Carrying Both Medicines

May 12, 2026

National Nurses Week: Mabel Jones

Today, during National Nurses Week, Grandmother’s Voice honours Mabel Jones.

In 1928, Mabel Jones became the first Indigenous nurse to graduate from the Women’s College Hospital School of Nursing. Women’s College Hospital remembers her as a trailblazer who had to overcome systemic barriers built to erase Indigenous Peoples, and as someone known for combining Western nursing practices with Indigenous healing practices, including traditional plants.

That matters deeply.

Because Mabel’s story is not only a story about becoming a Nurse. It is a story about refusing the idea that Indigenous knowledge had to be left behind in order to enter a health care profession. It is a story about walking into a colonial institution, learning its methods, meeting its standards, and still carrying the medicine of her people.

Long before hospitals, clinics, and formal nursing schools shaped what health care would become, Indigenous communities had their own systems of care. Knowledge was held by Grandmothers, Aunties, Midwives, Medicine People, Healers, and Helpers. It lived in the land, in careful observation, in ceremony, in food, in water, in plants, in language, and in relationships. A person was not treated as a body separate from spirit, family, grief, story, or community. Wellness was understood as balance.

Colonization tried to interrupt that balance. Indigenous medicines were dismissed. Ceremonies were outlawed. Midwives and Healers were pushed aside. Children were taken from the homes where teachings would have been passed down through listening, watching, helping, and remembering. Western systems often demanded that Indigenous people prove themselves by moving away from their own knowledge.

Mabel Jones stands inside that history.

She entered nursing at a time when Indigenous women faced barriers not only because they were women, but because they were Indigenous. To graduate from nursing school in 1928 was not a small accomplishment. It meant discipline, intelligence, endurance, and courage. But what makes her story especially powerful is that she is remembered not only for succeeding in Western nursing, but for bringing Indigenous healing knowledge with her.

That is cultural safety before the term became common.

It is the knowledge that healing can live in more than one place. It can live in a hospital room and on the land. It can live in clean bandages and plant medicines. It can live in training and in teachings. It can live in careful clinical assessment and in the wisdom of knowing that a patient is more than a diagnosis.

Mabel Jones reminds us that Indigenous Nurses have always been asked to navigate more than one world. They have had to learn systems that were not built for them, care for people harmed by those same systems, and often educate others along the way. They have had to carry professional knowledge and ancestral responsibility together.

Today, that work continues.

Indigenous Nurses continue to bring language, culture, advocacy, humour, ceremony, patience, and fierce love into health care spaces. They continue to challenge racism, correct assumptions, comfort families, speak up when a patient is being dismissed, and remind systems that Indigenous health is not only about access to services. It is about dignity, respect, self-determination, and the right to be cared for as a whole person.

Mabel Jones helped make that truth visible.

Today, Grandmother’s Voice honours her courage, her skill, and her refusal to be separated from Indigenous medicine. We honour every Indigenous Nurse who has ever had to fight to be respected in both worlds. We honour every Indigenous patient who deserves care that recognizes their whole self.

Mabel Jones reminds us that healing grows where knowledge is allowed to root.