Melanie Sheldon is a multicultural pediatric physiotherapist employed with the Rehabilitation Centre for Children (RCC), located in Winnipeg, Manitoba. Melanie works with communities and alongside families, providing consultative service to children with neurodevelopmental and lifelong disabilities living on reserve. She is honoured to be a part of her client journeys, exploring reciprocity in storytelling as a way of engaging with clients in their health journey, and to understand Indigenous participation with health services, using two-eyed seeing to advance the goals of her client families.

Melanie’s clinical and lived experience is highly valued within the clinical and research departments at RCC, including a joint initiative with the University of Manitoba and CanChild, working to apply a decolonizing lens to the F-words for Child Development. She also works with settler colleagues to bring policy in alignment with the TRC Calls to Action, as an active member of the RCC Truth and Reconciliation Committee, and as a council member of the College of Physiotherapists of Manitoba.

While she is Wet’suwet’en, whose ancestors are from Witset First Nation in British Columbia, she is the descendant of a 60s scoop survivor, and grew up in a diverse urban core neighbourhood flowing with Anishinaabe, Inninu, and Métis ways of being.

She is overjoyed to be a part of this circle as it weaves together so many of her passions to advance health equity initiatives for Indigenous families and communities across Turtle Island.