The College Fix

Professor says students learn ‘from Indigenous ways in terms of health promotion and being at one with nature’

A required nursing class at the University of Alberta teaches students about “systemic racism” and “Indigenous ways” of understanding “health … and being one with nature,” a dean of the nursing school told The College Fix.

However, the course has prompted concerns about a growing emphasis on “identity politics” in healthcare.

Dr. Joanne Olson, professor and vice dean of nursing at the university, told The College Fix that she “absolutely” believes the “Indigenous Health in Canada” class should be mandatory for nursing students.

“Students learn about the legacy of systemic racism against our Indigenous people and the public health crisis that has resulted due to racism and racial trauma,” Olson said in a recent email.

The course catalog describes it as “the beginning step to culturally safe interaction and practice. Focus is on introducing students to a variety of historical realities and contemporary issues relevant to Indigenous health in Canada.”

The university created the class in “response to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada: Calls to Action,” a report by the government to “advance the process of Canadian reconciliation” toward students and families impacted by its former residential schools for Indigenous people.

Olson said the topics that they discuss include “(1) Aboriginal health issues, (2) The history and legacy of residential schools, (3) The United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, (4) Treaties and Aboriginal rights, (5) Indigenous Teachings and Practices.”

“As Canadians, we have an obligation to incorporate this important part of our history into the basic curricula of all health professionals as there are strong links between past events and trauma and current health issues of the Indigenous population,” Olson said.

Students also can learn a lot “from Indigenous ways in terms of health promotion and being at one with nature,” she told The Fix. “These lessons can offer us valuable knowledge as we try to deal with the current issues that face us today (climate change, mental health issues, intergenerational trauma etc.).”

However, when contacted about the course, Dr. Stanley Goldfarb, chair of the medical organization Do No Harm, raised concerns about its ideological focus. His organization works to end identity politics in medicine.

“The true origins of this mentality reside in postmodernism, as adherents need to see the world through power relationships in which men and particularly white men are seen as eternally subjugating any people of color,” he told The Fix.

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“These guilt-ridden progressives think that their economic and social status is envied by groups that they believe are powerless. They then feel regret about generating envy in others,” he said. “What really is going on here is a kind of mass neurosis that generates such absurdities as seen in this course.”

Goldfarb, a former University of Pennsylvania medical professor, told The Fix that teaching history is important, but “it must be provided with a context that reflects the progress that Western civilization has produced.”

Medical schools in the U.S. also are promoting this ideology, he said.

“The famous pledge made by the students at the University of Minnesota School of Medicine (in which a land acknowledgment preceded their traditional recitation of the Hippocratic oath) reveals the same sort of neurosis that plagues other fields,” he said.

The University of Alberta course initially attracted attention because of a recent X post by Quillette editor and Canadian journalist Jonathan Kay.

There’s a mandatory course for @UAlberta Nursing students called “Indigenous Health in Canada.” An important subject. But as one student told me, it’s just “4 months of self-flagellation led by a white woman.” Course materials suggest it’s basically activist political propaganda pic.twitter.com/9k0H20e4u5

— Jonathan Kay (@jonkay) January 20, 2025

Kay told The Fix via email, “Canada and the United States both did terrible things to Indigenous people—including pushing them into reserves (Canada) and reservations (United States) that often consisted of economically marginal lands that racist white farmers, ranchers, miners, loggers, and urban planners didn’t want.”

“Unlike in the United States, many of these Canadian Indigenous communities are, to this day, ‘fly-in’ hamlets that cannot be easily accessed by all-season roads, let alone proper highways or rail,” he said.

He said the land is a poor economic resource due to frozen winters, flood-prone summers, and contaminated drinking water, and jobs in these communities are scarce.

For a long time, Indigenous communities were “out of sight and out of mind,” he said.

“Conservatives typically didn’t care about these communities. And while progressives (as we would now call them) did care, such caring became expressed through a deeply unhelpful political mythology whereby it was imagined that such communities would blossom into prosperous, egalitarian, autonomous (or even sovereign), culturally authentic mini-nations if they were simply given enough money.”

Recently, he said some progressives have become “increasingly cultish,” and the University of Alberta class is one example.

Kay said he believes nursing students “could learn an enormous amount of valuable information if they were exposed to actual Indigenous reserve-resident people who simply spoke in plain words about what life is like in their communities.”

But instead, the course they are taking “seem to consist in little more than a white professor holding forth with her cultish views and demanding that they be parotted by her classroom congregants,” he said.

“In fact, it’s become obvious that the movement’s most dedicated acolytes channel it as a deflected form of Christian religiosity. They denounce themselves as ‘settlers living on stolen land’ (or some such), speak of their ‘whiteness’ as a form of original sin, and insist that those around them pursue Indigenous ‘reconcliation’ (the term has become a catch-all) as a form of inward psycho-spiritual purification,” he told The Fix.

Kay is an advisor for the Foundation Against Intolerance & Racism, an organization that promotes diversity without identity politics.

Monica Harris, executive director of the organization, said in an email to The Fix that while higher education institutions in the U.S. and Canada both have adopted “identity-based curricula,” Canada seems to be “more aggressive” about it.

“We believe this is likely because constitutional legal protections in the U.S. provide guardrails that have helped curb the scope of these practices,” she told The Fix. “For example, FAIR is not currently aware of any U.S. nursing schools that have mandated a required course in indigenous health.”

Harris said students should “be made aware of the harms of divisive, identity-based curricula that position ethnicities and cultures against each other.”

“… the most powerful and effective way to challenge these practices is through a unified voice. There is always strength in numbers. In our experience, petitions and open letters to faculty and administration have been successful in reversing these practices,” she said.

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