A Four-Part Blog Series
& the Practice of Cultural Safety
What a novel about an Ojibwe boy, a residential school, and a hockey rink taught me about twenty years of emergency care and why it belongs in every paramedic classroom in Canada.
Read the series
On carrying assumptions into emergency care for nearly twenty years and what it finally took to begin examining them. A settler paramedic's entry point into Indian Horse and the question of reconciliation.
Richard Wagamese's novel and the 2017 film adaptation. Saul Indian Horse, his grandmother's world, St. Jerome's Residential School, and how hockey became both refuge and prison.
The novel's central wound: silence, compound oppression, and what Crenshaw's intersectionality reveals about why Saul had no recourse. What healing actually requires, and the silence I now hear on calls.
Two structural gaps in Canadian paramedic education, the TRC's Calls to Action 23 & 24, and why Indian Horse belongs in every professional health curriculum. The case for story as pedagogy.
Andy Ramonal
Paramedic Educator
Ontario College
19 Years Clinical Practice
I am a Filipino-Canadian paramedic and educator based in Ontario. My parents arrived in Canada in 1973. I have spent nearly twenty years on ambulances, and three years in the classroom training the next generation of paramedic students.
This blog series grew out of graduate work in Diversity in Adult Education and a reckoning — slow, uncomfortable, and necessary — with what I did not know about the patients I was caring for, and why.
Indian Horse broke something open. These posts are an attempt to pass that through to my students.