Book praise

The author would like to thank the following individuals who took the time to read the manuscript (before publication) or the book itself (after publication), and submit powerful endorsements in support:

• Alika Lafontaine, first Indigenous physician to hold the role of President-Elect of the Canadian Medical Association and a past President of the Indigenous Physicians Association of Canada
• David Eidelman, Former Vice Principal and Dean (2012-2023), Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences, McGill University
• Gary Geddes, author of Medicine Unbundled: A Journey Through the Minefields of Indigenous Health Care
• Ghislain Picard, Chief of the Assembly of First Nations Quebec-Labrador
• Harsha Walia, author of Undoing Border Imperialism and Border & Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism
• Joanne Liu, pediatric emergency physician and former international president of Doctors Without Borders (Médecins Sans Frontières)
• John Borrows, Canada Research Chair in indigenous Law, University of Victoria Law School
• Karen Stote, author of An Act of Genocide: Colonialism and the Sterilization of Aboriginal Women
• Lisa Qiluqqi Koperqualuk, M.A., vice-president international affairs, Inuit Circumpolar Council Canada
• Margo Greenwood, academic leader of the National Collaborating Centre for Indigenous Health
• Marie Wadden, author of Where the Pavement Ends: Canada’s Aboriginal Recovery Movement and the Urgent Need for Reconciliation
• Mary Jane Logan McCallum, Canada Research Chair in Indigenous People, History and Archives, and co-author of Structures of Indifference: An Indigenous Life and Death in a Canadian City
• Maureen Lux, author of Separate Beds: A History of Indian Hospitals in Canada, 1920s-1980s
• Quebec Native Women (Femmes Autochtones du Québec)
• Robert Leckey, Dean, Faculty of Law, McGill University
• Robyn Maynard, author of Policing Black Lives: State Violence in Canada from slavery to the present, and co-author of Rehearsals for Living
• Sherene H. Razack, author of Dying From Improvement: Inquests and Inquiries into Indigenous Deaths in Custody
• Stephen Lewis, Co-director AIDS-Free World
• Taionrén:hote Dan David, Kanien’kehá:ka journalist and founder of Aboriginal Peoples Television Network (APTN) News
• Will Prosper, filmmaker, co-founder of Hoodstock, and human rights activist

“The persistence of anti-Indigenous racism in healthcare has always been contingent on two conditions. The first is that the majority of those harmed remain silent due to shame, guilt or fear. The second is that when experiences of harm become known, society justifies the impacts of racialization as normal or out of its control. Dr Samir Shaheen-Hussain confronts both of these conditions directly, masterfully weaving a narrative tapestry that brings to light racialized experiences of Indigenous children within the context of how abnormal these experiences should be in a healthcare system most view as inherently good. In a direct and concise way, he lays out the reality that not only is the power to change these systems within our hands, embracing our own humanity means we must act.” Dr Alika Lafontaine, associate clinical professor, Department of Anesthesiology & Pain Medicine (University of Alberta), first Indigenous physician to hold the role of President-Elect of the Canadian Medical Association, and a past President of the Indigenous Physicians Association of Canada

“In Fighting for a Hand to Hold: Confronting Medical Colonialism against Indigenous Children in Canada, Dr. Samir Shaheen-Hussain brings to life the ongoing legacy of medical colonialism in Canada and its profound impact on Indigenous people. Dr. Shaheen-Hussain provides a sobering picture of the ways in which Canada’s healthcare system perpetuates racism against Indigenous people through stereotyping, and dehumanization. A major strength is that the book builds on Dr. Shaheen-Hussain’s direct experience with Indigenous children and families, as well as on his effective advocacy to end the unjustified practice of separating children from their families when they were transported from northern Québec to Montréal. While showing the valuable role that allies can play in reversing some of the consequences of systemic racism, the book also underscores the importance of Indigenous self-governance in reversing this situation. Highly recommended for anyone involved in the care of Indigenous patients and their families.” David Eidelman, former Vice Principal and Dean (2012-2023), Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences, McGill University

