Description

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Launched by healthcare providers in January 2018, the #aHand2Hold campaign confronted the Quebec government's practice of separating children from their families during medical evacuation airlifts, which disproportionately affected remote and northern Indigenous communities. Pediatric emergency physician Samir Shaheen-Hussain's captivating narrative of this successful campaign, which garnered unprecedented public attention and media coverage, seeks to answer lingering questions about why such a cruel practice remained in place for so long. In doing so it serves as an indispensable case study of contemporary medical colonialism in Quebec. Fighting for a Hand to Hold exposes the medical establishment's role in the displacement, colonization, and genocide of Indigenous peoples in Canada. Through meticulously gathered government documentation, historical scholarship, media reports, public inquiries, and personal testimonies, Shaheen-Hussain connects the draconian medevac practice with often-disregarded crimes and medical violence inflicted specifically on Indigenous children. This devastating history and ongoing medical colonialism prevent Indigenous communities from attaining internationally recognized measures of health and social well-being because of the pervasive, systemic anti-Indigenous racism that persists in the Canadian public health care system - and in settler society at large. Shaheen-Hussain's unique perspective combines his experience as a frontline pediatrician with his long-standing involvement in anti-authoritarian social justice movements. Sparked by the indifference and callousness of those in power, this book draws on the innovative work of Indigenous scholars and activists to conclude that a broader decolonization struggle calling for reparations, land reclamation, and self-determination for Indigenous peoples is critical to achieve reconciliation in Canada.

About the Author

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Samir Shaheen-Hussain is assistant professor in the Faculty of Medicine at McGill University and works as a pediatric emergency physician in Montreal (Tio'tia:ke).

Praise For…

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"The author meticulously employs the Hand to Hold story to help readers access the more significant narrative about racism, effectively connecting the two in a work that meaningfully adds to the canon of indigenous advocacy. The specific examples of callous removal of indigenous children without their parents for emergency medical treatment are seamlessly integrated within the larger narrative of residential schools, racism, and debates about the supposed difference between equity and equality. Recommended. All readers." Choice

"Fighting for a Hand to Hold denounces with ferocity the utterly inhuman, decades-long practice of separating children from their families during emergency medevacs in northern and remote regions of Quebec. In a precise, compelling, and well-documented narrative, Samir Shaheen-Hussain challenges our collective understanding of systemic racism and social determinants of health applied to Indigenous communities most dependent on medevac airlifts and most impacted by the non-accompaniment rule. An eye-opening, tough, and essential book." Dr Joanne Liu, pediatric emergency physician and former international president of Médecins Sans Frontières

"Samir Shaheen-Hussain's Fighting for a Hand to Hold is a searing indictment of medical colonialism in Canada. This must-read book shatters the myth of universal and equitable healthcare as a pillar of this country's benevolent social democracy and forcefully exposes the active involvement of the medical system in upholding historic and ongoing settler-colonial power." Harsha Walia, author of Undoing Border Imperialism

"In Fighting for a Hand to Hold Samir Shaheen-Hussain exposes the social, cultural, and historical structures that allow medical colonialism to hide in plain sight as it harms generations of Indigenous children and their families. It is an unflinching analysis that should be required reading in every medical school in the country." Maureen Lux, professor, Brock University and author of Separate Beds: A History of Indian Hospitals in Canada, 1920s-1980s

"Its clever framing, detailed research, and frequent critical gems put Fighting for a Hand to Hold in the very good company of a small group of stellar books and articles about Indigenous health issues, all of them manifestos for change. It's a passionate and informed report from the medical frontlines that exposes some of the social determinants and racial subtexts that prevent us from improving and safeguarding the lives of Indigenous peoples and other minorities in Canada." Gary Geddes, author of Medicine Unbundled: A Journey through the Minefields of Indigenous Health Care