If you’re a complete n00b here, we’ve been following the story of Makayla Sault, a Canadian First Nations girl who died of leukemia at the age of 11 because her parents decided to abandon the live-saving chemotherapy and try “traditional” cures, including the traditional Aboriginal cure of visiting the Hippocrates Quack Health Institute in Florida for a vegetarian diet, vitamin injections, and “cold laser therapy.” It didn’t work, of course, and Makayla recently died.
“J. J.,” another First Nations girl, also afflicted with leukemia at age 11, has similarly given up chemo for “alternative” (i.e., ineffectual) medicine with her parent’s support; she will die soon, too.
Last week I reported that Makayla’s mother, Sonya Sault, gave a self-serving and exculpatory lecture at McMaster University under the aegis of McMaster’s Indigenous Studies program. As the Globe and Mail reported, “Ms. Sault spoke at an event organized by McMaster University’s Indigenous Studies Program in an effort to understand the problems between First Nation peoples and the health-care system.” Ms. Sault reported that her daughter had pleaded for the cessation of chemotherapy, implicitly pinning Makayla’s death on the child’s own wishes. That’s reprehensible, for the parents’ job is to ensure that the child understood that any sickness from chemotherapy was a necessary side effect to save her life (and now there are drugs to alleviate those side effects). Their job was not to cave in to the child’s request, or to pressure from their tribe.
As far as “understanding the problems between First Nation peoples and the health-care system” goes, it’s clear from both the lecture and the smarmy letter below that what McMaster means is that the health-care people need to allow First Nations people to abandon scientific medicine for their own ineffectual but indigenous cures. The understanding is meant to be one-way, not mutual.
This letter, which I found on McMaster University’s Indigenous Studies Program website, is an exercise in political correctness, using the excuse of expressing sorrow for Makayla’s death to push the program’s own agenda.
Now it’s admirable to try to preserve traditional cultures and prevent discrimination against First Nations people, but this letter implies more: the “culture” that should be preserved includes the right of First Nations people to kill their children by withholding modern medicine. Although couched as a plea for mutual tolerance, the letter is really about everybody else respecting the wishes of First Nations people:
This letter positive drips with disingenuousness. Let’s deconstruct it:
They expressed their support for a decision that would surely kill the girl, for the survival rate for untreated lymphoblastic leukemia is 0%. And really, to say that the young girl was “wiser” than all of us? That’s ridiculous and patronizing, for unless Makayla was completely irrational or unwise (and she did have a vision 0f Jesus), she would have endured the chemotherapy to stay alive. And if she wanted to reject it, her parents should have insisted otherwise. And since her parents didn’t, the Canadian government should have stepped in. In what sense it it “wise” to allow a child to die when she had a substantial chance—72%, according to her doctors—of being alive. And really, were the Indigenous Studies (IS) folks “optimistic” about her survival? Her doctors sure weren’t, for, unlike the IS people, they knew the prognosis was terminal without treatment.
What they mean here, which is clear from the rest of the letter, is that they want the doctors and public to learn, not the First Nations people or those who supported the Saults’ decision to kill their child. They are more interested in preserving the sensitivities of First Nations cultures than in saving the lives of First Nations children. As far as I can know, Makayla wasn’t mistreated or bullied (although the parents, probably ridden with guilt, might claim so), and the “stress” experienced by her family and community came largely from the public who objected to their callous decision. If they were “stressed,” well, that’s just too damn bad. The child’s life was at stake.
What this whole letter boils down to is this lesson: “Our goal is to ensure that First Nations people don’t get offended or upset when dealing with the healthcare system. If we must allow children to die preserve the equanimity of the parents and tribe, we will.”
I suggest you read that disgusting editorial in CMAJ, “Caring for Aboriginal patients requires trust and respect, not courtrooms.” In its call for doctors to respect the feelings of “Aboriginals” (which of course they should—up to the point that that respect is fatal), the physician-authors basically put the imprimatur on the court’s decision to allow J. J. (the still-surviving child) to forego therapy, thus sentencing her to death. From their paper:
Had the court forced J.J. to undergo such treatment, the mistrust, anger and resistance that might have ensued within her community could have greatly compromised any future ability to provide optimal care not only to her, but to all Aboriginal people. For the state to remove a child from her parents and enforce medical treatment would pose serious, possibly lifelong, repercussions for any family, but such action holds a unique horror for Aboriginal people given the legacy of residential schools.
I’m sorry about those horrible residential schools, which have thankfully been eliminated, but children’s lives are at stake now. If courts must force children to take life-saving treatment, and that angers Aboriginal people, I’m sorry, but life trumps feelings. And perhaps those people will eventually learn that the doctors know best in cases like this.
