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Physician Denial and Child Sexual Abuse in America, 1870–2000
- Wilfrid Laurier University Press
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church sermons, were as much about hygiene and health as about religion and the three Rs.”41 They were also about establishing a routine set of practices. Attempting to impose Western order on northern bodies could sometimes pose unique challenges. So too could the long daylight hours in the high Arctic. In The Other Side of Eden, anthropologist Hugh Brody recalled becoming embroiled in a struggle between some Inuit parents at Pond Inlet and newcomers, particularly schoolteachers. Like many other Arctic communities, Pond Inlet was a settlement established by the Canadian federal government and administered by southerners. It was created to encourage the Inuit to desert their traditional hunting camps and to live in prefabricated houses, attend local schools, and when ill, receive medical supervision from the nurses at the local nursing station.42 Inuktituk was the primary language spoken, but a few of the Inuit could speak English, and they were eager for their children to learn the language. In fact, children stood at the centre of the struggle recalled by Brody. The trouble was that it was June, and in the land of the midnight sun, time began to take on a different meaning, a meaning that did not fit the schedules of southern schoolteachers. Children stayed up, gallivanted around Pond Inlet, played baseball, went on bike rides, but they often did not go to bed until breakfast time. The school hours, however, did not reflect this pattern. Pupils were expected to be in school early in the morning, and many did not meet this standard. A community meeting was called to discuss the problem. Teachers believed it was the responsibility of the parents to arouse their sleepy children. Parents , on the other hand, believed that since it was the teachers who were so vexed about the children, then they should ensure that the children were in school on time. The teachers should come to the houses to awaken their charges.43 While the problem remained unresolved, it offers a striking example of the tension between what Brody calls “an Inuit sense of culture and the colonial enterprise.”44 Pond Inlet kids were treated as individuals who could make decisions without being coerced by adults. They carried the name of their ancestors and, as such, were treated as rational decision makers by their kin. Parents were more than willing to have their offspring attend school, but they were not about to force them to adapt to the classroom routines and discipline. This effort to enforce strict bedtime routine, associated in Western culture with successful, healthy children, was but one of the new regimes to which Inuit children were exposed by southerners. And, as Brody reminds us, at times there was strong resistance. The summer months offered children alternatives more appealing than the classroom. 318 MYRA RUTHERDALE Resisting The Pond Inlet children were not unique in their desire to assert their freedom and independence. Their efforts to challenge the newly imposed schedule were matched by those of other children who collaborated in order to talk, joke, and sometimes to downright refuse new disciplines. In her memoirs Amy Wilson recalled a clinic that she held in Lower Post, Yukon, during one of her many stops along the Alaska Highway. Together with a doctor from Edmonton and the assistant Indian agent, she occupied the schoolhouse for the day to carry out their duties. Since no one was actually sick, the doctor spent the day extracting teeth, acting as a dentist. Amy Wilson found herself administering vaccinations and measuring weight. The scales were the most popular of attractions, as many school girls and young women wanted to try them out: “No woman bothered to take off the jacket that might weigh an extra pound or so. One, anxious for her turn, stepped on the scale with her baby slung on her back. As the weight indicator swung to 200 pounds, and then passed it, peals of laughter rang out from those crowding round. Unabashed, she stepped off the scales. She and her healthy baby made a pretty figure.”45 The unfamiliar technology provided an opportunity to joke about others’ numbers with “peals of laughter” ringing out. Measurements would set in motion a new consciousness about size and appearance, just as bathing in soap and water raised new possibilities about perceiving the Westernized version of the proper body. The significance of the “peals of laughter” heard in the school that day should not be ignored. While the newcomers approached their technologies of health...