When the Truth and Reconciliation Commission published its recommendations in 2015, Canadians were called to understand and take action around the impacts of colonization on Indigenous people. A conversation that took over 500 years to develop was asking settler descendants to become aware of the systematic residue caused when Treaty obligations went unfulfilled. The social-determinant-of-health impacts on First Nations are well known to HSAA members. We witness the over-representation of adverse outcomes for Indigenous people daily through the services we provide. Yet few of us ever received the real story about why this was so disproportionate.

At the beginning of his first presidential campaign in 2016, Mike Parker stopped into my home community of St. Paul, Alberta. While meeting with me to discuss his vision for HSAA, he asked me about the big brick building he saw behind the airport on his way into town. I told Mike it was the former federally sponsored, church-operated residential school built in the 1930s. It was taken over in 1971 by the seven First Nations in the area and is now University nuhelot’įne thaiyots’į nistameyimâkanak Blue Quills, governed by an Indigenous board and informed by Indigenous knowledge, world view and practices.

At his request, I brought Mike to the university to experience the imagination of what history must have looked like there. I introduced him to my friends and academic colleagues, and they shared some of the stories. Mike was observably impacted by his experience and told me that he, too, grew up near a residential school that closed in 1995 but that this was the first time he knew it even existed. For him, this became unacceptable.

Mike recognized that the union movement had roots in doing social justice work, and that support was required by non-Indigenous allies to address the wrongs of colonization and meet our mutual Treaty obligations. For Mike, organized labour was a movement that had a responsibility for standing in solidarity with the marginalized, as much as it had a duty to respect the contract – which now included the one signed between the governments of Europe and the Indigenous governments of Turtle Island.

When Mike Parker was elected president of HSAA, he said he did not know enough about the insidious nature of historical trauma or the full impacts of colonization and unfulfilled Treaty obligations. He was clear, however, that HSAA, as a union of health care providers, could no longer stand by. He introduced the idea of having HSAA’s leadership experience the understanding he came away with from Blue Quills as a beginning to HSAA’s solidarity work with First Nations. This was such a life-changing exercise for the Board and staff that the Board authorized and organized bi-annual education events at Blue Quills for HSAA members to do the same. In 2018, HSAA became the first labour union to fly the Metis Nation and Treaty 6 flags publicly alongside our own. In 2019, Mike Parker was fully committed when the social justice committee proposed the idea of reaching out to Alberta communities for discussion on this subject through a 14-day walk from Edmonton to Calgary. Through Mike’s leadership, HSAA has become a leader among labour unions in this work. As healthcare unionists, we can be proud of the risks we have taken to begin doing the right thing in our communities and for Mike’s leadership in helping healthcare providers understand and become better allies.