In 2021, a year marked by catastrophic wildfires and floods in B.C., Tamara Sommer was hired to support the Health Emergency Management B.C. (HEMBC) team at Interior Health (IH). Today, Tamara is the Indigenous HEM liaison, supporting First Nations communities throughout the Interior region.
Tamara was recently interviewed for Interior Voices, IH’s Aboriginal health and wellness podcast series that explores the intersection of health and culture in the workplace, everyday lives and patient care. In it, she talks about her role, the barriers and challenges of emergency management (EM) and what she hopes for the future of EM in B.C.
Covering gaps and connecting pathways
As the Indigenous liaison for Interior Health, Tamara is responsible for many of the roles that emergency management coordinators perform – writing emergency plans, helping facilitate responses in times of emergency such as a flood or wildfire, and setting up training and resources for staff and leadership.
But as she shares in the podcast, the purpose of her new role is much broader. “Not only do I cover some of the gaps that we are seeing in connections internally between our different departments that help support First Nations communities across the IH region. But I also really work to connect all of those different emergency management pathways with our external partners in a way that can better support Indigenous Peoples in emergencies,” says Tamara.
Those external partners are quite vast, and include not only First Nations, but local government, municipalities, different governmental response organizations and local organizations like Salvation Army, Meals on Wheels, to BC Housing, to local mental health and wellness response teams.
Ensuring First Nations are at the table
Key to her advocacy work, and performing emergency management well, is ensuring First Nations are at the table at the start of a response to an emergency. As Tamara explains, “One of the challenges we see in emergency management is that the Nation or the community is not necessarily included in those initial meetings. This really ties in to that piece around community respect and self-governance.”
She adds, “And I think that is a really big loss on our part when we are responding, because they are the people who know their land, they know their people, they know the weather, they’ve lived there since time immemorial, they understand exactly what needs to be done and how their area works, and there’s so much valuable knowledge in that. We need to find the humility within ourselves to say ‘We want you to come to the table and tell us what you need. Because you know what we need. Better than we do.’"
“With the way the emergencies are starting to happen…we need to be asking ourselves, ‘This is what we have historically done. Is it enough?’ It likely isn’t enough. So how can we change the way we work, and how can we work with other people who have the knowledge and wisdom…and bring them all together so we can do this in a better way. Because we are going to need to learn and adapt as climate change and emergencies continue to have such a heavy impact on all of our communities in our region.”
Pushing for changes
Ultimately, Tamara would like to see her role become redundant. “My vision is that the unique needs and values of the Indigenous Peoples of B.C. are integrated every day into our work, for example when we’re creating new processes and new standards works of practices.”
In the meantime, Tamara continues to advocate for change, not only in emergency response, but in emergency mitigation and recovery as well. “Over the last few years, First Nations communities have been in constant response mode,” she says. “They haven’t even had the opportunity to get to recovery and the rebuilding, and the health and wellness recovery piece is so important and often forgotten. I would hope in this position I can continue to push for those changes in how we approach good health care in all of the pillars of emergency management.”
She adds, “This is something health care in general needs to take on – that role of self-reflection and humility to say either ‘We don’t know’ or ‘We got it wrong.’ There’s no weakness in that. I think it’s a strength to admit when you’ve done something wrong, and then ask. There’s a lot of information out there that shows how we can do better.”
Tamara Sommer lives and works as an uninvited guest on the traditional, ancestral and unceded territory of the Sylix Nation.
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