“Its clever framing, detailed research and frequent critical gems put Fighting for a Hand to Hold in the very good company of a small group of stellar books and articles about Indigenous health issues, all of them manifestos for change. It’s a passionate and informed report from the medical frontlines that exposes some of the social determinants and racial subtexts that prevent us from improving and safe-guarding the lives of Indigenous peoples and other minorities in Canada.” Gary Geddes, author of Medicine Unbundled: A Journey Through the Minefields of Indigenous Health Care

“In his book, Fighting for A Hand to Hold: Confronting Medical Colonialism against Indigenous Children in Canada, Dr Samir Shaheen-Hussain compellingly exposes and details the colonial practices of the medical world. He highlights the non-accompaniment rule that had been applied for many years by Évacuations aéromédicales du Québec (EVAQ). Without sparing anyone in power and by relying on facts, Dr Shaheen-Hussain informs us about the deep roots of colonial, historical, political, social, and economic oppression suffered by Indigenous peoples in Quebec and in Canada.
As a pediatrician who spearheaded the #aHand2Hold campaign, Dr Samir Shaheen-Hussain has played a role to ensure that our children are finally respected and, importantly, treated without discrimination during medical air evacuation. The powerful message of this book, however, is to make the reader realize to what extent many people are complicit, on a daily basis, with the many injustices Indigenous peoples are forced to face even today. If the message is blunt and may be difficult to accept for some, the facts conveyed are solidly backed up. We hope that Fighting for A Hand to Hold will become an integral awareness-raising tool in order also to confront and put an end to systemic racism. It is necessary and fundamental reading to ensure that our next seven generations don’t have to experience the harsh realities that are so vividly described in this book.” Ghislain Picard, Chief of the Assembly of First Nations Quebec-Labrador

“Samir Shaheen-Hussain’s Fighting For A Hand to Hold is a searing indictment of medical colonialism in Canada. This must-read book shatters the myth of universal and equitable healthcare as a pillar of this country’s benevolent social democracy and, instead, forcefully exposes the active involvement of the medical system in upholding historic and ongoing settler-colonial power.” Harsha Walia, author of Undoing Border Imperialism and Border & Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism

“Fighting for a Hand to Hold denounces with ferocity the utterly inhuman, decades-long practice of separating children from their families during emergency medevacs in northern and remote regions of Quebec. In a precise, compelling, and well-documented narrative, Samir Shaheen-Hussain challenges our collective understanding of systemic racism and social determinants of health applied to Indigenous communities most dependent on medevac airlifts and most impacted by the non-accompaniment rule. An eye-opening, tough, and essential book.” Dr Joanne Liu, pediatric emergency physician and former international president of Doctors Without Borders (Médecins Sans Frontières)

“Heartbroken. This is how I feel after reading Fighting for a Hand to Hold. It hurts to read about children suffering. Shaheen-Hussain’s book does not relieve that pain. Yet his words hold the potential to help us create broader healing, if his insights are heeded.” John Borrows, Canada Research Chair in indigenous Law, University of Victoria Law School

“This book is a timely and important contribution to ongoing discussions on how to address Indigenous realities of systemic racism in health care. Samir Shaheen-Hussain offers an accessible and politically-engaged analysis that calls on Canadians to recognize how western medicine continues to be imposed on Indigenous peoples as a tool of colonialism and genocide. While the #aHand2Hold campaign serves as an example of how social pressure can lead to tangible improvements in the health care experience of Indigenous children and their communities, the author also reminds us that to fully address systemic racism requires radical change; namely a respect for Indigenous sovereignty – over health care and lands – through decolonization.” Karen Stote, Assistant Professor (Women and Gender Studies, Wilfrid Laurier University) and author of An Act of Genocide: Colonialism and the Sterilization of Aboriginal Women

