In a 2022 message, Dean Galea discusses the need to acknowledge historic injustice to begin shaping a healthier future for native populations. "Health is deeply shaped by history. Past events echo in the present, progress made in earlier centuries helps ensure a healthier world now, injustice committed long ago undermines health at this very moment. We have begun to acknowledge this, for example, in our belated but necessary national conversation about how the legacy of slavery has shaped health in the present. Less discussed is the founding sin of the treatment of North America’s Indigenous population (roughly defined as Alaska Natives, American Indians, and Native Hawaiians). The natives of what was once called the New World (it was only new to the European colonizers—to the Indigenous, it had long been home) were subject to what has been rightly described as genocide. The colonization of North America was, for native peoples, a history of theft, war, plague, forced displacement, and social and political marginalization, as Indigenous societies were attacked and undermined by an invading and occupying force intent on taking as much of the continent’s resources as possible. This history is inseparable from Indigenous health in the present." Read the full note here and please join us on October 25 for a Public Health Conversation on centering the health of indigenous populations in the public health agenda. ➡️ http://spr.ly/6048uz2Aq
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Executive Director
1yTime will tell if action is put to these words.