Healing Histories: Stories from Canada’s Indian Hospitals by Laurie Meijer Drees (review)

A dark-haired, dark-eyed girl sitting in a hospital bed and holding a pale-skinned doll grins at you from the cover of this book. It is a publicity photo from the 1950s of a patient at the Charles Camsell Indian Hospital in Edmonton, Alberta. Canadian health officials used such photos to show how effectively First Nations and Inuit people were being provided medical service. But oral historian Laurie Meijer Drees begs to differ. It is hard to ignore the parallels, she argues, between the Indian boarding schools and Indian Health Service (IHS) hospitals, both of which took indigenous people far from their homes and families and cut them adrift from their cultural traditions.

But readers familiar with the extensive literature on US Indian boarding schools, based largely on oral history interviews, will note a more nuanced story here in which optimism, resilience, humor, and hope prevail alongside pain and a sense of loss. And readers would do well to remember that at least through the 1950s, when medical researchers established effective drug therapies to treat people with tuberculosis (TB), the prevailing treatment option was enforced bed rest in a sanitarium where patients were isolated and could not spread the disease, thus addressing a very real public health threat.

Healing Histories is based on the author’s seven years of research in government archives, on travels throughout British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan, and the Yukon, and on interviews with sixteen people who were associated with Indian Health Service hospitals as patients, family members, nurses, or other staff members. It documents, from individual participants’ perspectives, the impact of the IHS’s efforts to stem the deadly tuberculosis epidemics that wiped out families and sometimes entire indigenous communities in Canada’s west and far north.

Oral historians can take away some important lessons from this book. First, the author’s work illustrates the importance of context in presenting information from oral histories: she explains the circumstances by which she found her narrators and those in which the interviews took place, including an acknowledgement of her nervousness in fumbling with dead batteries in her recorder at the outset of one interview; she details her use of varied documentary sources to outline the history of health care for indigenous people in Canada; and she sets the scene in the first chapter with a detailed discussion of tuberculosis, especially in the indigenous population, and efforts to treat the highly contagious disease. In 1944, for example, TB infection rates were ten times higher for registered Indians in Canada than the national average and remained significantly higher into the 1960s. Tuberculosis, in fact, was a driving force that brought Western medicine into Native communities in the first half of the twentieth century.

The author offers other insights particularly important to oral historians who wish to interview aboriginal people, especially if the subject under discussion may involve difficult or painful experiences. She says First Nation elders, storytellers, and teachers helped her see that “oral histories are more than answers to structured interview questions. They are instead a part of a person’s life. … Stories are gifts given, not collected” (xxi). Drees says she learned that “interview work in this field really only works by invitation, rooted in relationships underwritten by reciprocity and trust” (xxiii). To that end, people in addition to the interviewee generally were involved in what she calls “storytelling sessions” (xxii). Their presence helps both the teller, who welcomes an audience for the stories, and the listener, who has the advantage of having others to discuss the story with “and ultimately, to help remember it” (xxii).

Readers might, however, wish for more details on Drees’s transcribing and editing process. Most of the chapters that focus on an individual’s story appear as uninterrupted, polished, first-person narratives, which is almost certainly not how the interview evolved. It would be helpful to know what standards the author followed in massaging...