Cindy Blackstock, a renowned First Nations scholar, has been appointed the inaugural chancellor of the new NOSM University.Supplied
Cindy Blackstock, a renowned First Nations scholar, activist and advocate for child welfare, has been named as the inaugural chancellor of NOSM University.
Dr. Blackstock embodies principles of social justice, respect and integrity, the Northern Ontario medical school said Thursday in announcing her appointment.
“As chancellor of NOSM University, her tenacious, inspirational leadership and steadfast moral courage will set the tone for us as Canada’s first independent medical university, and the only such institution in the country established with an explicit social accountability mandate,” Dr. Sarita Verma, NOSM’s president, dean and CEO, said in a press release.
NOSM University, which was created as the Northern Ontario School of Medicine in 2002, became an independent school earlier this year when it broke its affiliations with Lakehead University in Thunder Bay and Laurentian University in Sudbury. NOSM’s mandate is to address the physician and specialist shortages in remote and rural regions across Northern Ontario.
Dr. Blackstock, a member of Gitxsan First Nation in British Columbia, says her appointment is an opportunity to build a way of working that celebrates everyone’s differences.
“I want us to see that it’s okay to be uncomfortable when you don’t know somebody else. That’s where the brilliance of the human community can come forward,” she said in an interview with The Globe and Mail. “And when we honour people’s human rights, we’re not taking away from our own human rights. We’re actually making everyone’s human rights stand out and be honoured.”
Dr. Blackstock is a professor of social work at McGill University. She is also executive director of the First Nations Child and Family Caring Society in Ottawa. In 2007, she led a human-rights complaint against the federal government for underfunding Indigenous children in care. The Canadian Human Rights Tribunal agreed that it was discrimination and the case has since grown into a historic $40-billion settlement.
Dr. Blackstock will serve a four-year volunteer term as NOSM’s chancellor. More than 800 medical doctors have graduated from the university to date, with most of the students coming from Northern Ontario.
“I understand the need for compassionate holistic health care, especially in rural and remote communities,” Dr. Blackstock said in statement. “Universal health care means that every person should have access to the health care they need.”
In her interview with The Globe, she said that key themes for her term at NOSM include looking at the impact of colonialism and how health care can be shaped “in a way that is responsive to the unique cultures, realities and histories of First Nations, Métis and Inuit folks, and other people of diversity.”
Dr. Blackstock said that promoting and recognizing the value of First Nations, Métis and Inuit traditions on health is also a priority. She said it is important to understand how those traditions can work alongside Western types of medicine, but they “need to be respected, need to be honoured.”
As a big believer in honouring host territories where work is done, Dr. Blackstock said she would like to see the next chancellor of the university be a First Nations, Métis or Inuit person from the area.
“I’d like to see for all academia, but certainly it’s a theme I prefer to take up, as having that courageous conversation about how do you work with, particularly the local communities, of structuring ways where persons who are authentically Indigenous are able to have the space to occupy key decision-making roles and areas of influence,” she said.
In the meantime, she says she sees herself as a placeholder who will hopefully provide a foundation for the future while also making some progress.
Dr. Blackstock will oversee convocation for the university next June, a celebration she is looking forward to, she said. But she also hopes to engage with communities before that, half-heartedly joking that every time she thinks she has a free week, the federal government files a new litigation related to the child-welfare human-rights case.