Vancouver Foundation

To respect the data sovereignty of our partners, most of the project details are available to partners only. Please feel free to contact the UPROOT team should you have any questions. If you are meant to have access to any of these projects, please email the team at uproot.team@ubc.ca.

Uprooting Pharmacy: A Two-Eyed Seeing Path for Change

The Uprooting Pharmacy project seeks to uproot colonial and systemic issues in pharmacy that have led to discriminatory practices experienced by Indigenous patients. We seek to answer the question: what are the culturally safe principles for integrating Indigenous and western worldviews in the decolonization and Indigenization of community pharmacy practice? We will explore this question from the perspectives of the communities impacted: Indigenous patients, care providers, Elders and Knowledge Keepers. Identifying the benefit of this work to our community and how it can synergize with existing health programming will be a related topic to investigate. We also acknowledge that traditional knowledge is privileged and in desperate need of revitalization and preservation, and may apply differently to a diverse urban population of Indigenous people in Metro Vancouver.

Through our collective and ongoing engagement with the Indigenous patients and partners we serve, there is a clear community expressed need to better understand how we can provide culturally safe pharmacy services that integrate both Indigenous and western worldviews to support the physical, mental, emotional and spiritual wellbeing of Indigenous peoples.

Pharmacists are a key component of the healthcare system, frequently identified as one of the most accessible and trusted care providers. As a profession, pharmacy is deeply rooted in a colonial and Eurocentric view of western values, evidence-based medicine, and a transactional approach to care provision. Ironically, this model of “community” pharmacy often lacks the humility, flexibility, and understanding of the Indigenous communities they are destined to serve, contravening Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s Calls to Action, the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, and In Plain Sight. The result has been a homogenous and discriminative culture of community pharmacy that is often steeped in harmful stigma and pervasive implicit bias. For Indigenous people, this results in significant barriers to receiving traditional medicines and healing practices, and pressure to forgo those methods as inferior. Further exacerbating these issues in community pharmacy is the unsafe environment for Indigenous-identifying pharmacists, an absence of learning pathways for Indigenous pharmacy students, and a lack of Indigenous-owned pharmacies. Connections between these systemic issues to the determinants of health can be traced back to the structural conflict between Indigenous and western worldviews.

Community Partner(s)

Metro Vancouver Aboriginal Executive Council (MVAEC)

Metro Vancouver Indigenous Services Society (MVISS)

Lu’ma Medical

Student(s)

Brandon Whitmore, E2P PharmD Student

Tia DeGroot, NITEP Student

Ryan Knowles, E2P PharmD Student

Madi Runa, E2P PharmD Student

Emma Mills, E2P PharmD Student

Katie Arisz, E2P PharmD Student

Kadence Cave, NITEP Student

Granting Agency/Partner(s)

Vancouver Foundation

Partner Access

Co-Developing a Culturally Safe Engagement Framework with Urban Indigenous Partners

There is a long-standing history of improper engagement with Indigenous individuals that often lacks respect, humility, and understanding of Indigenous protocols. To rebuild trust with people, researchers must commit to reconciliation and develop strategies for ethical engagement. The UPROOT team has more than 10 years of history working with individual Nations to decolonize and Indigenize pharmacy education and practice. The team has primarily worked with individual Nations, but their next project will focus on Urban Indigenous people which represent various First Nations, Métis, and Inuit people. Due to the diversity, UPROOT lacks clarity on the proper principles of engagement in lieu of Nation-specific approaches.

This project aims to create an engagement framework for engaging with Indigenous individuals, communities and/or organizations by answering the following research question: What are the culturally safe principles and protocols for engagement with Urban Indigenous partners?