Dartmouth Institute MPH Student Spotlight: Nicole Redvers

Growing up in the Canadian north, with its predominantly Indigenous population, Nicole Redvers developed an early understanding of the vast challenges of delivering effective, personalized care to a population often distrustful of conventional medical systems. To help bridge that critical gap between modern advances in medical science and more traditional forms of healing, Redvers became a licensed naturopathic physician—studying both modern medicine and traditional indigenous medicine around the world. 

After serving as a medical volunteer in Africa, Asia, and Central America, Redvers established northern Canada’s only rural integrative health clinic. Located in Yellowknife, the capital of the Northwest Territories, the Gaia Integrative Clinic has 16 practitioners and offers primary care integrative medicine to the local population. Through her work at Gaia, which is a private clinic, Redvers became keenly aware of how many of the most disadvantaged and at risk in the community couldn’t afford the clinic’s services and didn’t have options for accessing care that aligned with their culture and beliefs. Motivated by this inequity, in 2016, Redvers co-founded the Artic Indigenous Wellness Foundation, an organization dedicated to revitalizing Indigenous traditional healing services in the Canadian north. In 2018, the foundation was the recipient of the $1 million Arctic Inspiration Prize. Part of the million-dollar award will be used to support the creation of healing camps focusing on the homeless population in Yellowknife and those most at risk in the Indigenous communities in the Canadian north. 

“The Indigenous elders in our region have been trying for decades to have a place where they can pass on cultural health knowledge and practice to the next generation. Their voices have continually fallen on deaf ears (from the Canadian government). One of the elders who has been actively fighting for this right for almost 10 years asked me personally to get involved in this fight for our people.”

Areas of Interest:

• Evaluation methods for community-based projects in a minority context

Dartmouth Institute Deliverables:

• The skills, training, and perspective to better advocate for Indigenous health in North America

POSTED 8/23/2018 AT 10:31 AM IN #mph online