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Margo Greenwood was born in Wetaskiwin, AB, Canada, to a Cree father and English mother, and was raised and educated in Ponoka, AB. Both places are located in Treaty 6 territory. Tragically, Greenwood lost both her parents, “in my mid-teens”, she recalls, “and so I was really on my own”. It was an experience that influenced the focus of her work. Greenwood is now Professor in the Education programme at the University of Northern British Columbia (UNBC) in Prince George, BC, Canada. She is also Academic Leader of the National Collaborating Centre for Indigenous Health, hosted at UNBC, Interim Scientific Director of the Institute of Indigenous Peoples’ Health, Canadian Institutes of Health Research in Ottawa, ON, Canada, and has recently been appointed to the Canadian Senate. ....
Yin Paradies, the Alfred Deakin Professor and Chair in Race Relations at Deakin University, Melbourne, VIC, Australia started his academic life studying applied mathematics and computing. His first job, at the Indigenous Health Statistics Unit of the Australian Bureau of Statistics, took him towards his work in heath inequalities, on racism as a determinant of Indigenous health in Australia, and his current focus on decolonisation and Indigenous knowledges and perspectives. Paradies, who is a Wakaya man, and “the first person”, he says, “in any part of my family to get a PhD”, has since published widely on experiences of racism, and the impacts of racism on social and emotional wellbeing of Indigenous Australians, as well as on anti-racism theory, policy, and practice. ....
Delan Devakumar, Professor of Global Child Health and Co-Director of the Centre for the Health of Women, Children and Adolescents at University College London (UCL), UK, has always understood racism and what it is like to be discriminated against. About a year before he was born, his parents’ house in Sri Lanka was burnt down. “It was a targeted attack”, he says. “My father comes from the Tamil minority group.” Later, as a south Asian boy growing up in north Wales, UK, he experienced racism first hand and recalls how “in the 1980s and 90s there weren’t many people who looked like us; being called names and sometimes physical acts of violence were more normal then”. ....
Before our interview, Ntobeko Ntusi, Chair and Head of the Department of Medicine at the University of Cape Town (UCT) and Groote Schuur Hospital, South Africa, had been doing a bedside tutorial with students. He highlighted the different way they had presented the Black and White patients. “I asked the students why it is important to clarify the HIV status of Black patients when you present them when it has no bearing on their clinical presentation. And you can see the dumbfounded faces because it s not something they do consciously, but these biases are so in-built, even at this young age”, he says. ....