01/09/2026
SAVE THE DATE📆, REGISTER & CALL FOR PRESENTATIONS📣:
FNHSSM Two-Day Anti-Indigenous Racism Conference
Moving Beyond Land Acknowledgments: Disrupting Anti-Indigenous Racism in Healthcare
February 18-19, 2026
Radisson Inn Downtown – 288 Portage Avenue
Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada
📣Presentation Call Out for Stories and Knowledge
The First Nations Health and Social Secretariat of Manitoba (FNHSSM), together with the Anti-Indigenous Racism Conference Team, invites stories, knowledge, and practices that move beyond performative commitments toward accountability, action, and systemic change across healthcare systems.
This conference centres Indigenous-led perspectives and critically examines how Anti-Indigenous Racism operates within healthcare delivery, health education, research, and policy—and how it can be disrupted in meaningful ways. This gathering is about telling the truth: honouring our ancestors who entered into treaties, and honouring our relatives whose lives and health have been harmed by racism in healthcare. It is a call for accountability and a shared commitment to change—through allyship, advocacy, and action, now.
Who Should Attend:
This conference is intended for those who are prepared to engage honestly, reflect critically, and take responsibility for disrupting Anti-Indigenous Racism within healthcare, research, and institutional systems.
This includes:
First Nations community members whose lived experience, leadership, and knowledge systems are foundational to this work
First Nations researchers and scholars advancing Indigenous-led and anti-racist research practices
Indigenous organizations and networks leading systemic change and advocacy
Non-Indigenous researchers, academics, and health professionals willing to examine power, privilege, and complicity, and to move from awareness to action
Race-based Data and information management professionals engaged in First Nations data sovereignty, governance, and equity-driven decision-making
Presenters are invited to align their submissions with one or more of the following streams:
1. Truth→ Responsibility → Action → Transformation
Truth-Telling & Indigenous Lived Experience in Healthcare: Strength-based stories and Indigenous knowledge rooted in lived experience, history, and traditional teachings that uplift survival, care practices, and community wisdom, and equip participants with anti-racism practices to create accountable and transformative change in healthcare.
2. Systems, Power, and Responsibility
Power, Policy, and Institutional Accountability: Sessions focused on how racism is embedded in healthcare systems, policies, funding decisions, and research structures—and how it can be dismantled.
3. Beyond Symbolism, Toward Change
Practicing Anti-Racism: Skills, Tools, and Interventions: Hands-on, applied, and experiential approaches that equip participants to disrupt racism where they work.
4. Unlearning Whiteness and Colonial Harm
Settler Responsibility and Ethical Allyship in Health: Critical examinations of settler roles, complicity, and responsibility, moving beyond performative allyship.
Or
Settler–Newcomer Participation in Anti-Indigenous Racism: Exploring how racialized newcomers are disrupting colonial systems, resist pressures of proximity to whiteness, and creating pathways toward accountability and solidarity with Indigenous Anti-Racism in healthcare.
5. Disrupting Colonial Health Systems
Treaty, Land, and the Medicine Chest Clause: Understanding health as a Treaty right and examining how colonial systems extract land, resources, and life by denying care.
The types of sessions for this Call for Stories and Knowledge are:
Oral presentations
45 minutes that is interesting and engaging
Interactive Workshops
45-minute interactive workshop that participants will learn skills that can be used within their communities or on their journey
Sessions should be action-oriented, strength-based and solution focused. Indigenous led sessions will be given priority. All workshops, and oral presentations must have an Indigenous co-presenter to be considered.
Abstracts must be connected to the theme of strength in our communities and linked to one of the streams noted above.
The final date for submission is EXTENDED TO: January 20, 2026 at 4:30pm (central).
Late submissions will not be accepted.
Process:
Abstracts will be reviewed by FNHSSM – Anti-Indigenous Racism Team
Speakers will be notified if session is accepted by end of day Wednesday January 21, 2026.
Written acceptance will be provided through email, and speakers will need to confirm acceptance by noon Friday January 23, 2026. (central standard time)
Speakers will need to register by Wednesday January 28, 2026.
Accepted sessions will be published in the conference program, the conference website and other mediums.
Presenters are responsible for their own registration fee, accommodation and travel to and from the conference.
Inquiries:
Cheryle Dreaver
Anti-Racism Project Lead
First Nations Health and Social Secretariate of Manitoba
Email: cdreaver@fnhssm.com
Phone: (431) 337-5836
