UBC appoints Aboriginal health director

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The Institute for Aboriginal Health at the University of British Columbia has appointed its first director.

Dr. Eduardo Jovel, a Pipil Indian from El Salvador, accepted the post on Jan. 1 and has been installed until Dec. 31, 2008.

The announcement was made by Dr. Richard Vedan, director of the First Nations House of Learning, and Dr. John Gilbert, principal of the College of Health Disciplines.

Jovel, whose particular research interest is ethnobotany, is currently an assistant professor in the faculty of Agricultural Sciences at the University of British Columbia (UBC), where he earned his PhD in 2002 and a master's degree in science in 1997.

He has taught and developed curricula for Aboriginal and other minority programs that are offered through UBC and Cornell University in New York.

The new director has set the goals of advancing Aboriginal health research in the province and attracting more Aboriginal students to the health and scientific professions. He's equally concerned with increasing respect for Indigenous medicine knowledge and the people who have been its guardians.

A couple of years ago, Jovel helped to found an association called Students for Aboriginal Health at UBC. One of their functions was to organize a conference for community members and academics to seek direction for the association and for the Insititute for Aboriginal Health.

The Institute had been without a director since it started in 1997. Before Jovel came on board, James Andrew ran the community liaison division, and Rosalind Ng ran the health careers division.

"They were the Institute, to some extent," said Jovel. Students for Aboriginal Health worked with both divisions.

The objective of the conference was that they should develop educational modules "that could be helped to encourage other academics to incorporate more First Nations issues into their curricula."

That led to Jovel being hired to develop the Institute-sponsored ethnobotany course he teaches now, which is listed in the university catalogue as The Role of Plants in Aboriginal Health.

Historically, ethnobotany has been a discipline that has combined anthropology and botany, Jovel said. It dealt mainly with plant uses by Indigenous people.

Now, "It touches, not just plant uses, but other issues that are related to plant uses, including intellectual property rights and appropriation of traditional knowledge."

Jovel said the new UBC course brings "a more Aboriginal perspective" to the subject.

Previously, it was "a more anthropological perspective, that Indigenous people (were studied) as subjects mainly, and without acknowledging the value of traditional knowledge."

Concern about misappropriation of traditional knowledge was formerly absent, he added. "People went ahead and used a lot of this knowledge that was compiled, mainly by anthropologists, but also by botanists, by going into the rain forests of South America or to Africa, or even in North America."

Information about plants used as traditional medicines then was published in peer review journals and it passed into the public realm. Next, plant compounds were isolated scientifically and patented by corporate interests such as pharmaceutical companies, which generated huge profits, without benefits accruing to the Indigenous peoples who owned the knowledge and revered its source.

"It's not just about the plant uses, but the cultural context in which those plants are used. That will include ceremonies and other medical practices. So the plant is just one factor, but there are other practices that complement the uses of those plants."

There was no recognition of the concept of intellectual property rights until about the 1970s, Jovel said. Equally, there was a lack of awareness among Indigenous people of ways to protect traditional-use plants and the interpretation and translation of information about them.

He explained that a researcher who enters a community to film and take notes has the responibility of interpreting and translating what he learns. "So when people are not fully aware of other issues or the culture itself, then that translation might have some problems."

The course he teaches is to make people aware of the cultural context and "of other issues that come attached to the uses of the plant, not just the idea to get an extract . . . with a claim that it cure this or that disease." Ultimately, it is to create an environment that will allow the knowledge to continue to exist and flourish.

From an Indigenous perspective, he added, it takes more than chemistry and lab experiments to validate plant knowledge. "It has to be used in the cultural context in which that knowledge was developed." Ceremonies, rituals, fasting, and recommendations that might come from an individual healer, for instance.

Jovel said that as the first director of the Institute of Aboriginal Health, his mandate is "quite large." That's an understatement.

The institute, under Jovel's direction. will maintain its original dual focus of encouraging Aboriginal people in health careers and maintaining community liaison.

He started by rebuilding and reinforcing the advisory council, which is "heavily based" in community members. He said they have tried to include as many nations as possible as advisers, but presently the council is made up primarily of members from the Lower Mainland.

The institute is, however, implementing a new national initiative called Aboriginal Capacity and Development Research Environments (ACADRE), which has the objective of creating environments for Indigenous people to address Aboriginal health research, said Jovel. The funding they have for ACADRE will help them expand their mandate and allow participation by First Nations across the province. They are already networking to develop "clusters of nations", including northern areas of British Columbia.

"Our main focus has been in health; however, we take the definition of health at the United Nation, which is very broad in that sense. That includes even environmental health. So, if we take that definition, we can talk about water quality, the health of the watershed, the health of streams and the wetlands, and how that would relate to the health of the people. So, it allows to expand in that way our mandate into other areas that are traditionally not regarded as health."

Through the division of health careers, the institute is targeting the recruiting, supporting and retention of Aboriginal students in health sciences. Up to now, Jovel said it has been slow recruiting students into programs requiring high marks in chemistry, physics and biology. At the university level, he said students are having problems in mathematics and English. "The foundation needs to be reinforced." The disparity in education between Lower Mainland schools and isolated areas, where there may be no science labs, needs to be addressed too, he said.

In addition, Jovel said he would like to see communities promoting the need for environmental studies programs more.

Another challenge to attracting Aboriginal students to work in scientific fields is that it is a "competitive environment" and lab work is often "lonely." But through the division of community liaison, they are targeting elementary and high school students and drawing them into structured summer science programs to encourage them.

"We sponsor students from different communities across UBC, and sometimes we've got students across Canada."

Currently they have a program that brings two groups of grades 8 to 12 students into the university during the summer to be "exposed to the sciences" as a possible career option. Between 30 and 40 students are sponsored every summer.

The ACADRE initiative at the institute also supports students with health-related fellowships- at this time eight undergraduates, six master's students and four PhD students.

Jovel anticipates having a "functional research lab" by the end of the year and say he will be able to take up to six master's or PhD students.