Medicine that Walks: Disease, Medicine, and Canadian Plains Native People, 1880-1940 (review)

The tragic impact of epidemic disease on Native Americans following European contact is unquestionable and well known. Does this then mean that the subsequent devastation wrought by colonialism must be dismissed as the unfortunate but unavoidable outcome of a biologically skewed meeting? Maureen Lux would say no. In Medicine that Walks, Lux convincingly argues that the abysmal state of Native health on the Canadian plains was the result of ill-conceived, but no less deliberate, government policies. Without denying the toll of epidemics, Lux emphasizes the baseline living conditions of poverty, poor sanitation, and insufficient nutrition that weakened general health and eroded the ability of communities to deal with epidemics when they hit.

Lux begins her study with the “numbered treaties” of the 1870s, a logical starting point given her interest in the impact of government policy. When Aboriginal people refused to move onto reserves, the Canadian government presented them with a grim ultimatum: submit or starve. Withholding food and medical rations—which were, in fact, treaty obligations, and not the charity they were often made out to be—had a variety of important implications that have been studied elsewhere. Here, Lux draws our attention to the quite obviously negative effects of such actions on health. As a result, “Aboriginal people of the plains were plunged into a hunger/disease nexus, the impact of which would be felt for many years after the initial food crisis had passed” (p. 20).

Typically, the Canadian government responded to the Aboriginal health crisis by attempting to provide the bare minimum required to keep people alive. The Aboriginal view of health was quite different; it entailed a holistic view of spiritual and physical health as indivisible. Aboriginal people responded to disease with their own time-tested practices, ranging from herbs to the Sun Dance. Lux argues that “therapeutics are culturally relative” (p. 72) and that such practices worked in the context of particular world views. Unable, or unwilling, to recognize this, the government blamed Aboriginal medicine for the poor health of many people and attempted to eliminate it.

Government officials used the unhealthy conditions on reserve—for which they were largely responsible—to justify assimilation and the apprehension of Aboriginal children. They removed children from their families for years at a time and incarcerated them in residential schools where conditions were often as bad, if not worse, than on reserve. Neither missionaries nor government took appropriate steps to stem the tide of illness and death, preoccupied as they were with other priorities: patronage, funding, and the health of the white population. A 1909 report found the death rate for Native schoolchildren to be nearly twenty times that of other Canadian schoolchildren.

While the government undermined Aboriginal health and medicine, it simultaneously denied responsibility for health care. When the government did provide care, it was ad hoc and tailored for non-Native rather than Native needs, and thus wholly inadequate. Rather than understand the role of government policy in creating the health crisis, Canadian officials resorted to explanations based on race and evolutionary biology. They claimed disease was the inevitable condition of the uncivilized savage. Government doctors were agents of assimilation as much as the Indian agent or missionary. Instead of recognizing assimilation policy as the cause of disease, they prescribed it as the cure.

Racial assumptions were fundamental to the treatment that Native people received for tuberculosis, the major health concern of Canadians in the first half of the twentieth century. Here, the self-serving and shameful behavior of government officials and medical practitioners culminated in performing medical experiments and drug trials on Aboriginal schoolchildren and adults without their consent.

This book fits neatly alongside studies of other aspects of government policy, such...