Red Rock Indian Band citizen 1 of 3 Lakehead University doctoral students to receive award
By Rick Garrick
THUNDER BAY—Lakehead University researcher Holly Prince is looking forward to working with community through her recently announced three-year $105,000 Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) – Joseph-Armand Bombardier Canada Graduate Scholarships Doctoral award.
“It’s building upon the previous research I did around palliative care in First Nation communities,” says Prince, a Red Rock Indian Band citizen who has worked with Lakehead University’s Centre for Education and Research on Aging and Health (CERAH) for about 14 years. “My proposed project was working with a First Nations community following up some of the previous research that we did from their perspectives and their understanding of what was involved in conducting research and how as researchers can we do our research ethically and more respectfully with engagement with First Nation communities.”
Prince says her PhD thesis will seek to understand the experiences of First Nation community participants to participatory action research and collaborative inquiry into palliative care and explore how First Nations Elders, knowledge carriers and Indigenous communities educate and inform research methodologies to better serve their needs, rights and interests.
“There are a couple of different ideas that I have as well for looking at doing some further research with First Nation communities,” Prince says, noting that she wants to talk with First Nations women who are health care providers about their approach to delivering good quality palliative care in their communities. “So I kind of have two different streams or two different ideas on what this research could look like.”
Prince says her Wiigiiwe research project is part of the Joint PhD in Educational Studies she enrolled in last July at Lakehead University.
“So I’m a full-time student working part-time,” Prince says. “I’m just completing my first year of my PhD program. I’m hoping to do it in four-to-five years.”
Prince began her research into palliative care in First Nations communities while she was pursuing her Masters, which she completed in 2005.
“When I started my Masters, I looked at two First Nation communities, and at that time, which was 15 years ago, there wasn’t a lot of research happening around palliative care with First Nations people,” Prince says. “My research project was really trying to find out what were the challenges and barriers to providing good quality palliative care and what were some of the things they needed in community and where did community members want to receive their end-of-life care.”
Prince says her part-time role at CERAH involves the delivery of culturally relevant and appropriate palliative care education for First Nation communities.
“We’ve been involved in a provincial-wide roll out of education in Ontario, so we went and delivered 25 workshops to over 70 First Nation communities targeting almost 500 healthcare providers in Ontario,” Prince says. “My PhD is more focused on more research and exploring and understanding what our [First Nation people’s] approach to care looks like and how can we better provide care and reclaiming some of that traditional community-based knowledge around caring for people at end of life.”
Prince previously co-led a CERAH research project focused on improving end-of-life care in First Nations communities with the active collaboration of community members from 2005-2017.
She was one of three Lakehead University students who received SSHRC – Joseph-Armand Bombardier Canada Graduate Scholarships Doctoral awards. The three projects were among 29 research projects at Lakehead University that were announced on April 3 as recipients of more than $1.2 million in funding from SSHRC.