Two Nurses Suspended Without Pay for Ridiculing Indigenous Woman’s Death

Two Quebec nurses were suspended without pay after ridiculing an Indigenous woman on Friday. The incident follows the death of another Atikamekw woman, Joyce Echaquan, who filmed her final moments in September as two nurses uttered racist comments about her.

The latest incident and Joyce Echaquan’s death both took place in Joliette, Quebec, a city 50 kilometres northeast of Montreal.

According to Ghislain Picard, grand chief of the Assembly of First Nations Quebec-Labrador, the nurses said they’d call the unnamed patient “Joyce.” 

“The staff from this clinic saw her name and told her ‘I think we’ll just call you Joyce,’” Picard Picard said in a Facebook post.

She “was the subject of intimidation, mockery and harassment. In the city of Joliette of all places!” Picard said. “You would think they would have learned their lessons on how they treat Indigenous peoples!” 

Echaquan was 37 and a mother of seven at the time of her death last September. In a video, taken moments before she died, two nurses were overhead speaking in French, saying Echaquan was only good for sex and would be better off dead.  

Caroline Barbir, interim head of the regional health authority in Joliette, told the Canadian Press the incident shocked her, and she immediately asked for the nurses’ identities so they could be suspended without pay. 

No one filed a formal complaint about the latest encounter, but Barbir told CP she understands the Atikamekw community distrusts Quebec’s health care system, and asked a cultural liaison, hired after Echaquan’s death, to reach out to the victim.

In 2019, Quebec released a damning report about how systemic racism plagues several public sectors, including health care.

“The situation is such that the patients brace themselves and devise strategies to decide how to deal with the racism… they will encounter when they walk into an emergency room,” the report says.

Last week, Mireille Ndjomouo, a Black woman from Cameroon and single mother of three, died after filming herself pleading for help while at a Montreal area hospital. “Since I arrived, it’s as if they’re killing me little by little,” she says in the video. “Please, save my life. I have children. I don’t want to die and leave my children.”

Ndjomouo said she told staff she’s allergic to penicillin, but they administered it anyway. The circumstances around her death are still unclear and the Quebec coroner’s office is now investigating.

Quebec is not the only province struggling with systemic racism in its public sector. In 2018, a HealthcareCAN report called out racism nationwide, while British Columbia released its own reports last year after ER doctors and nurses were caught playing a racist game guessing Indigenous blood alcohol levels. More than 10,000 people complained about mistreatment in B.C. hospitals during the investigation.  

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