The Dangerous Push to ‘Decolonize’ and ‘Indigenize’ Nursing

Patients will pay the price when evidence-based nursing practices are replaced with mystical rituals.

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About the Author

Dr. Colin Wright is an evolutionary biology PhD, Manhattan Institute Fellow, and CEO/Editor-in-Chief of Reality’s Last Stand. His writing has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The Times, the New York Post, Newsweek, City Journal, Quillette, Queer Majority, and other major news outlets and peer-reviewed journals.

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The ideological capture of academia has spread beyond the humanities and social sciences into medicine and healthcare, and the consequences are increasingly dangerous. What began as a campaign to promote “equity” and “social justice” has become a full-blown assault on the scientific standards that made modern medicine possible. Universities and professional associations now pressure researchers and practitioners to pledge loyalty to ideological dogmas, while redefining knowledge itself to include political slogans and cultural traditions masquerading as science. The infiltration of pseudoscientific concepts into disciplines that deal with life-and-death matters should alarm us all.

One of the most troubling manifestations of this trend is the push to “decolonize” and “indigenize” science and medicine. These campaigns rest on the claim that Western science is merely a cultural preference, unfairly privileged over “Indigenous ways of knowing.” But this framing ignores a basic truth: the scientific method became dominant not because white Europeans imposed it on others, but because it works. Its results are consistent across cultures, and its universality is what makes it the most rigorous and inclusive method of producing knowledge ever devised. To reject it in favor of subjective “ways of knowing” is to undo centuries of hard-earned progress in order to virtue signal.

The latest example of this ideological creep comes from a peer-reviewed article in Advances in Nursing Science titled A Scoping Review of Action Toward Decolonizing and Indigenizing Nursing. The paper is presented as a neutral survey of literature, but in reality it is an ideological manifesto. Its authors insist that nursing is “permeated by Eurocentric norms that reinforce Whiteness” and call for replacing Western frameworks with “Indigenous and subaltern philosophies and knowledge.” Nurses, they argue, must condemn oppression, embrace activism, and reject the profession’s longstanding apolitical stance. Patient outcomes, strikingly, are never mentioned.

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Watch or listen to evolutionary biologist Dr. Colin Wright and nurse Amy Hamm discuss this paper on the Citation Needed podcast.

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Instead, the paper urges nurses to adopt concepts from The Red Deal, a political manifesto, and to prioritize “caretaking” paradigms that involve “divesting” and “healing the planet.” Research, we’re told, should move away from controlled trials and replicable data toward storytelling, talking circles, and “holistic narrative approaches.” The authors even complain that institutional review boards scrutinize decolonizing research too closely—apparently forgetting that scrutiny is what keeps quackery out of medicine.