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Med student earns award for tackling tobacco use in aboriginal youth

Wednesday, May 7, 2008
University of Alberta Folio

Volume 45 Issue 17

Helping aboriginal youth uncover the long lost line that separates First Nations tradition from cigarette addiction has earned a University of Alberta medical student a Kaiser Foundation of Canada National Award for Excellence.

Daniel McKennitt, who is in his second year in the Faculty of Medicine & Dentistry, was named the winner in the Excellence in Youth Leadership category for his creation of the Aboriginal Health Group, an aboriginal student group whose main initiative involves a program designed to warn Edmonton’s aboriginal youth about the perils of smoking.

The Aboriginal Health Group’s Culturally Appropriate Use of Tobacco program, started in 2006, is a twist on the Butt Out program created in 1999 by a U of A medical student to promote smoking prevention and proper decision-making about tobacco use to Grade 6 students. McKennitt’s program is proving so popular that the Aboriginal Health Group recently received a $25,000 grant from Canadian Heritage to expand the program.

“We were asked to try to put together something; not only because as health professionals and university students we are aboriginal role models, but also to also make something that is culturally appropriate,” said McKennitt. “We wanted to show the cultural appropriateness of tobacco use alongside the inappropriate recreational tobacco use that was never intended to be part of our culture but has seemed to become so.”

To tailor this message to the appropriate audience, the Aboriginal Health Group contacted Edmonton’s various school boards, First Nations elders, addiction experts, resource workers and aboriginal youth themselves, and then developed a manual and guide book with a sample curriculum designed for students in Grades 1-6.

McKennitt, who was born into the Sandy Bay Ojibway First Nation, says while the original Butt Out program is a great program, it paints tobacco in a negative light. He says in many First Nations’ cultures tobacco use is central to many ceremonies and rituals. Unfortunately, that understanding has been lost through the years and a culture of recreational smoking, which is as high as 82 per cent in some aboriginal communities, has taken hold.

“Both aboriginal and non-aboriginal students have been very supportive and very understanding of the appropriateness of tobacco, and that it does have a role in society and is not just an evil drug that has killed so many people,” said McKennitt. “Students shouldn’t be scared to participate in sweat lodges, pipe ceremonies or smudges because the aboriginal people have been using this for traditional purposes, and it’s only since they started using tobacco improperly that the harmful effects have happened.”