For the Indigenous Explorations project, my group researched the health of Indigenous people in Canada. We split the project into three parts and did three parts each, I researched the history of Indigenous health and their traditional healing practices. I talked about how colonization impacted the health of Indigenous people. Bella researched the current health of Indigenous people. She touched on the gap in the health system when it comes to Indigenous people and some factors that may contribute to that. Lastly, Kiki researched the health of the children in residential schools. She delved into how they were treated, the conditions of these schools, and how the abuse the victims faced traumatized them.

  Researching the health of Indigenous people made me aware of how the health system and government in Canada do not properly address the concerns of Indigenous people. It was sad to see how things like colonization, poor living conditions, and racism impacted Aboriginal people’s health. Recording the podcast was something I was really looking forward to because I, myself listen to a lot of podcasts. It was harder than I expected because up until then, I didn’t realize that I had such a bad stuttering problem. Even though it took a couple of tries to finally get it right, I’m glad we practiced over and over. Overall, I thoroughly enjoyed recording this podcast, and it is honestly something I would want to do again.

At first, researching our topic was not as easy as I thought it would be. I had to look at various different sources to confirm that the information I was sharing was correct. However, using the school’s resources in conjunction with online sources was very helpful because it allowed me to compare my information to other sources to ensure it’s right. Since ‘health’ is a pretty broad topic we had to split it into three parts for each person in the group. I researched the history of Indigenous health, Bella researched information on the state of current Indigenous people’s health, and Kiki researched the health of Indigenous children in residential schools. As a group, the research part went pretty smoothly and we all found interesting facts and information that we combined for our topic.

Although the research part of the assignment went well, we ran into some issues recording it and posting it. We used Kiki’s computer and the audio sounded kind of muffled. However, this could be partly due to the fact that we leaned in to speak on the microphone, as opposed to passing it around, which we didn’t originally do because we didn’t want the microphone to pick up the audio of us passing it around. In hindsight, if I could do it again, I would re-record it. When it came to posting the audio we ran into an issue, where we couldn’t post the file because it was an ‘aup’ file and not an ‘mp3’ file, however, we quickly figured it out and came up with a solution on our own.

Sources:

Burnett, K. (2006, February 7). Health of Indigenous Peoples in Canada. The Canadian Encyclopedia. Retrieved March 11, 2022, from https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/aboriginal-people-health#:~:text=Minimal%20health%20services%20were%20made%20available%20to%20Indigenous,feared%20Indigenous%20communities%20might%20spread%20to%20white%20settlements.

Joseph, B. (2014, November 14). What is residential school syndrome? Indigenous Corporate Training Inc. Retrieved March 11, 2022, from https://www.ictinc.ca/blog/what-is-residential-school-syndrome