Colonizing Bodies: Aboriginal Health and Healing in British Columbia, 1900-50, and: Ways of Knowing: Experience, Knowledge, and Power among the Dene Tha (review)

Colonizing Bodies: Aboriginal Health and Healing in British Columbia, 1900–50. By Mary-Ellen Kelm. (Vancouver: UBC Press, 1998. xxiii + 248 pp., illustrations, figures, tables, acknowledgments, introduction, notes, a note on sources, select bibliography, index. $75.00 cloth.)

Ways of Knowing: Experience, Knowledge, and Power among the Dene Tha. By Jean-Guy A. Goulet. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998. xliv + 334 pp., preface, introduction, map, tables, notes, references, index. $60.00 cloth, $25.00 paper.)

Euro-Americans have long romanticized the body and soul of the pure native. Today this purity is often spoken of in the past tense, and this assumption was also true of the earliest colonizers. Mary-Ellen Kelm’s Colonizing Bodies is a dissertation-based historical analysis of colonization encompassing concepts of territorial invasion, sociocultural dislocation, external political control, limited citizenship, cheap labor, limited social services, and racial discrimination on aboriginal bodies in British Columbia during the first half of the twentieth century. The study is geographically and temporally specific, but these fifty years are a critical time, when seminomadic hunter-gatherers were pushed into government-built nuclear family homes, children were forced to board at schools far removed from their home life, and native subsistence technology and nonsecular medicine were criminalized—all to create a semblance of “Europeanness.” This project was, of course, set up to fail. While this native transformation was considered inevitable as the next imperative step in evolving toward civilization, native Europeanness was never fully attainable in the eyes of Europeans.

Part one begins with a review of aboriginal health alongside devastating statistics on the dreaded tuberculosis, influenza, measles, alcohol, suicides, and venereal disease, among others. Kelm contends that aboriginal bodies are the “sites of struggle between indigenous and imported healing systems” (175), the loci of colonization and resistance both physically and symbolically. She argues that the colonizers focused on the body, changing such practices as banning tattoos, labrets, and cranial deformation, and altering the design of clothing and housing to “whiten” them. “Progress” was thus measured against the bodies, and Kelm documents this through restrictions on use of land, resources, house and village styles, and “Euro-Canadian culinary imperialism” (37) that led to unsafe housing, sanitation problems, overcrowding on reserves, undernourishment, and outbreaks of disease. In addition, these conditions were blamed on bad native mothering, providing an excuse to remove children from their homes. Assimilation, abuse, and starvation of children in boarding schools by Christian missionaries were the final insults for most aborigines who began to vehemently protest colonization.

Part two examines the medical practices of colonial doctors who believed their efforts to be purely humanitarian, but their health care policies of assimilation allowed doctors and nurses to undermine native healers to “save them from their unsanitary selves” (102). Kelm argues that the medical infrastructure came to be supported by natives who wanted non-native medicine for non-native diseases, and describes how natives preserved their own remedies to heal what they considered native diseases.

The author seeks to track the toll on the physical bodies themselves, but does this without the integration of biological studies on disease and alcohol—of which there have been several. Though Kelm acknowledges that not all social and physical ills were brought on by Europeans, a precolonial picture is lacking. Deeper exploration into nonvirulent causes of death would have added an important dimension. Violent deaths have been lumped with accidental deaths, both of which she mentions all too briefly as developing in these fifty years (16). But violent deaths were not new to the First Nations and are associated with periods of stress; colonization was the most recent of many periods of stress.

Smaller points of disagreement aside, this is an impressive synthesis of multiple types of sources. Ultimately, Kelm’s case study affirms that the effects...