What Got Us Here Won’t Get Us There: Critical History in Radical Black Re-imaginations of Canadian Nursing Histories

Abstract

As a “foursome” of nursing history students and scholars, upcoming, junior, and seasoned, we presented a panel on new work and possibilities related to histories of Blackness and Black nurses in Canadian nursing history. Our presentation was the 2023 keynote Hannah Panel Presentation for the joint Canadian Society for the History of Medicine (CSHM-SCHM) and the Canadian Association for the History of Nursing (CAHN-ACHN) conference. Reflecting and expanding our perspectives, we share the relevance and significance of engaging with histories of Canadian Blackness and (in)visibility of Blackness in nursing history. This paper considers the overarching question of how does engaging with histories of Canadian Blackness serve as an anti-racist strategy when examining, analyzing and understanding the history of nursing and health care? A core tenant of this work aims at acknowledging how institutional relationships of power are reproduced within scholarship unless there is space for radical re-imaginations. The disruption to power is achieved by exploring the connections between nursing and history from the perspective of Black nurses’ history or Black feminist thought. We also disrupt power by our form, in challenging expectations of scientific inquiry as the only format of valid knowledge production within the discipline. Possibilities of arts-based methodology as a site for democratization in nursing knowledge are evoked through the metaphoric language (water, fire, air and earth) interwoven within the text. We highlight how each of us engages with nursing history, further complicating previous narratives of our collective Canadian past. In publishing our thoughts on historical inquiry in a nursing journal, we hope to provoke more curiosity and interest in history within our discipline as a site for liberation!