18/06/2020
Colonisation and decolonisation are common concepts used within Indigenous Studies, yet these words and the meaning they convey uncommonly appear in papers by nutrition and dietetic professionals. Decolonising Dietetics as a project focusses on how nutrition and dietetic research, services and client work can better serve populations who sit outside the mainstream, especially BIPOC.
Colonisation, as a historical and contemporary process, has been seen to be at the root of health and other inequities experienced by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders (and other First Nation peoples) and other minority populations. The legacy of colonisation lives on. We see time and time again that BIPOC are MADE vulnerable by public policy, social inequity, bias and stereotype.
Around 50% of adult First Nations people live with one of the major chronic diseases such as cardiovascular (heart) disease, kidney disease or cancer. Almost one-quarter have two or more of these chronic conditions.
Traditionally, dietetic research and clinical practice has largely served the white, dominant culture. Western cultural perspectives have been privileged. Western health and illness paradigms are, more often than not, the default paradigms rolled out, even when there is plenty of evidence that they are largely ineffective in BIPOC communities.
This cannot be surprising when nutrition and dietetic faculty are largely white. When the vast majority of students recruited to dietetics programs have been historically white. This needs to change.
Things are changing slowly. We have seen this past week space made on instagram for BIPOC voices in dietetics, as part of the campaign. Strategies are needed to continue listening, to have meaningful dialogue, to rewrite curriculum, to change the profession so that we reflect diversity at all levels, and so that racism is denied the oxygen it needs to survive and thrive.
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