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Race, Class, and Health: School Medical Inspection and “Healthy” Children in British Columbia, 1890–1930
- Wilfrid Laurier University Press
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number of counts. They were more likely to be living with a family member other than a biological parent, came from larger families on average , and from homes characterized by referral agencies as having poor hygiene, nutrition, or home management, or as being overcrowded.55 The supporting study on which these conclusions were based noted that health camp recording systems were largely silent on the subject of ethnicity , only one camp specifically including the information on its admission form. When approached to supply information, some districts were reluctant to do so, fearing to be labelled “racist” merely by recording such details. “Unfortunately,” it noted, “a frequent corollary of this perspective is the notion that all children, whether Pakeha or Polynesian, should be treated the same. Inevitably, the ethnocentric view of the dominant culture determines the manner in which children will be treated.”56 From the mid-1980s, then, the ethnicity of children admitted to health camp, and of Maori children in particular, became an issue. The all-inclusiveness of the category of “child” was officially fractured and the cultural homogeneity of the health camp experience publicly challenged. Maori—and to a lesser extent, Pacific Island—children became visible, literally and figuratively: for the first time, health stamps showed children of markedly darker hue, and posters and other publicity included children of obvious Polynesian descent. The response at health camp level varied according to the ethnicity of local intakes. At the Gisborne camp, on the east coast of the North Island, as many as 60 per cent of children were Maori, and attempts to make the camp a comfortable environment for Maori children preceded the Hancock report.57 The camp was adopted by a local Maori community, representatives from the local Department of Maori Affairs were included in case discussions over the 1980s, and by 1990 a kohanga reo or Maori language pre-school was based at the health camp. Other camps gained funding for a kaumatua or elder, or a Maori field worker to liaise with Maori parents and local marae, and there were attempts to employ Maori staff in positions other than domestic.58 At national Health Camps Board level, the response was slow, but it was hastened by a government shift away from deficit funding through the Health Department to more competitive funding models in the early 1990s. As has happened among First Nations peoples in Canada,59 tribally based Maori authorities successfully claimed government funding for their own, autonomous ventures. Other organizations wanting a share in government health revenues had to demonstrate a commitment to treaty principles. Contracts signed between the Children’s Health Camps and government health funding authorities in the 1990s required the camps to “apply the principles of partnership, participation and active protection of Maori interest in their management, employment 280 MARGARET TENNANT and service delivery policies and practise.”60 Reference to the treaty was made in the service requirements and was expected in the inevitable mission statements issued from the late 1980s. The Children’s Health Camps Board began to speak of “holistic” conceptions of health, which were seen to be in keeping with a Maori integration of the spiritual and physical, to emphasize the movement’s “long, close and positive” relationship with Maori, and its delivery of programs in a “culturally appropriate manner.”61 Within the camps the visibility of Maori children was now an asset to the movement, an avenue to continued funding, and an indicator of the camps’ relevance to contemporary New Zealand. Ethnicity overshadowed gender as an issue of concern, and although a majority of male Maori children was sometimes implied, ethnicity and gender were not correlated. A 1999 evaluation of children’s health camps for the government’s Health Funding Authority gave no gender breakdown of intakes, instead constructing “equity” as a rural–urban access issue or as one relating to Maori health.62 The report mentioned only in passing that 29 per cent of health camp children lived with two parents and that the principal source of income for 56 per cent of attendees’ households was a social welfare benefit.63 As an organization existing for more than eighty years, one that is still “a national icon well loved by politicians and supported by local voluntary action groups”64—as even its critics reluctantly concede—the children’s health camps movement illustrates many broader themes in New Zealand society writ small. Not least, it shows changing conceptions of health over time, as reasons for referral shifted from...