While there is perhaps a hidden message here that First Nations people should also work with the doctors (i.e., accept medical care), it’s not very obvious. And, as you see from the first sentence above, the IS people affix the blame for the situation on the “insensitive” health care providers. But really, would an increased “sensitivity” have changed the Saults’ minds? I doubt it, for, according to them, they acceded to Makayla’s own wishes to avoid a treatment that made her sick. That has nothing to do with cultural insensitivity. And I seriously doubt that the doctors treated Makayla and her parents badly; at least there is no evidence of it from the news.
The root cause of “this case”, if by that we mean Makayla’s death, is the inability of her and her parents to either understand the odds, or their insistence on ineffectual traditional medicine (i.e., cold-laser treatments). Another root cause the murderous sensitivity of the IS people and the Canadian government in “respecting” the parents’ decision. “Indigenous medicine” deserves respect and support only insofar as it works, which in this case didn’t—and couldn’t.
This whole letter is an exercise in exculpation, couched in the terms of political correctness: “mutual respect,” “cultural safety,” “respect and support of indigenous medicine,” and so on. What it leaves out is that the course of action recommended by McMaster’s Indigenous Studies program led to the death of this child:
I am not suggesting, of course, that doctors be insensitive to the backgrounds and feelings of their patients, whoever they be. But I’m suggesting that if parents try to force a religiously- or ethnically-motivated “treatment” on their children, a treatment guaranteed to hurt or kill them, then that’s where the sensitivity must stop and the coercion must begin. By supporting Makayla’s refusal of scientific treatment, McMaster’s Indigenous Studies Program is complicit in her death. They sense this. In response, they blame the doctors for their insensitivity. The letter sent by the IS program is doubly repugnant because it’s an attempt to exculpate their participation in the Sault Charade by chastising doctors and the public. The Indigenous Studies Program should have kept their noses out of this case, and recognized that their politically-correct academic stance is deadly to a child with leukemia. I am particularly offended by the letter’s supposed intention of “honouring Makayla.” It’s better to honour a child by saving her life than to engage in postmortem recriminations and breast-beating.
If you want to voice your opinion about this (and I’m sure emails from Canadians will carry the most weight, but I urge anybody who feels strongly about this to write in), this address, of the director of the Indigenous Studies Program, seems to be the most appropriate address from see the “contact” page for other officials):
Dr. Rick Monture
Hamilton Hall 103/H
Sub
Reblogged this on Mark Solock Blog.
Only a dying culture puts tradition over human life. All cultures must earn respect not receive it automatically by the fact that they exist. Bad ideas driving bad cultures must be condemned and not tolerated. Cultures everything else must evolve and progress or stagnate and die.
Absolutely agree. By almost any objective standard, their culture is virtually dead already. These are people who probably live in air-conditioned, centrally-heated houses or apartments, travel around in cars or on planes, watch TV, cook their dinners in microwaves, use computers and do all the same stuff that the rest of us do. It seems they don’t value their traditional culture highly enough to forego all that.
If the right to deny medical treatment to their children is the last bastion of the “culture”, then the sooner it dies the better.
Many First Nations people living on reserves are living in truly wretched conditions. Poor housing, poor medical access, over crowding, the list goes on. It is particularly bad in reserves with no road access.
Not these First Nations people. They live on New Credit & 6 Nations (I can never remember which from which – I think JJ is 6 Nations & Makayal is New Credit).
These are modern places, indistinguishable from the Canadian towns surrounding them. You do not know that you are in the 6 Nations reserve or New Credit until you see the cheap gasoline and cheap smokes signs.
Both of these reservations are right near where I live.
True but there are many reserves where conditions are bad.
True but my point stands for many northern reserves.
FN people are proud of their culture. I have had no contact with native people since I retired but when working I knew and met many people from different reserves here in northern Ontario. They are proud of their heritage and strongly resist any attempts at assimilation.
Why should the adoption of modern technologies and medicine developed by modern science be seen as “assimilation” or “destroying” a culture? I appreciate my Nordic culture just fine, but I go to legitimate hospitals, drive a car, and do not sail around in longships marauding coastal villages.
Humans used to carve information onto clay tablets. Now we use paper, or electrons. I do to understand the view that some humans should resist availing themselves of technological improvements.
do to = don’t
I park my longboat in the backyard and hang my Viking horns on the hatrack.
In between pillaging jaunts? 😉
How’d you guess??
I don’t know. Canada’s aboriginal people have not had a good deal and there seems to be fear that settler (I have seen this term used quite often)culture is going to destroy native culture. It is a pity that there is this suspicion. I don’t have any answers.
I check the boxes but never get any notification.
Canada’s, America’s, Australia’s, Africa’s, etc. aboriginal people have not had a good deal. I suspect native heritages will be extremely hard to maintain over the years, and understand why that would be a loss.
