Valéry Ridde, « Climate migrants and health promotion », Global Health Promotion, nov. 2018

Edito dans Global Health Promo­tion à retrouver en accès libre sur le site de la revue

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‘Burn me /​hang me /​as much as you wish /​as much as history repeats /​I will return a hundred­fold’ (1). It is rare to begin an edito­rial in a scien­tific journal with a quote from a poem, but art is an essen­tial dimen­sion of health promo­tion. After all, didn’t Winslow daringly assert that public health is ‘an art and a science’ (2) to explain that we must also take our emotions and our expe­rien­tial know­ledge into consi­de­ra­tion to act on the social deter­mi­nants of health, as we cele­brate the 10th anni­ver­sary of the famous WHO Commis­sion dedi­cated to said deter­mi­nants (3)? I read this excerpt by Natasha Kanapé Fontaine, a poet from the Innu First Nation, in a heart­brea­king book that shows how Euro­pean migrants (a term of our times!) who had come to conquer and settle Canada sought to destroy the ‘Laughing People’ (1), them­selves migrants. But the people demons­trated their resi­lience, a word that has come back into fashion (4) even if it is still not used often enough in public health. Despite the twin humi­lia­tions of colo­ni­za­tion and the unjust govern­mental poli­cies of assi­mi­la­tion that followed, the people of the Côte-Nord region of Quebec persisted, and still exist today. They, along with the people in central Sahel and at the heart of the Carib­bean, are living in an alar­ming situa­tion today that all too few of us know about. […]