Joyce Echaquan Films Abuse Before Her Death

Editor's note: This content includes disturbing and hateful language.

Credit to Érick Tremblay-Dionne, via Youtube.

While Joyce Echaquan, a member of Canada’s Indigenous Atikamekw Nation and a mother of seven, was a patient in a Quebec hospital last week, she streamed a Facebook Live video of nurses verbally abusing her as she called for help. She died only hours later at the age of 37 on September 28.

In the video, Echaquan screams in her mother tongue, Atikamekw, before unseen hospital staff verbally abuse her. “Are you done messing around?” one nurse says in French. “You are stupid as hell. You made some bad choices, my dear.” An unrecorded part of the livestream reportedly includes a staff member suggesting that Echaquan is “only good for sex.” Echaquan checked into the hospital in Joliette, Quebec four days before she died with stomach pains. A relative said on Facebook that doctors gave Echaquan morphine even after she informed them of a complicating heart condition. Neither the hospital nor the local coroner has revealed a cause of death, but the latter announced that it is launching an investigation. The hospital, the Centre Hospitalier de Lanaudiere, fired one nurse.

Several Canadian politicians and leaders of the country’s Indigenous community have spoken out against the staff involved. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau called the nurses’ actions “the worst form of racism.” Grand Chief of the First Nations of Quebec and Labrador Ghislain Picard said that deaths like Echaquan’s were “the fruit of government policies which lead to systemic discrimination.” Carol Dubé, Echaquan’s husband, spoke to lawmakers in Ottawa as protests erupted there and in several other Canadian cities, including Montreal and Toronto.

Discrimination against Indigenous patients is nothing new in Canada. A nearly 500-page report from 2019 on Indigenous peoples’ access to public services in Quebec concluded that “both access to services and the quality of care and interventions available to Indigenous people are problematic on many levels.” The report mentions incidents in which doctors administered non-consensual drug tests to Indigenous women and more broadly asserts that Indigenous Canadians commonly face racism in the public healthcare system. Discrimination against Indigenous patients has not been limited to Quebec. The health ministry of British Columbia investigated claims that hospital workers played a game involving guessing the blood alcohol concentration of Indigenous patients in 2015.

The inequities of the Canadian healthcare system pose a real risk to the country’s already shrinking First Nations communities. COVID-19 is especially dangerous to Indigenous Canadians, who often lack convenient and sufficient medical care close to their homes. A similar pattern exists in the United States, where the CDC has noted that the incidence of coronavirus cases among Native Americans is three and a half times higher than among non-Hispanic white Americans. At any time and especially during a global pandemic, the two-tiered medical care that Canada and the United States provide to Indigenous peoples underscores the fact that Indigenous peoples face ongoing discrimination and lack resources from the government to provide for their communities’ safety.