“Untelling Nursing History: Centering the Voices of IBPOC Nurses”

Informed by an anti-racist and decolonizing historical framework, the website “Untelling Nursing History: Centering the Voices of IBPOC Nurses” provides an interactive digital experience for students, faculty, staff, alumni, and donors of the University of British Columbia (UBC) School of Nursing, along with friends, colleagues, health professionals, and other historians from around the world, to consider nursing history in Canada from diverse perspectives. Funded by the UBC Nursing Anti-Racism Committee, the project was created by students and faculty at UBC (Vancouver) to tell the histories of Indigenous, Black, and People of Color (IBPOC) who have practiced nursing in Canada. This website comes at a particular historical moment when questions of public memory and commemoration in Canada have taken on a new urgency. The website challenges racist, sexist, class-based, and colonial ideas about nursing and the Indigenous lands on which academic institutions have been built. Readers are asked: “How has nursing participated in the subjugation of others on a local and global scale?”; “Who gets to be a nurse, and who deserves care?”; and “Whose voices are heard, and who decided?” Thoroughly researched and documented, this website’s great strength is that it includes a more inclusive and complicated history that avoids retelling nursing history as one of “whiteness” and heroism. Rather, race, social class, religion, access to resources, motivations, and specific circumstances shaped each nurse’s experiences differently. Indeed, “Untelling Nursing History” pushes new boundaries for doing nursing history.Using videos (with appropriate credits), numerous written sources, and repositories such as the Provincial Archives of Saskatchewan, the authors direct the reader to begin their navigation by clicking the “Run Game” link. Then other links can be easily accessed that send readers to a demonstration and to different sections. There are two major organizing themes—“Colonialism” and “Social Justice”—that direct the user to videos. Videos reflect on “Who gets to be a nurse?” by revealing nurses’ use of different kinds of knowledge, education, and practice. One video features the notes of Marie Albertina Wallace (nee Stark) from the recollections of her mother, Sylvia Stark, who came to Canada in the 1850s from the United States after her enslaved laborer father purchased his family’s freedom. Sylvia Stark cared for friends and family members and assisted with births and other duties. Additional sections examine Filipino, Iranian, and Chinese Canadian nurses. A Japanese Canadian nurse tells her story of harm done to her and her family when interred in a camp during World War II. A South Asian nurse, Chinnama Baines, became a nursing leader and dean in Canada. To examine the question “What counts as nursing knowledge?” a video features a Muslim woman named Rufaida-Al-Aslamia, born in 620 CE, who nursed twelve hundred years before Florence Nightingale. Her path to healing included prayers, bandaging, treating pain, dispensing mercy, and providing care during wartime. She also taught other nurses. In focusing on the question of what opposition nurses faced, and who decided what that would be, the video shows two notable Indigenous nursing leaders, Jean Cuthand Goodwill (Assiniwikamik) and Madeleine Dion Stout (Keteskwew). The video is narrated by an elder and nurse Dion Stout and an Indigeous nursing student, it uses Cree language, and readers learn about the “gift culture” that was so important to these women’s contributions to nursing in Canada. They worked as healers, medicine women, public-health nurses, midwives, and educators. They were leaders in First Nations health organizations and in the Canadian Indigenous Nurses Association.There are several key points to consider about this website. It uses diverse art and music pieces unique to the time periods under study to illustrate the nursing narratives. As the authors created the videos, they employed website designers and artists, as well as artificial intelligence, with an important caveat on the complexities of using AI, not for commercial use but for education. The website is user-friendly as an academic resource for history, nursing, medicine, and social and health care policy.Most importantly, nurses’ first-hand narratives are compelling stories of resistance, resilience, altruism, and a sense of pride in their accomplishments. They and the authors of this website leave a message about reconciliation: that those with power must study the past to reflect on how colonial power has been misused and how social justice can be achieved through the equitable redistribution of power and privilege. Faculty and student authors acknowledge that there are multiple histories with multiple perspectives, and that it is imperative to do justice to the marginalized and those left out of nursing histories altogether. Each section begins and ends with questions such as “Who is a nurse?” and “Who decides?” showing that asking good historical questions is integral to any study of nursing. This website helps readers do just that and is a starting point for more work of this kind.