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

“My uncle never healed at the tb hospital. He became more ill from being confined to hospital and not seeing his family.” This quote from the opening sets the scene for this fascinating book.

Healing Histories takes us back in time in the mid-1900s to the interface of medical treatment of tuberculosis and indigenous experience of this foreign illness and its treatment in Canada. The author, a nurse by training, positions her stories as intimate recollections that invite us into a more personalized and haunting space, touching the shadows of our recent ancestors. Her goal is clear, “to faithfully present the expressions of Aboriginal people who have rarely, if ever, spoken publically about their past experiences with Western Medicine and Canada’s Indian Health Service” (xix).

The stories are gripping with their tender descriptions of dislocation and resilience, interspersed with contextual reflections by the author. The use of story as method is well known within indigenous research and scholarship. Students, practitioners, and researchers will find Drees’s descriptions of the power of stories and the nuances within the role of indigenous researcher useful to reference and reflect on, improving their approaches. This aspect is one of the great strengths and contributions of this book.

The issue of people rarely speaking of their experiences (xix, 126) is reiterated but not interrogated by the author. This remains intriguing. It would have been insightful to hear more about the participants’ considerations in not speaking about these matters before.

The estrangement of patients from their families, lands, and languages is painful to read. And yet there are stories of resilience where patients and their families use their cultural resources to survive and thrive. The author provides some evidence contrary to a more superficial reading of this history where one might conclude that Aboriginal people were passive recipients of treatment and institutionalization. Rather, she emphasizes the hope and optimism they possessed.

That being said, it is hard to hold onto optimism in the face of expressions of sinister experimentation, anger, sarcasm, and fear. Descriptions of Aboriginal babies screaming because they were left alone in cots, the antithesis of their experiences with their families, where they were never without human contact, are heartbreaking. The fact that neither Aboriginal care nor consents were subject to the same standards as non-Aboriginal peoples was also hard to read about. In addition, accounts of the exploitation of children as young as nine accepted into training for nursing support and racist views about the intellectual capacity of “half-breed girls” are frankly horrifying.

At the same time, the book charts the groundbreaking and personally sacrificing work of the first Aboriginal nurses and support staff advocating for better standards of care for their own people. For some, their experiences as patients brought them back as future employees.

I found the photographs unnerving and distressing. The images appear as publicity shots, with posed, well-groomed patients, smiling on cue, and in particular the young children and babies looking perplexed and literally out of place. They seemed to reflect the veneer that the author was trying to peel away with her participants’ accounts. We see no images of crying infants or people in the “isolation ward.”

Unfortunately, the book’s impact is diminished by the repetition of quotes and stories that have been presented earlier, for example, on pages 97, 128, 129, and 131. Despite this, the book provides lessons that will not be lost on indigenous practitioners who face oppressive and devaluing political structures that continue to undermine our people’s health.

I agree with Drees’s conclusion that Western medicine failed to extinguish the self-determination of Aboriginal people’s concepts of health and healing. However, the book leaves us with the ongoing challenge of identifying how the dynamics described continue to exist in service provision. Systems in which indigenous patients and their families’ knowledge, ways of being, and understanding illness and imbalance...