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Journal of Interdisciplinary History 33.4 (2003) 673-674



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Medicine That Walks: Disease, Medicine, and Canadian Plains Native People, 1880-1940. By Maureen K. Lux (Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 2001) 230pp. $50.00 cloth $22.95 paper


Much of the work in Native studies focuses on political negotiations, land claims, and economic development. It is as if "high politics" and economics have dominated this field just as they did most fields of historical inquiry in the past. Medicine that Walks is a much-needed reminder that the most trenchant assessment of treaties and reserve allocations, court cases, and political protest comes at the level of human relations. In particular, at a time when the public tires of the "Indian question," as it was once called, we need to be told again that human lives are profoundly affected by "Indian" policy now and in the past.

Lux's book does just that. Lux situates federal policy toward the Plains First Nations between 1880 and 1940 within the context of acute economic and environmental change. First Nations, Lux argues, forged treaties with the government expecting help in facing such transitions. Canada's federal government sought only to limit the impact of First Nations on settlement—to remove them to reserves and hence to "open [End Page 673] up" the land. This fundamental misunderstanding haunted the treaty-making process and the early years of treaty implementation. More devastating, however, it permitted government inaction as First Nations starved while the buffalo disappeared. Weakened by hunger, the people succumbed to wave after wave of infectious disease. Faced with an embarrassing situation, government stepped in only to silence the bad press that a full-blown health crisis had generated.

Assimilative policies only made matters worse. Residential schools preached good hygiene and promised to ensure good health, but children died in those institutions in alarming numbers. The government outlawed aboriginal ceremony and medicine even while it refused to provide adequate medical care to First Nations. Further, by arguing that aboriginal health was determined more by biology and culture than by policy and institutions, the federal government and the medical community exculpated themselves.

There is not much that is new in this story. Lux goes over ground better covered in other texts but synthesizes the existing material well. Though the book is conservative methodologically, Lux was thorough in her attempts to ensure that aboriginal perspectives were represented. Nonetheless, she has little to say that will change the way we think about aboriginal health or the nature of cross-cultural contact. Medicine that Walks solidly pulls together information that was already available in scattered sources and vaguely formed impressions.

Medicine that Walks is sometimes repetitive and poorly organized. On one hand, the repetitiveness replicates the material itself: Epidemics repeatedly hit communities, and the government persistently failed to act. The story repeated itself over and over again. But on the other hand, poor organization and inadequate writing sometimes limit the accessibility and the appeal of this book. Greater care might have been taken to make sure that this important story was told clearly and elegantly. Yet, by showing how aboriginal people suffered the effects of government policy, this book contextualizes the poor health statistics for First Nations that so often appear in the media. In this way, it prevents these statistics from being confined to matters of race and forces us to see how the nature of aboriginal ill-health has been socially, economically, and politically constructed.

 



Mary-Ellen Kelm
University of Northern British Columbia

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