Health Features

After more than two decades of living mostly in Vancouver, Evan Adams has returned home to his Sliammon band reserve near Powell River. A prominent gay actor who finished a medical degree and is now British Columbia’s first aboriginal-health physician adviser, Adams is settling in with his partner and their son in their own house.

“It was a big homecoming,” Adams, 41, told the Georgia Straight about the warm welcome he and his family received from band members when they moved in on April 4.

It was quite a different world for Adams, who, like many young Natives, had to leave his ancestral community for an urban area because he felt his sexuality wasn’t accepted by his own people. For many, acceptance is hard to come by even in the cities, where they also face discrimination because they’re aboriginal.

These are the challenges that Adams and other Native leaders hope to bring to the forefront through a conference held in Vancouver (April 6 to 8) that organizers described as the first-ever national aboriginal gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, queer, two-spirit (GLBTQT) summit.

Summit cochair Lynda Gray, executive director of the Urban Native Youth Association, noted that it won’t be an easy task. “It’s hard enough for us to get youth issues on the agenda, but nobody’s talking about GLBTQT,” Gray told the Straight by phone prior to the summit. They’re generally lumped together with either the mainstream gay community or the aboriginal population, and there’s not too much research on their health and social situation, according to Gray.

“Nobody is keeping statistics on it, but we know that it’s worse than what it is for the rest of our community,” Gray said. “The point of the summit is to get it on the agenda so that people are paying attention and they can start gathering statistics and providing services.”

The latest available annual report by the B.C. Centre for Disease Control on sexually transmitted infections and HIV provides a breakdown of HIV and AIDS infections among various racial groups, including First Nations, Inuit, and Métis. However, the paper uses only the traditional gender classifications of male and female in its data presentation.

A 2005 research paper cowritten by Evan Wood, an epidemiologist at the B.C. Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS, noted there were a “considerable number” of aboriginal gay and bisexual men infected with HIV in the province.

“Although the population of Aboriginal gay and bisexual men is small, it still accounts for a large proportion of HIV infections,” Wood and his coauthors wrote in HIV Prevalence Among Aboriginal British Columbians. The paper estimated that in 2001, as many as 232 Native gay and bisexual men were infected with HIV.

In a phone interview, Wood stressed that aboriginal GLBTQT people are a vulnerable group. “It’s a situation where an effective response from policymakers is going to require the full participation of the affected community,” Wood told the Straight. “In public health, it’s been shown that when communities are empowered and participate in the development of solutions, that’s when effective solutions are found.”

The paper’s principal author, Robert Hogg, pointed out that “targeted cultural interventions” are needed in order to effectively deliver health services to this sector. Such services include access to antiretroviral care for HIV-positive people, Hogg, director of the B.C. Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS’s drug-treatment program, said in a separate phone interview.

In 2004, UNYA released a report on the survey it conducted among “two-spirit youth”. The report explained that the term two-spirit has been used historically by North American aboriginal societies to refer to those who are now called gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and transsexual people.

The UNYA report noted that 38 percent of the respondents didn’t feel accepted in their communities, and that 43 percent stated that they were suffering from depression. The survey results also showed that 34 percent of the respondents felt they were more likely than non-two-spirit people to think about and attempt suicide, and 34 percent agreed that they were more likely to become dependent on either alcohol or drugs.

A paper released by Statistics Canada on March 19, 2008, provides a glimpse of the physical and mental health of gays, lesbians, and bisexuals in general, including aboriginal people. “Gay men and bisexual women tended to report more chronic conditions than did the heterosexual population,” according to Health Care Use Among Gay, Lesbian and Bisexual Canadians. “They were also more likely to have had at least one disability day due to physical illness in the previous two weeks.”

The StatsCan paper also notes that bisexual men in general were more than twice as likely as heterosexuals to perceive their mental health as fair or poor. It adds that “for bisexual women, the proportion reporting fair or poor mental health was three times that of heterosexual women.”

Over at the Coast Plaza Hotel, the venue of the three-day conference, NDP Vancouver–Mount Pleasant MLA Jenny Kwan said at a news conference that the provincial government needs to invest in the recommendations that will come out of the summit.

Summit cochair Karen Joseph said that community elders also have a role to play. She explained that elders are needed to help youth reclaim their Native culture’s heritage of according recognition to two-spirit people. Joseph explained that this tradition was lost when aboriginal communities were subjugated by non-Native settlers.

When UNYA surveyed two-spirit youths, 80 percent of the respondents stated that a better understanding of their issues is needed in their own Native communities. “With the residual effects of the Residential School System still felt in most First Nations communities, homophobia is prevalent,” the UNYA report stated.

Robert Joseph, a hereditary chief of the Gwa wa enuk First Nation, agreed that elders need to come forward to revitalize the aboriginal culture of acceptance of two-spirit people. “We’ve been silent for too long,” Joseph said at the news conference.