Modernity and the Dilemma of North American Anglican Identities, 1880–1950 by William H. Katerberg (review)

444 letters in canada 2001 university of toronto quarterly, volume 72, number 1, winter 2002/3 plains reserves, with soaring death rates the result. Rather than acknowledging the harmful effects of their policies, government officials chose to place the blame for the Aboriginal people=s hardships on their supposed racial and cultural inferiority. In turn, this doctrine of inherent weakness, fuelled by the emerging pseudo-science of race science, was taken up by others and used to justify the destructive policies of assimilation and medical interference that followed. Residential schools that were developed as vehicles for religious and cultural assimilation provided ideal conditions for the spread of tuberculosis. Hospitals that emerged as offshoots of the school system did little to alleviate the situation, while medical care was largely ineffective and was provided to the plains people based on the needs of non-Natives. Taken as a whole, this doctrine of racial inferiority had a devastating impact upon the health of the Aboriginal people of the plains, and its legacy is to be seen today. Lux=s thesis, with its focus on entrenched racism, is certain to be a controversial one, but it is well supported by her comprehensive research. In addition to drawing heavily upon government records and archival holdings from across Canada, documents that she has examined with a highly critical eye, she has also attempted to present the voice of the Aboriginal people through the use of interviews. Consequently, this book is a damning indictment of Canadian policies towards the Aboriginal people, with as much in common with treaty rights research as with more traditional medical history. Its emphasis on the government=s indifference to the economic and physical devastation of the Aboriginal people and the corporate and individual racism that has been endemic in the Canadian government, the medical community, and the Christian churches will no doubt be unsettling to some readers. This unease is heightened by the book=s tendency not to delve far into the complex motivations of the nonAboriginal actors, who for the most part appear as unsympathetic agents blinded by their racist beliefs. If discomforting, Medicine That Walks is an important book that offers critical insights into the collapse of the health of the Aboriginal people of the Canadian plains beginning in the 1880s. At the same time, it also has much to say about the present. Even as it documents the process by which the current poor state of health developed, the book also suggests that all is not hopeless. This may be one of its most valuable contributions. In- deed, it argues convincingly that traditional health care practices proved resilient enough to adapt to changing social and economic circumstances and to new health threats, despite policies meant to silence and discredit them, and that they have gained new relevance in the present. When combined with Western medicine, these traditional practices may offer part of the solution to the legacy of yesterday=s disastrous policies. (PAUL HACKETT) William H. Katerberg. Modernity and the Dilemma of North American humanities 445 university of toronto quarterly, volume 72, number 1, winter 2002/3 Anglican Identities, 1880B1950 McGill-Queen=s University Press. xii, 306. $49.95 This study of a particular expression of North American religious history serves as a lens into contemporary debates over identity formation and of the relationship between traditional religious communities and modernity. The book offers analyses of the lives of five prominent leaders of the Anglican Church in Canada and the United States, and identifies the contradictions and paradoxes involved in modern identity formation. Katerberg argues that these tensions develop as traditional values and assumptions become >disembedded= when stable cultural norms are fragmented by changing social conditions. Like other studies of Anglican identity (here one thinks of Stephen Sykes=s The Integrity of Anglicanism), Katerberg highlights what he calls the >myth of comprehensiveness,= or the notion that the Anglican Church represents a unity of differences that reconciles both Protestantism and Roman Catholicism under a common umbrella. He demystifies this ideal in the course of his biographical analyses of Dyson Hague, W.H.G. Thomas, William T. Manning, C.E. Grammer, and H.J. Cody, as he uncovers unresolved contradictions in their...