class). Before every single class I took there, there was a land acknowledgement. Georgetown University, while very dedicated to social justice, doesn’t really provide teaching on the history of the Native people of the Washington, DC, area. The Nacotchtank people lived and roamed on the same places that the U.S. Capitol and Supreme Court now sit. What was once a tribe of nearly 300 people has no living members anymore. I just wonder why we don’t spend any class time talking about that history and the people that walked before us on the land we now occupy.
Definitely. Professor Kritz does work on participatory action research and community-based research. She really emphasized to me the importance of centering your participants in your research and the value of engaging stakeholders in the research process. I resonated with this because I didn’t want to just enter a space and take information without providing some sort of agency or acknowledgement to the people that contributed.
While I couldn’t completely follow her methodology, I decided to integrate a feedback form in my interview protocol. I wasn’t sure at first if that was enough to make participants feel open to critique my questions or interview style, but actually after my first interview, the participant called me and said they wanted to give me something to help me with my next interviews. They gave me about six tobacco ties, which in the Syilx culture is something you offer someone to show appreciation for the knowledge or insight they have shared with you. I don’t know for sure if the feedback form made this participant feel comfortable sharing and contributing to improving the research process; however, I think my intention as both a learner and a researcher came across. I ended up using the tobacco ties in all my next interviews as a way to show appreciation.
Definitely. I really loved Kelowna and learning about the Syilx Okanagan people. Being there made me think about using my future skills as a nurse to work in Indigenous health. It made me think about ways to decolonize medicine and ways to integrate evidence-based health practices with Indigenous traditions and knowledge. There’s so much information and knowledge in Indigenous medicine; it’s just a matter of getting our society to validate and include it. I don’t know exactly where I will end up in my career. However, this experience solidified my desire to work with underserved populations.
In my first interview, I introduced myself, making sure to state where I went to school, what I was studying, and what I was researching. Unconsciously, I had sort of just gone on this ramble of my credentials. The participant introduced themselves after me, and they started by talking about their ancestry, their heritage, their family, and where they had come from and how they had journeyed to get here. Just the difference in how we introduced ourselves struck me. It demonstrated how important family, heritage, and community is to Indigenous groups.
In DC, we spend so much time thinking about our careers and education and resumes that we don’t slow down and think about what makes someone who they are. I think we forget that we’re inherently social creatures and that the people and heritage that came before you has weight. It’s also a reflection of the differences in our society. Our postcolonial world puts this major emphasis on individual success and achievement and, in my opinion, neglects the work that is done for community and in service of others. I was so touched by the culture of community and compassion that was demonstrated by the Indigenous knowledge keepers in Kelowna, British Columbia.
Pictures courtesy of Sydney Blackston.
August 23, 2023
Sydney Blackston (N‘25) is the inaugural recipient of the Maeve McKean Global Health Award. This highly selective fellowship offers one Georgetown student the opportunity to conduct their own research anywhere in the world the summer before their senior year.
