Public Speaking & Video Conferencing

Raven Speaker:
RavenTALKS is a collection of 11-minute talks by Indigenous leaders and storytellers sharing concise, compelling, and courageous stories.
Their stories are powerful-each of them holding unique wisdom, inspiration and resilience woven together by vision of what could be possible for our world. www.ravenspeak.ca

Creating an authentic experience
with Indigenous Peoples Teachings in person following Social Distancing Protocols or Video Conferencing

Indigenous Land Acknowledgement
Event Openings and Closings
Keynote address
Facilitate Workshops
Moderator
Panelist

Past engagements

EMCEE
Vancouver Aboriginal Child & Family Services Society Coffee House

The VACFSS Coffee House is a fundraising initiative for the “Developing the Gifts of Our Children & Youth Fund,” which was established in 2005 to esteem and support the gifts of our children in care. Extracurricular costs to explore music, dance, arts or sports are not covered by core funding and VACFSS takes responsibility that it is our duty to find the extra funding to provide opportunities for VACFSS children and youth to explore their extracurricular interests.

Emcee
Kidney Walk, Kidney Foundation of Canada

The Kidney Foundation of Canada Kidney Walk for Kidney Transplantation and Organ Donation was held September at West Vancouver’s Ambleside Park

Marissa Nahanee shares her personal story of receiving a kidney from her mother at the event. photo Cindy Goodman, North Shore News

North Shore News

A Global Perspective: The International Context of Indigenous Health

Why would a forum focusing on First Nations, Inuit and Métis healthand well-being in Canada begin with a look at Ecuador? In words and images, Dawn Walker of the First Nations and Inuit Health Branch of Health Canada sketched out the answer. Spearheaded by the World Health Organization’s (WHO) Commission on Social Determinants of Health (SDOH), a global initiative is now underway to acknowledge and find solutions for health inequities. Within that undertaking, Canada has played a leadership role in supporting the inclusion of indigenous voices and perspectives in the WHO report, Closing the Gap in a Generation: Health Equity through Action on the Social Determinants of Health. The report’s overarching recommendations have identified the global need to improve daily living conditions and tackle the inequitable distribution of power, money and resources.

Together with colleagues gathered in Australia, England and Ecuador, members of the Canadian Reference Group hammered out the unique nature of
indigenous social determinants of health. These include self-determination, cultural continuity, a holistic worldview, land and the environment, language preservation and the implementation of traditional knowledge and practices.

Dawn Walker, as a member of the Canadian Reference Group, and youth ambassador Marissa Nahanee from the Squamish and Nisga’a Nations, shared the highlights of what they learned during their time in Ecuador. They were particularly impressed by ways in which traditional healing practices there were combined with more conventional Western medicine medicine. One health centre had a shaman as well as a doctor, nutritionist, psychiatrist and naturopath on staff. A birthing centre encouraged traditional methods and birthing rituals with a consequent drop in mortality rates and domestic violence.

The impact of good governance was also evident as they met with a mayor who had brought 130 different regions together to develop efficient models to
meet community needs. These efforts led to more literacy programs, more midwives and more self-sustaining clinics.

The links between here and there became even more evident with the story of one Inuit youth who was also along on the trip. As she stood in the middle of the lush and steamy Ecuadorean rainforest, she took a deep breath and said ”Now I feel at home.” She could point to several
reasons: the similarities between traditional shamanic ceremonies and Canadian Aboriginal practices, a holistic world view and above all, the anchoring and healing connection to the land. This theme of the inescapable importance of the land for the well-being of First Nations, Inuit and Métis peoples was to come up repeatedly during the Vancouver forum.