But we can’t change history, and it’s certainly a Pyrrhic victory for Makayla’s tribe to obtain a win for traditional methods at the price of a life.
I agree it would be a loss to *forget* about various cultures and how they lived at various times, but I don’t feel we should expect people to continue to live as though it’s 1700. See my reply to Richard below.
Also, keep checking the boxes…WordPress is moody.
I should’ve made it clear I wasn’t arguing with anything you wrote. Your use of the word “assimilation” simply got me thinking about why one would characterize the use of the best medicine, or any technology, as “assimilation”. One can’t expect cultures not to evolve, and one certainly can’t expect individual humans to sacrifice their well-being for the sake of maintaining “traditional” (read: ineffective or inefficient) cultural methods.
Yes, well put.
There is a checkbox on the WordPress site that you may have selected that will prevent all emails even if you subscribe down here.
What bothered me about this letter most is that it seems that the IS group was involved in discussions between Makayla’s parents and the doctors. WTF?! Why should they be involved? Whould the JDL get involved every time a Jew has to go to the doctor for crying out loud!
I’m trying to think who I should bring to my treatments…hmmmmm.
I keep thinking about that, too, Diana. I can’t remember, but I wonder if the parents brought them in? Even if they did, though, it seems to me to be a real ethical problem for an academic, not otherwise knowledgeable about medicine or care, to get involved in a medical issue like this. I would hope the university, at least, looks into this.
That might unearth that some of the Indigenous Studies staff actually believe that alternative treatments are just about as good as real medicine.
Gloria Steinem?
Maybe Richard Dawkins because he is our atheist God as the press often seems to suggest. 🙂
Oh, good point!
😀
In the most serious example of religion vs science it shows the sometimes futile effort to bring primitive thinking up to date. There are many who will not learn and live.
“…guide both sides to a therapeutic care plan that truly facilitates a culturally safe, person-centred approach.” How self-absorbed is this department? How about a plan that facilitates an approach that actually results in the adequate medical treatment of the child? I am sure the members of the department will feel a warming glow of inclusiveness when they attend her culturally safe funeral.
A blunt but absolutely on-the-mark comment.
This letter should be aimed at the Hippocrates Health Institute and their doctors. Lasers and intravenous Vitamin C are not traditional or Indigenous medicines, the doctor there mistreated and lied to Makayla and her Mother.
The reason why they were “pressured and threatened with apprehension” was because a child’s life was at risk! But it doesn’t matter what the actual doctors said it was they way they said it apparently.
This letter is shameful. It does everything to blame the doctors trying to save Makayla instead of blaming those who stopped the treatment and are responsible.
As a follow-up there is this article from the CBC news website
http://www.cbc.ca/news/aboriginal/brian-clement-hippocrates-health-institute-head-ordered-to-stop-practising-medicine-1.2968780
So the head of the Hippocrates clinic is not a physician
Yes, I’ve already posted about that a while back.
I’m waiting for him to come out saying something like, “How dare they accuse me of not being a hypocrite.”
Excellent piece. Thanks for articulating it so well.
The travesty you discuss – the consequences of ignorance combined with off-the-rails political correctness – is sure to die a slow and painful death. As weird as it may seem, we still have those among us who ritualistically fondle venomous snakes with utmost confidence that no harm will befall them. Some States even sanction their right to continue this bizarro practice.
Children of the snake handling cults are taught from an early age that faith trumps trumps everything, including probability. When providing candid instruction that precisely the opposite is true is considered culturally insensitive, it’s obvious why the death of which I mention will be slow and painful.
If their faith trumps probability, they should be able to bust the bank in a casino. Sounds a lot safer than snakes, in case your faith lapses for a moment.
I inavoidably read that as McMaster’s Disingenuous Studies program.
If I correctly recall, McMaster holds the papers and some personal effects of Bertrand Russell. I contemplate how he would have reacted to this.
I hope the First Nations people soon come to see these “cultural respecters” as the patronizing monsters they are. Those people on the IS program would make excuses for psychopathic genocidaires if they thought it was because of “culture”.
“Culture” and “respect” are their gods, blindly worshipped and fed politically expedient sacrifices to keep happy. These slimy mindless moralists corrupt the space they occupy and other people with their mere existence. They should be quarantined to keep their madness in check.
Keep in mind, most IS folks will be aboriginals themselves.
Quetzalcoatl on a bike.
Let’s hope no-one in that department gets asked to be on an ethics panel for clinical research.
I see their approach as being the opposite of a “trusting and mutually beneficial relationship.” I trust someone more when they treat me as an adult, equally protected and covered by law. But the Canadian government is not treating them that way. This may appear to be special treatment for the benefit of native peoples, but I bet they’d get a lot more long-term benefit out of equal protection under law.
