BPK student research looks to history to find a way forward for Indigenous elder care

SFU Biomedical Physiology and Kinesiology (BPK) PhD student Katen Kelly was inspired to study neuroscience after watching the experiences of elders in her family with Alzheimer’s and dementia going through the healthcare system at home in Saskatchewan.

“What that looks like is taking an Indigenous person, displacing them from their community and putting them into a long-term care facility,” she says. 

Kelly and her supervisor, BPK professor Randy McIntosh, are working in the growing field of cultural and social neuroscience, which takes an interdisciplinary and holistic approach toward brain health. “We can scan brains, we can look at the data, but unless we ask people about their lived experiences and what brain health means to them, we don't fully understand,” she says.

Kelly’s thesis work focuses on understanding the aging process and access to culturally appropriate care for Indigenous elders in B.C., using a two-eyed seeing approach, which incorporates both Indigenous and western ways of knowing. 

“In some cultures dementia is viewed as a natural way of aging,” she says. “You come into the world knowing very little, and you exit knowing very little. Assuming that cognitive decline is automatically a disease or problem is not always appropriate.”

Kelly notes that Indigenous cultures had ways of taking care of elders long before contact with European settlers. “I think that looking backwards into history and into Indigenous healthcare practices is going to be so important moving forward,” she says, “seeing what practices worked and how we can implement those now into the healthcare system.”

Kelly is collaborating with elders and knowledge keepers to ensure that her research benefits the communities she’s working in and is carried out in a respectful and culturally appropriate way. “You can learn a lot from listening, and that has been something so pivotal in my research,” she says. “We have a lot to learn from each other.”

“I think it’s so important to have culturally appropriate front-line care, and to have it accessible to everyone,” Kelly says. “Historically healthcare practitioners and Indigenous people were at a power imbalance and often Indigenous people don’t even want to go into healthcare centres because they feel that they’re going to be not listened to or discriminated against.”

“So I think it's so important that this is something that we talk about, especially in neuroscience, where research has mostly been on the quantitative side, that we show people that these are meaningful things to research and talk about.”