Blog 4(part 2)Women’s week

This week I attended a presentation called “(Re)imagining Gender and Sexuality in the healthcare Field through Ancestral Inquiry. The presenters name is Emil Briones is a successful person who teaches at McGill University. He talks about the course he teaches to dentistry students, which includes gender identity, gender expression, biological sex and sexual orientation. He mentions that his students sometimes find it difficult to understand these topics as they are usually concerned with the scientific fact of people. What he answers to that, which is important, is how sometimes even if you can’t see it with science it doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. Another important point made is that one must look into his own roots of where one came from. He meant that you must look back at your own culture to have a better understanding of one’s self. He then continued in talking about two spirited people, which is someone who has both the male and female identities in one body. As he mentions that they are healthcare healers and spiritual healers, showing that there are many other ways to help people. He ends by explaining that anyone who’s profession involves helping people must understand that in order to understand a patient’s needs, one must understand their culture.

After talking to other students, they agreed that it is important to consider other ways of explaining thing in only the scientific way. Along with it is important to know your own culture along with others so you can better understand people.

From what he said, I do agree that somethings can’t only be explained by science and one must have an opened mind to things. With that said I do find it important to look at one’s culture to get to know more about yourself. For example, in my personal life, to have a better understanding of my own culture I travel to the country that my mother came from and learnt a lot from my grandmother, which I found very useful to know.  With that being said I strongly believe that in order to actually understand someone even as a friend you must have a sense of what their culture is about. This can help you understand why and how they think or even do certain things.

After researching Emil Briones, I found out that he is also very talented. As he is a researcher, writer, musician and he is also an educator in Tiohtià:ke. He is vey talented in many aspects in life along with being an educator at McGill University as mentioned.

After listening to this presentation, I would recommend it to my friends because it talks mainly about having an opened mind to things. Which is something that is important to have along with the fact that one must research about their own culture while getting to know other cultures as well, so one can have a better understanding of our multicultural society.