Separate but equal (systems) impoverished blacks in the US both economically and educationally. It impoverishes native Americans in the US today. It takes a special kind of pomo myopia to think a separate but equal sort of health care policy will work wonders on native health care choices if you just walk far enough north.
Part of the issue is First Nations are given purview over medicine.
137 posts to go till the arbitrary but not insignificant milestone.
In the photos I’ve seen, JJ and her mom appear to be wearing modern clothing. I assume her mom gets around using modern modes of transportation, and probably watches TV.
Why is she willing to take advantage of scientific and technical advances in other areas of her life, but not when it comes to medicine? Could it be because there are too many useful idiots, like the ones that signed this letter, who justify it?
Part of the answer is (IMO): there is not much money to be made in selling spirit-empowered wheeled transportation, chi-based telephones, or telepathic TVs.
lol.
It’s the feel-good world we live in now. Everyone needs to be treated with kid gloves and have their bullshit ideas shielded from criticism.
There is no such thing as “Western medicine” or “Indigenous medicine.” If a cure for cancer can work for western people, I’m pretty sure it may work for other human beings around the globe as well.
How can a rational person truly believe that leukemia can be cured by vitamins and cold-laser therapy (whatever the hell that is). I suspect they know they are quite responsible for Makayla’s death. I see this letter as an admission of guilt hidden behind a hypocritical sense of pathos and a misguided obligation towards cultural sensitivity. This entire business is nauseating to say the least.
A cruel irony in this story is that Aboriginals have traditional medicines and practices that are potentially very useful in concert with modern medicine: mood-stabilizing and appetite-expanding marijuana, perspective-broadening psychedelics, and the support of family and community in rituals with music and chanting can also be empowering, soothing and distracting.
When my wife was five years old, she stumbled backwards and landed on an electric heater, sustaining severe burns to the backs of her legs. She has almost no recollection of the injury or subsequent treatment, but her father lived with the memory of the nightly ordeal of cleaning the wounds and scraping away necrotic skin before her bath, and then applying save and dressings afterward, with her screaming and begging him to stop the whole time. Only a fool or a liar would claim that she was the wiser of the two: it can’t be up to a five-year-old to decide whether the teen and grown woman she will become is to live with disfigured legs.
My closest experience to dad’s was when my now-teenage daughter had to be strapped to a board at age four, despite her being given a healthy dose of Valium, so her dentist could clean-out and cap a molar with a nasty cavity. It felt like cruelty at the time, but again, wisdom is in doing the hard-but-healthy thing (and in learning the hard way that one’s four-year-old can’t be trusted to brush her own teeth unsupervised).
A little pot, Valium and/or ‘shrooms might not be a bad idea in improving parents’ “wisdom,” either, come to think of it.
salve, not save
As it happened, a Supreme Court ruling on precisely this issue serves as a glaring reminder of the unequal treatment of the law regarding “religious accommodation” in these two cases.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Employment_Division_v._Smith
It boggles the mind that laws requiring the safeguarding of children under the care of a parent or guardian are somehow twisted to fall outside the category of “neutral law of general applicability.”
“For the state to remove a child from her parents and to enforce medical treatment would pose serious, possibly life-long repercussions…” Life-long? Well, they made sure her life was not long. One of the most weasily statements I ever read.
Shame on them.
When I read that, I said out loud, “well you won’t have to worry about that now since she’s dead.”
That has got to be one of the most oblivious statements of all time. Good choice qualifier, “possibly,” though.
I haven’t read all the background stuff, but since when is “cold laser” a traditional indigenous treatment?
The gist of the letter seems to be, “We think it’s better for indigenous children to die than to resist their parents’ unscientific beliefs.”
A surprising priority.
It’s even worse: we expect you to accept this treatment that doesn’t work and to do bit smiling.
I’m glad Jerry mentioned the onesidedness because I got that impression too.
“We owe it to Makayla, her family, and the community to ensure that in the future, Indigenous people seeking primary health care will never again experience the additional stress related to systemic and structural barriers that are ever present in the health care system.”
That’s what the problem was, that indigenous people were made to experience the friction that resulted when evidence based medicine came up against cultural beliefs – not that the patient died.
JC: “They are more interested in preserving the sensitivities of First Nations cultures than in saving the lives of First Nations children.”
That nails it right there.
My email to the director of the program:
“I was horrified to read your rationalization of your support in allowing a young girl to die a painful death when she had good chances of survival with appropriate medical care.
“You may try to convince yourself that you were acting out of compassion and understanding, but you were not, you were participating in a cruel and preventable outcome.
“This has nothing to do with preserving indigenous culture. It is child abuse, and you endorsed it. You and your program have no moral standing in my estimation.”
Very nicely done!