Welcome to my second CSL homework assignment, where I discuss my professional perspectives on my work so far! This one is slightly wordier than the last one, so I'll be brief. Enjoy!
All the best,
~S
What professional skills or competencies have you been able to observe?
My placement consists mostly of research done on my own, but I have still had the opportunity to observe others in the Métis Family & Community Research Lab. Occasionally, there is a PhD student working on her thesis on the history of Métis women. When I first met her in the lab, I asked her about her work and what she does. She showed me a document she was transcribing into the Métis digital archive database. What amazed me was how she was almost instantly able to decipher the various shorthand codes in hundred-year-old, script-like, clergyman’s handwriting, and to tell me what the all the dates were (birth, baptism, death, etc) and what the relation was between the people listed on the document. She was able to tell me a story, when all I saw initially was a bunch of scribbles. When I reflect on this moment, I realize what an incredible skill it is to interpret complex information and present it in a way that is understandable to people with no background in that particular topic. Every researcher wants to communicate how awesome they think their research is, but effectively translating from the jargon of their research field to the language of the commons is key.
What links can you establish between your experiences and your initial conception of your future profession?
My program of study is Honours in Biomedical Science with a minor in Indigenous studies, and I’m leaning towards a career in social epidemiology and public health policy. One of my reasons for pursuing a minor in Indigenous studies (and this CSL placement) is that it challenges me to view the world from a different perspective. In my daily life, I find myself questioning what knowledge we choose to teach and how we teach it. I consider the influence of colonialism when I reflect on why things are the way they are. I have learned more about the equity concerns involved in how we talk about race and Indigenous peoples in relation to scientific research. It is also important to consider that the use of racial categories in scientific and medical research can sometimes be harmful, given the wide genetic and cultural diversity within these socially constructed groups. Given my interest in a future career in health, it is essential to consider social and cultural aspects when coming up with solutions to address the disparities in health that Indigenous peoples face. This CSL placement ties my two fields of study together nicely, and has allowed me to further explore the social aspects of Indigenous identity; it is just a small part of a lifelong journey of learning that will certainly continue into my career.
What links can you establish between your experiences and your initial conception of the Science Community?
What lead me to come up with the idea for my CSL placement in the first place was inequities I learned about within the Science Community. In my health sociology and bioethics classes last semester, I learned that science is not value-free, even though its aim is to observe the natural world. Some examples we looked at involved eugenics, false claims of biological determinism, and cases such as the Tuskegee study, which was notoriously racist under the guise of medical science. Last semester for an Indigenous studies class, I read Medicine Unbundled: A Journey Through the Minefields of Indigenous Health Care by Gary Geddes, which details the notorious nutritional experiments done on starving Indigenous children. So basically, going into this placement, I was relatively aware that science has not exactly been kind to marginalized people.
In a geography class this semester, I’m learning about the social construction of nature, and how what we perceive in what we call “the natural world” is still only what we have learned to see. In essence, many of our observations in the name of science are social constructions – words we made up to describe things, and to describe things that resemble other things we’ve previously described.
So to tie this in to my CSL placement, I guess you could say that I’m examining some of the inequities that exist in scientific research. I’m asking questions regarding the extent to which culture, history, and social aspects influence how we conduct science and our understanding of scientific concepts. Especially when it comes to the general public’s perception of race, the lines are blurred between interpreting it as a purely a social construct or a real biological difference. My work aims to deconstruct this complex issue and gain a better understanding of different ways that different disciplines document lineage and relationships, and to see if concepts from one field (genealogy) can be applied to another (genetics) to make the latter more equitable and socially aware.
What skills or abilities associated with your future profession and/or career did you use and what was the result?
Some skills I’ve been working on through my CSL placement are:
- Critical analysis of existing research – this is an incredibly important part of developing public health policy, especially interpreting the credibility/methodology of the research and understanding what it says so that appropriate policies that aim to reach the outcomes proposed in the research can be implemented.
- Navigation of online databases – this is an important skill for finding research in the first place or for finding documents to include in research. I’ve learned about the important role that genealogical documents (like the ones found in the databases I have used) play in developing lineages for Indigenous people trying to prove tribal membership through blood quantum rules.
- Communicating research in a professional way with scholars – every time I’m in the Métis Research Lab, I discuss my findings with my supervisor, Brenda. I also had the opportunity to talk about my project with Jesse Thistle at his event. Although he seemed impressed with my research interests (especially that I knew of Kim TallBear’s work), I still felt a little nervous talking to someone with such an impressive academic background with a lot of expertise on my research topic. But, I believe that communicating research will get easier with more practice.
Although the amount of reading required can be tedious at times, overall I feel like reading through journals and various other sources gets easier with more practice. I’ve learned how to question certain beliefs and assumptions about identity and the role genetics plays in identity, and understand that identity is influenced by an intersection of many factors (genetic, social, cultural, etc). This is an important concept to understand for research in population health.
What aspects of your personal growth have you observed?
The other day, I received a message from a friend asking me to educate her on the current conflict between the Canadian government and the Wet’suwet’en peoples. My friend was having difficulty understanding the articles she had read on the news, and said that given my field of study and personal interest in Indigenous topics, she assumed I would have a good understanding of what is going on. To be quite honest, I haven’t exactly followed Wet’suwet’en as much as I would have liked. Nonetheless, I was able to provide a lot of the historical context behind Indigenous land rights in British Columbia and the Wet’suwet’en people because of my research into the Delgamuukw case for this CSL project, a case in which precedence regarding Indigenous peoples’ rights to land were set. By the end of our conversation, I felt that I had really made a difference by educating someone on Indigenous sovereignty and helping contextualize her understanding of current events in a way that could be easily understood. This experience has made me more confident in my own ability to educate others on Indigenous rights and history, and has made me realize the importance of being an informed ally (and having more informed allies!) in our community to encourage other non-Indigenous people to view the world through a postcolonial lens.