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Bulletin of the History of Medicine 77.1 (2003) 214-215



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Maureen K. Lux. Medicine That Walks: Disease, Medicine, and Canadian Plains Native People, 1880-1940. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001. xii + 300 pp. Ill. $50.00, £35.00 (cloth, 0-8020-4728-9); $22.95, £12.00 (paperbound, 0-8020-8295-5).

This an important analysis of the political economy of the health of aboriginal nations of the Canadian prairies. Backed by meticulous archival research and interviews with native elders with their rich oral history, Maureen Lux shows how the depopulation caused by rampant diseases suffered by the aboriginal people was the result of repressive economic, political, and cultural policies of assimilation, which were designed to contain the native people and isolate them from Canadian settlement and industrial expansion at the least financial and political cost.

Lured by the promise of material and financial assistance in making the transition to agriculture from the rapidly collapsing hunting economy, the aboriginal people entered into treaties with the Canadian government in exchange for what they were led to believe was access to their lands. The twenty-year hunger crisis that followed the government's unwillingness to fulfill its treaty obligations that would have permitted effective agriculture reinforced "policymakers' perceptions that Aboriginal people were 'racially' flawed" (p. 5). The Indian Act of 1876, passed without the knowledge, and certainly without the consent, of the people, relegated them to the status of wards of the state, and created a bureaucracy that would exercise increasingly coercive control over every aspect of their lives.

Lux shows in horrifying detail how deliberate, cynical policies—such as forced relocations of starving bands to more remote lands, and a policy of work for rations that were deliberately kept below subsistence levels—created lethal conditions [End Page 214] that prevented economic recovery and ensured increased susceptibility to infectious diseases. Medical reports of starvation and rampant disease were repeatedly dismissed as being the result of the peoples' natural indolence—and indeed, such attributions of racial and moral inferiority would be used over the next sixty years to explain the alarmingly high death rate from disease and poverty. Despite changes in government, policies remained contradictory, self-serving, and increasingly coercive. The peoples' protests and petitions that these policies were interfering with their health and self-reliance were interpreted as proof of their inability to adapt to the rigors of civilization, and of the need for yet more coercive policies.

In close collaboration with government, the churches and medical personnel had their own self-serving agendas. With school attendance compulsory from 1895, students were crowded into poorly heated and ventilated, unsanitary buildings, and received nutrition of the lowest quality. Sick and dying children were not separated from the others—ideal conditions for disease to spread. The 1907 Bryce report, in which 35 percent of students were found to be dead or dying, finally led to public recognition of the situation. However, Bryce's recommendations were suppressed, and little was changed. Indeed, it was not until the 1930s, due to pressure from provincial anti-TB societies who feared the spread of disease to the nonaboriginal population, that sick students were separated from the rest.

Lux shows how politically appointed physicians, hired to administer the reserves, had little contact with the people, and were correctly perceived to be part of the structure of coercive assimilation. While the medical bureaucracy grew, health care was administered mainly by agents or missionaries, and by traditional healers who were seen to be more effective than the physicians (who were often considered a last resort when indigenous healing failed).

There is much more. This should be a recommended text for students of medical history, aboriginal studies, or medical anthropology. It bears rereading, as gems of information and irony appear in the most unlikely places—such as a brilliant economic analysis embedded in the section on medical treatment. Subheadings, a map, and a chronological chart would have been helpful adjuncts.

 



David Burman
University of Toronto

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