Members of the National Assembly on Tuesday presented a medal of honor posthumously to Joyce Echaquan. The family of the Atikamekw woman, who died in October 2020 under racist insults from Joliette hospital staff, quickly reminded the government that this recognition will not be enough without more concrete actions.
“We accept it by recalling that if a medal is only metal, it is worth nothing,” said Ms. Echaquan’s family in a press release issued on the sidelines of the medal ceremony.
“We accept it by recalling that recognizing Joyce’s Principle, halfway, is not enough. We must adopt it, bring it to life, give it the necessary resources, so that our heritage is, thanks to Joyce, an unprecedented evolution in relations between non-Aboriginals and Aboriginals in Quebec,” added his family.
After Ms. Echaquan’s death, the Council of the Atikamekw Nation developed Joyce’s Principle, which aims “to guarantee to all Aboriginal people the right of equitable access, without any discrimination, to all social and health services”. Gold Quebec refuses to adopt it, since it requires from the outset an admission of “systemic racism”, which the government of the Coalition avenir Québec does not wish to recognize.
However, in the opinion of the Echaquan family, systemic racism is one of the elements that contributed to the death of the mother, “tragic and avoidable”. In this, the conclusions of the relatives of the Atikamekw woman agree with that of the coroner responsible for investigating her death: in October 2021, Géhane Kamel ruled that “the racism and prejudice” that Ms. Echaquan faced in the hospital de Joliette “have certainly been contributory” to the tragedy that cost him his life.
Other honored personalities
Present in the stands of the National Assembly, the husband of Mrs. Echaquan, Carol Dubé, was greeted by applause from all the elected officials gathered in the Blue Room. The man and some of his children were in the company of journalist, actress and writer Janette Bertrand, screenwriter Luc Dionne, former MP Benoît Pelletier and Martin Lafleur, son of the late hockey player Guy Lafleur. They have all been honored by the National Assembly for their careers and their commitments.
In the statement they shared, the Echaquan family wrote that they would have “preferred not to be” in the National Assembly on Tuesday. “Obviously we would have preferred to have Joyce with us, still by our side. No medal can ever replace his life. But since we are there, we want to dedicate our presence to the courage of Atikamekw women, to the courage of Indigenous women from here and elsewhere,” they wrote.
In the wake of the death of Joyce Echaquan, dozens of Aboriginal people denounced the mistreatment they say they suffered in the Quebec health system.
The Echaquan family also said they accepted the medal “so that this particular form of racism [le racisme systémique] which is present in Quebec as elsewhere in Canada is no longer ignored by people in a position to change things”.
To date, the Legault government refuses to recognize the existence of systemic racism, anywhere other than in residential schools. Quebec also rejects a recommendation from the Commission on relations between Aboriginal peoples and certain public services (Commission Viens), which ordered it to document complaints from Aboriginal people in the public network in order to measure the extent of the phenomenon of discrimination.
The Echaquan family concludes its press release by paying tribute to Janette Bertrand, who was seated a few seats from Carol Dubé in the galleries of the National Assembly on Tuesday. “We accept it [la médaille] hoping that the value of the one we receive today will one day be equal to that which Mrs Bertrand received at the same time, that is to say the symbol of an exceptional contribution to the evolution of mentalities in the Quebec,” wrote relatives of the Atikamekw woman.