Healing Histories: Stories from Canada’s Indian Hospitals by Laurie Meijer Drees (review)

The history of tuberculosis and Indian hospitals is one that has received little attention and whose legacy is yet to be dealt with. Drees’s collection of stories shines a light on the indelible mark that Indian hospitals left on the lives of First Nations, Inuit, and Metis peoples. The collection is divided into five sections. Section 1 presents the spread of tuberculosis among non-Indigenous persons as the backdrop against which the federal government developed a plan to isolate and control the epidemic. Along with the epidemiology and history of tuberculosis, the chapter explains the emergence of a separate segregated Indian health care system, highlighting substandard care, dubious consent, and Aboriginal peoples’ role as a test population in the search for a cure.

Section 2, “Indian Health Services,” describes the evolution of a new secular system of health care for Aboriginal people, which began in 1945 and by the 1970s was being dismantled. Nurses’ voices offer personal insights and detail. Marge Thompson, matron of United Church Hospital in Bella Bella, British Columbia, during the 1950s, identifies public health work as a significant part of her role, while Biddy Worsley, a nurse at the Anglican Hospital in Aklavik, acknowledges being a minority in a hospital of Aboriginal people where “we were the guests, the intruders. We were useful but it was their place and that makes all the difference.” Elva Taylor, director of nursing at the Charles Camsell Indian Hospital in Edmonton, Alberta, describes patients’ feelings of isolation caused by significant language barriers between themselves and hospital personnel and great distances from home.

Section 3, “The Institutions,” focuses on the Indian hospitals and field nursing. The author likens the impact of Indian hospitals to that of residential schools. Aboriginal patients resided in hospitals for long periods of time, which impacted their ability to reconnect with their families or communities, and educational programs influenced patients’ future lives and careers. Hospital patients were subjected to forced con-finement and monotonous routines, foreign environments, separation from family and community, and confusing Western medicine – all of which combined to create cultural and linguistic isolation. Marjorie Warkes, a nursing student at the Camsell in the 1960s, talks about the isolation felt by Aboriginal children accustomed to close family connections who were left alone in individual cribs. As a young occupational therapist, Truus van Royen saw the cure for tuberculosis as a system to help Aboriginal people get physically healthy, on the one hand, and, on the other, as a system that isolated people from their families and communities and from everything they had ever known. Rae Dong, an undergraduate from the University of Alberta, describes the camaraderie that was evident in both the staff and the patients with whom she worked, saying that they “would help each other so that their end product was a successful endeavor.”

Section 4, “Patients and Families,” examines life in and around the Indian hospitals. The author identifies three reoccurring themes in patient stories: tedium, loneliness, and physical and emotional hurt. Tedium was alleviated for some patients through music and traditional crafts. Children were offered schoolwork with the intent of “civilizing” them, not unlike in residential schools. Patients reached out to their families and communities through newsletters and radio broadcasts in attempts to reconnect with them. Rehabilitation programs were offered to patients in order to provide skills that would enable them to find work in urban settings. All of these coping strategies were a result of a system that on the one hand treated diseases such as tuberculosis and on the other impacted Aboriginal peoples’ lives for years to come. Laura Crammer, now a recognized playwright, discusses her body memories and the feelings of fear and not knowing associated with those memories in a play she is writing in an attempt to make sense of her history. Alma Desjarlais describes regimented routines and bedrest with schoolwork and beadwork to alleviate the tedium, while Marie Dick recalls punitive punishments, like strapping and...