BY ADELLE LARMOUR

Sudbury’s Joyce Helmer was one of 40 international indigenous scholars selected to attend the recent, inaugural Indigenous Summer Research Institute at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

By the summer of 2009, this one-of-a-kind program will qualify indigenous scholars representing 23 tribes and indigenous groups from Canada, the United States, Australia and New Zealand, to lead health research for indigenous people.

The three-year course was developed through a United States-Canada partnership to address the lack of indigenous expertise in research methods. The goal is to increase the number of Aboriginal health professionals and remedy health inequities within indigenous communities.

The primary partners are Canada’s First Nations and Inuit Health Branch, the U.S. Indian Health Service, Johns Hopkins Centre for American Indian Health and the School of Public Health at the University of Alberta.

“There is no other program at this level of engagement,” said Helmer, who performs many roles within Northern Ontario’s Aboriginal and education sectors.

Awarded a full scholarship, Helmer works as chair of Cambrian College’s Wabnode Institute, a centre of leadership and knowledge for about 600 Anishinaabe students on and off campus. She is currently working on her doctorate in education and is an assistant professor at the Northern Ontario School of Medicine, where she focuses on Anishinaabe curriculum development, including the promotion of indigenous community-based research.

One of 20 Canadians chosen from 65 applicants, Helmer has participated in three sessions with 15 scholars from U.S. tribes, two from Australia and three from New Zealand. This year, a total of five more joined from Hawaii, Mexico and Guatemala. The last session will wrap up next summer.

The certificate is comparable to a Master’s degree, Helmer said. Written papers, presentations and literature reviews are required, earning two to three credits per course.

Like Helmer, the scholars in the program are community workers, academics, advocates and researchers.

“The folks in this cohort are cream of the crop,” she said. “They’ve worked many long hard years in many disciplines and are the leaders of this work in their countries.”

Helmer has been involved in a research ethics committee on Manitoulin Island since 2003. She provides recommendations to researchers and to First Nation communities on good Aboriginal research methods, which are different from academic research methods.

“These communities want to be involved in every step of the research project, beginning with question generation,” she said.

Unfortunately, past unethical research practices focusing on Aboriginal people has created a disparity, Helmer said, describing it as “research fatigue.”

“As Aboriginal people, we want to ensure that when research is being conducted in Aboriginal communities, it is culturally appropriate, done respectfully and supports meaningful change.”

Helmer said there is a movement to ensure this happens via education, by creating ethics committees to critique proposals, or by policy development at the band level.

She sees this course as validating what she has already been doing. “It is a different lens, a more enhanced lens,” transferable to her other studies and research work within First Nation communities.