CONCLUSION

This paper has sought to propose an Indigenous Cultural Safety Measurement Framework as a critical tool for revealing the impacts of colonialism and racism, past and present, on health system performance and Indigenous Peoples’ health and wellness. The Framework can also be used to monitor progress on achieving cultural safety in health care. Given that data and measurement have historically been used against Indigenous Peoples to justify continued oppression and colonialism, this paper urges some caution for those interested in using such a framework for measuring cultural safety. At the same time, if health systems and Indigenous Peoples do not collaborate to advance systemic measurement of cultural safety, the historic and ongoing invisibility of Indigenous Peoples and health inequities, and the masking of the very real problem of anti-Indigenous racism in health care, will persist.

The implementation of cultural safety measurement is inherently an effort that must be done together, between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Peoples and health systems. While the

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problem of Indigenous-specific racism and the required changes to enhance cultural safety lies with non-Indigenous individuals, communities, organizations and governments, those who experience racism in the health care system – Indigenous Peoples and, in particular, Indigenous women (Fridkin et al., 2019) – must be intimately involved in developing solutions and making decisions about health policy (Fridkin et al., 2019) as, ultimately, success in achieving cultural safety can only be determined by Indigenous Peoples themselves.

This will require working together, and not unilaterally, to agree upon a measurement framework. It will demand identifying and validating a set of priority or mandatory indicators. It will also necessitate supporting local settings to develop indicators that reflect their cultures, priorities, and practices, while maintaining the ability to aggregate across settings, regions, and geographies for systemwide monitoring and knowledge development.

We are at a unique and important time in the history of Indigenous–settler relations in Canada. This involves truthtelling about the past and recognizing how the colonial lineage of that past is deeply embedded in our society, laws, systems, and institutions. It involves systematically eliminating the racist beliefs that allowed colonialism to occur and decolonizing today’s policies and practices in order to enable expression of Indigenous human rights. This framework is an invitation to Indigenous Peoples and health system partners in various jurisdictions and geographies to engage in discussion and dialogue in order to identify measures and domains of relevance to them, to design data governance processes that contribute to repair, restoration, and reconciliation, and most importantly, to issue concrete, recurring, and normalized reporting of Indigenous cultural safety in Canada’s health care system.

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