“The memories of the Inuit children I attended as a young interpreter at the Montreal Children’s Hospital came flooding back to me, the sad face of a child looking up at me. Nurses informed me that he was not speaking, but I immediately recognized the fear in his face, in his eyes. As soon as I spoke to him in Inuktitut, he looked at me in disbelief, but in the next moment his tears began to roll and I could only sound out the Inuit sound of love, ‘mmph’, and to tell him it will be alright, and that his mom or a relative would be arriving soon. I felt for that child, and as he began to relax and open up, we had a lovely conversation in Inuktitut. He did not feel so alone in this strange place he had just been deposited on, as if he was cargo. To this day, I still feel for him. Throughout all these years, we all have been made to believe that this is how things should work. It was one of those things we stayed quiet about for decades. But no longer. We Inuit, we are a people. We love our children. Fighting For A Hand To Hold – Confronting Medical Colonialism Against Indigenous Children in Canada, helps us understand the issues of colonization in the medical system that has vexed us as Indigenous peoples. Today, we Inuit are working to bring our health back to our communities. Healthy communities and families mean self-governance to us and the de-colonization process will happen.” Lisa Qiluqqi Koperqualuk, M.A., vice-president international affairs, Inuit Circumpolar Council Canada

“Fighting for a Hand to Hold reveals systemic challenges through an approach that offers a holistic look at the structures that hold injustices in place. Inspired by patients, Shaheen-Hussain examines the impacts of medical colonialism on the lives of Indigenous young people. In so far as any book is wonderful when it creates new spaces for intellectual curiosity and engagement with complex ideas, this is a wonderful book. It made me think about how we can create the change that is necessary to address the anti-Indigenous racism of Canada’s past and present.” Margo Greenwood, academic leader of the National Collaborating Centre for Indigenous Health (reviewed in The Lancet)

“Shaheen-Hussain argues that genuine reconciliation can’t occur without reparations and restitution. Besides disclosure and acknowledgement of the harm done, this means a genuine demonstration of sorrow and regret, a promise to never do harm again, and action that ensures the harm will not be repeated. This book should be read by anyone who wants to meaningfully enter into reconciliation with Indigenous people.” Marie Wadden, author of Where the Pavement Ends: Canada’s Aboriginal Recovery Movement and the Urgent Need for Reconciliation

“Shaheen-Hussain’s primary contributions in the book are his analysis of the non-accompaniment rule (and the efforts made to change it) and his sustained Indigenous-centred survey of Canadian health care scholarship that dialogues with anyone and everyone who may have been asking similar questions about the past and about the practice. The book is grounded in critical disciplinary self-reflection on medical education and professionalism as well as thoughtful analyses that refuse to rely on pity, shock or arrogant moralism for easy answers. In his view, the colonial past never left us but rather still informs everyday health business in ERs across the country. And nor is it going anywhere fast without profound, radical change that implicates every one of us.” Mary Jane Logan McCallum, Canada Research Chair in Indigenous People, History and Archives (professor in the Department of History, University of Winnipeg), author of Indigenous Women, Work, and History, 1940–1980, and co-author (with Adele Perry) of Structures of Indifference: An Indigenous Life and Death in a Canadian City.

“In Fighting For A Hand To Hold - Confronting Medical Colonialism Against Indigenous Children in Canada physician Samir Shaheen-Hussain exposes the social, cultural, and historical structures that allow medical colonialism to hide in plain sight as it harms generations of Indigenous children and their families. It is an unflinching analysis that should be required reading in every medical school in the country.” Maureen Lux. Professor and Chair, History Department, Brock University; author of Separate Beds: A History of Indian Hospitals in Canada, 1920s-1980s

“In Fighting for a Hand to Hold: Confronting Medical Colonialism against Indigenous Children in Canada, Samir Shaheen-Hussain addresses different aspects of the healthcare system offered to indigenous people, always stressing that this is a field strongly marked by colonial power relations, historically perpetuated by the Canadian state. Starting from a harsh critique of the current health policies dispensed to indigenous children and their families, the book takes us to a profound reflection on how medical colonialism and systemic racism perpetuate themselves, and how movements for sovereignty and decolonial thinking are key pieces in changing diverse paradigms. The book shows that important changes in the health system offered to indigenous peoples have not yet been executed, which prevents an effective transformation of the healthcare system. This mismatch between the discourses and the reality is in tune with the maintenance of the colonial posture in relation to indigenous peoples is still in force in the Canadian State. While grounded firmly in the academic literature, the author uses language that will be easily accessible to a general audience and will incite the reader to engage in a profound examination of Canada’s history and its relationship with Indigenous peoples. A moving and necessary book. A must-read for all who are interested in one of the most macabre faces of medical colonialism: its genocidal and eugenicist face.” Quebec Native Women (Femmes Autochtones du Québec)

