As much of my COVID-19 research is still under review with the Metis Federation, I will be providing lessons learned from pandemic H1N1 and also will provide context on how to engage with existing community infrastructure as I know it. I will also share some broad lessons from pandemic H1N1 that can be applied to COVID-19.
At times in my testimony, I may make references to first nations, Métis or indigenous peoples. As much as possible, I will only use “indigenous peoples” when making more general statements. When something from my research is specific to first nations or Métis, I will identify it as such.
In developing a lot of my research around pandemic H1N1 and prior to even having the vaccine rollout, I was invited to a northern fly-in first nations community in Manitoba [Technical difficulty—Editor] data collection to demonstrate that our strategy to engage indigenous peoples was both appropriate and of benefit. Too often, researchers have gone into communities and have done extractionist research, taking knowledge that is gifted to them by indigenous peoples for their own academic gain.
What we learned is that first nations participants shared a lot of their concerns and their fears of the impact of a novel virus entering their community and having a devastating impact—