Globalization and the Health of Indigenous Peoples by Ahsan Ullah

Author:Ahsan Ullah [Ullah, Ahsan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Disease & Health Issues, Minority Studies, Political Science, Globalization
ISBN: 9781317587316
Google: PTslDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2016-11-18T03:24:25+00:00

Health and Self-Governance Correlates

A growing aging population in a particular country results in increased dependence on welfare system, especially health services. The interplay of health of the aging population and Indigenous peoples has crucial implications for policy makers and researchers. Indigenous people have a lower median age, meaning that the aging population among the Indigenous is lower than it is among non-Indigenous peoples. This might be one of the reasons why researchers have paid less attention to this group (Beatty and Berdahl, 2011). However, currently the growth is faster than the non-Indigenous. As a result, these seniors become a neglected section of the society. Indigenous seniors suffer poorer health than non-Indigenous seniors. There is no doubt that aborigines lack socioeconomic supports.

The idea that integrating the Indigenous population into the mainstream population would be helpful to address their needs has been proven wrong in the sense that this initiative may threaten their cultural life. For example, Stanton (2011) observes that as one step of such an initiative, the government of Canada intended to integrate Indigenous children into the non-Indigenous culture. In doing so, the government required them to attend church-run schools (International Symposium on the Social Determinants of Indigenous Health, 2007).

The determinants of Indigenous health are different from those of the mainstream population (Czyzewski, 2011). Partly, this is how Indigenous populations perceive health compared to Western biomedical definitions. Some of the previously cited mechanisms are actually identified as distal determinants. That an Indigenous SDH framework should be different from the conventional framework emphasized that the latter’s indicators were not reliable for all (International Symposium on the Social Determinants of Indigenous Health, 2007).

Colonialism has had direct impact on health of the Indigenous populations. To quote again Czyzewski (2011: 6) “Colonialism is the guiding force that manipulated the historic, political, social, and economic contexts shaping Indigenous/state/non-Indigenous relations and acounts for the public erasure of political and economic marginalization, and racism today. These combined components shape the health of Indigenous peoples.” This in fact endorses what I mentioned about the impact of colonialism on Indigenous health.

Many researchers confirmed that colonization and social determinants have crucial impacts on Aboriginal people’s health (Reading and Wien, 2009; Russell and de Leeuw, 2012). The effect of colonization on the Indigenous population is evident from the specific case of the British colonization of the Australian continent. The British did not recognize Indigenous rights to the land. Loss of land forced them to leave for small inland areas where food was scarce. The introduction of diseases such as smallpox and measles, against which the Aborigines had no immunity as they had never been exposed to them before, caused many aborigines to die without treatment. Family ties were severed because the Europeans took Indigenous children out of their families to schools where other European children studied. There have been deliberate actions to destroy Indigenous culture.

In Taiwan, for example, there are about 513,000 Aboriginal inhabitants who may have occupied the island about 8,000 years before the Han majority arrived on the island (Blust, 1999, cited in Lee and Chen, 2014).

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