Indigenous knowledges are increasingly promoted within scholarship and policy making as a necessary component of the well-being and self-determination among Indigenous Peoples. This article contributes to this discussion by raising practical and ethical questions surrounding the resurgence of traditional food practices in Western Canada. Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted with cultural activists and Elders in central Vancouver Island, this article reveals how this resurgence is framed by competing and contradictory pressures to build wider inclusion and awareness while simultaneously protecting knowledge and resources from exploitation. Due to this complication, it is imperative that scholars and policy makers develop and apply a more nuanced understanding of Indigenous knowledges in contemporary contexts that can better respond to the needs of Indigenous communities.

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Seizures account for approximately 1% of emergency department (ED) visits annually. 1 Approximately 11% of the population will experience at least one seizure in their lifetime. 2 There are numerous etiologies for seizures including intracerebral hemorrhage, malignancy, trauma, and central nervous system infections. Given the many causes of seizures and often unclear history, emergency

Culturally safe care is gaining traction in health policy, yet the health disparities faced by Indigenous populations persist. In addressing this discrepancy, this thesis addresses the different ways culturally safe care is defined, envisioned, and applied within health policy, Indigenous nursing practice, and within Nuu-chah-nulth communities. The research was conducted in partnership with the Nuu-chah-nulth Tribal Council (NTC) Nursing Services on the Canadian West Coast. This project involved two years of collaborative ethnographic field research based in Port Alberni, BC. My role at the NTC was both a student ethnographer and an embedded health systems researcher. Data was also collected from semi-structured narrative interviews with nurses, community members, and health leaders and participant observation of nursing visits, health-related workshops, and community events. Findings illustrate that Indigenous self-determination enables relational modes of care, which have increased access to health services by providing a site for individuals to overcome past trauma, as well as a platform for nationrebuilding and collective healing. At the same time, a biopolitics imbued with colonial logics continues to justify the lack of health services available in Indigenous communities. Indigenous patients are subjected to racialized stereotypes which affect the quality of care they receive. These practices are perpetuated through the discourse that the health care system is experienced the same by all Canadians. I challenge this by demonstrating how Indigenous peoples are subjected to constructs of "deserving" and "undeserving" patients informed by a truth discourse which is enacted through clinical decision-making and specific biomedical care practices which normalize structural racism. By understanding care practices as the subject of multiple ontologies, the collective modes of care performed informally within Nuu-chah-nulth families or during social gatherings expand the kinds of care afforded in biomedical settings, by emphasizing an ontologically relational nature of being. Ultimately, Indigenous modes of care are both marginalized by and actively transforming biomedical standards of care in western Canada. This produces simultaneous, oppositional movements between enacting relational modes of care and the colonial legacy linked to systemic racism that oppresses Indigenous ways of knowing and excludes Indigenous peoples from the ostensibly universal public good of health care.1 I use the term First Nations to reflect that this research was conducted with Nuu-chah-nulth First Nations. However, I also recognize the likelihood of similar or overlapping experiences shared by Metis, Inuit, and other Indigenous Peoples living in British Columbia and Canada more broadly and so I also use the term Indigenous. Use of the term Aboriginal is applied to reference the language used in Canadian legislation.