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Defining Dementia Care Standards When Cultural Safety is at Stake: The Case of Indigenous Canadians with Dementia

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Living with Dementia

Part of the book series: Advances in Neuroethics ((AIN))

Abstract

Improving dementia knowledge and support among Canada’s Indigenous communities faces a host of intertwined ethical, epistemic, and logistical challenges. These challenges include distrust among Indigenous people of mainstream health care owing to traumatic colonial histories and ongoing social marginalization, as well as a lack of culturally appropriate prevention and diagnosis protocols, and divergent Indigenous and mainstream explanations of dementia and its meaning in human life. This chapter examines these challenges in light of debates that concern intercultural training in nursing and other health-care contexts, the creation of culturally appropriate care, and the value of cultural safety as a critical concept for decolonizing health-care access.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    This chapter uses “Indigenous” and “Aboriginal” Canadian to refer to all persons of Indigenous ancestry in Canada. In Canada, further distinctions are drawn between First Nations, Inuit and Métis people. Not unproblematically, all of these terms imply the existence of homogenous ethnic or cultural identities which do not in fact exist: there are at least 52 major Indigenous cultural groups and over 50 different Indigenous languages in Canada. 50% of Indigenous Canadians live in urban centers, and the remaining 50% live on Reserves, of which there are 615 [1].

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Philosophy Department, University of North Carolina Greensboro, Greensboro, NC, USA

    Frances Bottenberg

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  1. Frances Bottenberg
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Correspondence to Frances Bottenberg .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies, and Science Technology and Society (STS) Program, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC, USA

    Veljko Dubljević

  2. Department of Philosophy, University of North Carolina, Greensboro, NC, USA

    Frances Bottenberg

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Bottenberg, F. (2021). Defining Dementia Care Standards When Cultural Safety is at Stake: The Case of Indigenous Canadians with Dementia. In: Dubljević, V., Bottenberg, F. (eds) Living with Dementia. Advances in Neuroethics. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-62073-8_9

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-62073-8_9

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