Grant: Travel Awards - Institute Community Support

Freire's life work is about the coming to know and understand our positions of power and presence of being in the world and the underlying structures that create social inequities (1970). As a way to liberate and deepen a person's understanding of the internal and external structures that cause oppression the experiences of human life are opened to us and shared through stories. Nurses come face to face with the other in their daily practice. During these times, opportunities for the telling and retelling of stories come alive. In nursing, these cultural discourses have focused on topics such as transcultural nursing, cultural competence, and recently cultural safety, which position people of culture as the other. Embracing Freire's critical curiosity the impacts of colonization and assimilation policies on the health and wellbeing of First Nations, Métis and Inuit peoples in Canada is studied. Recognition of these inequities from an Indigenous lived experience brings improved understanding of original teachings, philosophies and language as a means to social transformation. Freire reminds us that we are never neutral in the world and that to know is a social process bound in a conscious self as political action. Nurses can better prepare themselves to developing respectful relationships, which demonstrated responsible, reciprocal, and ethical actions that benefit the collective community. Because to mutually support each other in making these connections between social theory and the practice of social justice in our everyday experiences of the other is where we find ourselves.