2023 Alumni Honour Award: Mona Lisa Bourque Bearskin

Mona Lisa Bourque Bearskin, ’95 BScN, ’07 MN 2007, ’14 PhD (Photo courtesy of Alumni Relations)

Mona Lisa Bourque Bearskin was a young girl in foster care when her mother, Elma Bourque Bearskin, who was a victim of domestic violence, was gravely beaten. At her hospital bedside, Mona Lisa’s grandmother, Marianne, offered her daughter traditional healing through prayers and medicine. But the nurses scolded her, took it away and asked them to leave. 

“The way the nurses looked at my mom, she wasn’t a worthy human being,” recalls Bourque Bearskin, a member of the amiskosâkahikan nêhiyaw peyakôskân, ostêsimâwoyasiwêwin nikotwâsik Beaver Lake Cree Nation in northeastern Alberta. “That was really hard, to witness someone in your own family being harmed and belittled in that way.”

“I knew from that interaction with health-care providers — at 12 years of age — that I could take way better care of them myself. It just really lit a fire within me.” 

With emotion in her voice, Bourque Bearskin shares her story to illustrate the syndemic suffering caused by racism in Canada’s health-care system. Her goal is nothing less than to help transform how health-care services are delivered through nursing education and practice, by working with communities and local Indigenous knowledge systems. 

She is now an associate professor of nursing at the University of Victoria and one of six inaugural Indigenous Research Chairs in Nursing funded by the Canadian Institute of Health Research Institute of Indigenous Peoples Health. 

At 18, when Bourque Bearskin aged out of the foster care system, despite little support, she trained as a nurses’ aide. She went on to become a licenced practical nurse, and returned home to work in the local hospital before moving into a community health nursing role and then a nursing instructor in the Arctic. 

Her early experience in that hospital room with her family continued to stick with her, and she eventually made her way to the U of A to earn a BScN, a master’s and a PhD. For her doctoral thesis, she set out to answer the question she started asking herself as a child beside her mother’s sickbed. 

“Why nursing as a profession was unable to respond to the violence perpetrated against Indigenous women and children and fell so short on compassionate caring and advocating for the most vulnerable in their midst.”

For her research, Bourque Bearskin worked with four Indigenous nurses — Alice Reid, Evelyn Voyageur, Madeleine Dion Stout and Lea Bill — to explore the lived experiences of Indigenous nurses who integrated Indigenous healing knowledge into their nursing practice. 

A family history of caring for people 

During work on her thesis, she uncovered her own family’s connection to health and healing. Her great-grandmother Margret Larocque is a well-known traditional birther. Her great-grandfather Alexia Bearskin was known to possess distinct  knowledge. Her grandmother Marrianne also brought these approaches into her everyday life and relied heavily on land medicine to treat her Parkinsons. 

“So even though I was taken away from them early in life, I was born into it,” Bourque Bearskin says, noting that her twin daughters have also chosen to become registered nurses to enhance health-care services in their own ways. 

Her ancestral families’ approach to Indigenous science and caring for others remain her ideal for nursing practice.

“What I had learned from my nohkôm (grandmother) and nikawiy (mother) was to relearn our language, observe, and to be helpful first before asking any questions — to learn to listen before I uttered words, to think about what was being said before reacting and responding,” she writes in her thesis. 

An advocate for Indigenous communities

Bourque Bearskin set about sharing her vision as an advocate through the Canadian Indigenous Nurses Association and as an educator, spending six years as an associate professor at Thompson Rivers University before taking her current position. Among her many  initiatives, she takes great pride in working with her community and medicine family. 

She supports Indigenous community-driven and nurse-led research, which is attracting many Indigenous nurses seeking opportunities to work with their communities. She is co-leading the country’s first Indigenous wellness master’s stream at the University of Victoria in collaboration with five other B.C. universities. The first cohort started a pilot course this fall with 21 students from B.C. and Alberta. Each institution is developing partnerships with local Indigenous communities that will help develop the curriculum as they learn and work together. 

Bourque Bearskin explains that this distinction-based approach — which means collaborating with First Nations, Métis, and Inuit Peoples from the very beginning — is essential to understanding and respecting the traditional knowledge of the people connected to the land in each place and in their own languages. 

“It’s a co-learning model that opens up advanced practice to nurses to embody their own Indigeneity in a way that students can flourish and critically think through their own practices,” she says. “We all know that Indigenous nurses working in their communities are often the first point of contact for people and are the most trusted health-care providers as well.”

“My life’s work is about Indigenous truths, rights and responsibilities.” 

Healing the health-care system

Bourque Bearskin says in order for the health-care system to live up to the Calls to Action issued by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada for justice and inclusion, non-Indigenous allies need to listen to Indigenous Peoples’ truths and take a human rights approach to ensuring  responsive and safe care. “It is not enough just to learn about reconciliation. We have to take action — to implement Indigenous health rights and take responsibility for health-care transformation,” she says. She adds that decolonization will not provide all the answers; Indigenous students must also be afforded new opportunities for intergenerational learning. 

“What’s happened to Indigenous Peoples was purposeful, systemic and an act of genocide. To lean into this truth, each one of us must ask ourselves what is our relationship with white supremacy, white privilege and white fragility. This is the work to be done: to acknowledge your biases and how those biases impact your everyday practice,” she says. 

“If you don’t know our history and you don’t know how Indigenous identity intersects with every social determinant from poverty to child health, then the potential to cause harm is greater.” 

Under the B.C. Indigenous Chair program, she and a group of Indigenous nursing leaders are working to launch Indigenous Nurses Day, April 10, in honour of the birth of Edith Monture, the first Indigenous registered nurse in Canada, and to recognize Rose Casper, Western Canada’s first Indigenous nurse, to help correct the colonial history of professional nursing practice and recognize early Indigenous leaders who have been erased from nursing education. 

Bourque Bearskin gives credit to her U of A supervisors for seeing her potential and making space for her Cree/Métis approach to research in nursing: Brenda Cameron, ’72 BScN, ’98 PhD, professor emeritus of nursing; Cora Weber-Pillwax, ’77 BEd, ’92 MEd, ’03 PhD, professor of education; and Malcolm King, former scientific director of CIHR Institute of Indigenous Peoples’ Health.

“Creating parallel pathways to learning and paying that forward is my greatest satisfaction,” Bourque Bearskin says of her teaching career. 

She has seen progress in health care over the course of her career,she says, but it has been too slow, and too many continue to die. For now she takes comfort in the advice her grandmother always gave her — ahkameyimok, which means “never give up” in Cree. 

“Now, near the end of my career, I see our Indigenous nurses embodying their authentic selves, rooted in their own language and connected to their families. Co-creating something new from  who they are and where they come from and working with their peoples is life-giving. It has been the most liberating professional and personal experience I’ve ever had,” she says. 

“It is in honour of nohkum that I do this work of reclaiming my nehiyaw spirit, language and land in wellness. … The learning and healing never stops.”

Two other U of A nursing grads have been honored with a 2023 Alumni Award: Reagan Bartel and Hannah O’Rourke. Learn more about other award recipients and the Alumni Award ceremony on Oct. 25.