“Shaheen-Hussain painstakingly details the practice of separating children, its harms, and the difficulties in ending it. […] Fighting for a Hand to Hold would be an achievement for any author; it is astonishing to think of it as the product of a pediatric emergency physician’s spare time. I hope it and the French translation find the large readerships they merit.” Robert Leckey, Dean, Faculty of Law, McGill University (reviewed in Canadian Journal of Law and Society)

“A necessary and sobering read. Shaheen-Hussain’s text masterfully exposes the ways in which the logics of settler colonialism and genocide are structurally embedded into Canada’s healthcare system. It illuminates how egregious racial violence takes place – in plain sight – under the direction of a publicly-funded institution that is broadly understood, to most Canadians, as a social good. The book, meticulously researched, firmly centers Canada’s medical system as a crucial site for ongoing anti-colonial struggle.” **Robyn Maynard, author of Policing Black Lives: State Violence in Canada from slavery to the present and co-author (with Leanne Betasamosake Simpson) of Rehearsals for Living **

“A sick child is transported by plane to a hospital 1000 kilometres away alone and without a parent to accompany the child, a state practice without pity. No parent can read this and not feel a sharp pain yet so many managed to defend the practice even when the mothers of the children who died alone en route publicly grieved that they were never able to give comfort to their dying children. This is the racial terror that was aimed at Indigenous peoples in the province of Quebec. This book tells the story of the fight to change what so clearly springs from the annihilative impulse at the heart of settler colonialism. What can we learn from this book about the struggle to abolish the practice? This practice was no mere discriminatory residue of an old colonial system long gone. Instead it is a telling sign of an ongoing settler colonialism, one deeply structured to “disappear Indians” and to declare Indigenous lives as worth less than white ones. Samir Shaheen-Hussain’s clear-eyed account reminds us that we can change but not until we recognize this ugly truth.” Sherene H. Razack, Distinguished Professor and Penny Kanner Endowed Chair in Gender Studies, UCLA. Author of Dying From Improvement: Inquests and Inquiries into Indigenous Deaths in Custody

“An astonishing book. It begins with the anguished story of Cree and Inuit children from northern Quebec travelling alone by air, sick or injured, panic-stricken, to hospitals in the south, and becomes one of the most moving, ferocious, historically comprehensive narratives of medical colonialism and indigenous cultural genocide that I have ever read. It’s a stunning piece of work. When I finally put it down, I was gasping … an absolute tour-de-force.” Stephen Lewis, Co-director AIDS-Free World

“This book takes us down dark corridors where both unintentional and deliberate racism are condoned by bureaucratic nonsense pretending to be government policy. The author jolts the reader from complacency page after page, detail after detail, pushing the reader beyond individual incidents to an understanding of a bigger picture. First, he writes, he must dispel ‘the commonly held belief that the medical establishment is inherently benevolent.'” Taionrén:hote Dan David, Kanien’kehá:ka journalist and founder of Aboriginal Peoples Television Network (APTN) News (reviewed in Montreal Review of Books)

“Fighting for A Hand to Hold, which addresses the systemic racism faced by Indigenous communities in the healthcare system in Quebec and Canada, will make you sick. This book opens our eyes by delving into decades of medical colonialism that is still very much with us today. It is an essential read to strive toward collective healing, by better understanding and fighting against the racialized medical violence inflicted on Indigenous peoples throughout this country.” Will Prosper, filmmaker, co-founder of Hoodstock, and human rights activist