Separate Beds: A History of Indian Hospitals in Canada, 1920s–1980s by Maureen Katherine Lux (review)

Maureen Lux begins Separate Beds by noting that the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (trc) was about to present its final reports as her book was published and that she hoped that her book would work "to heed the Commission's call that we learn from the past to build that [respectful] future" (xi). When the trc released the final reports, it also released ninety-four calls to action directed at various levels of government as well as the general public. Seven calls fall under the category of "health," including a call for governments to "recognize and implement the health-care rights of Aboriginal peoples as identified in international law, constitutional law, and under the Treaties" (trc, Calls to Action, 2015, 2–3). Separate Beds demonstrates how in the twentieth century, Indian hospitals, as they were called, were consistently underfunded, understaffed, and over-crowded; clearly Indigenous peoples were not seen as having rights to proper health care in this country. Lux's book allows Canadians to understand just how awful the history of Indigenous health care was in Canada and how much work there still is to do today.

The book is a thematic study of the history of the Indian Health Service (ihs). It "examines the rationales for segregation in Indian hospitals and the particular focus on tuberculosis; staffing and hospital operations; coercion and the hospital experience; ihs efforts to shift responsibility for health care to the provinces; and community resistance and the articulation of the treaty right to health care" (14–15). As Lux notes, the book is not meant to be "a comprehensive history of all the hospitals, but a thematic approach to the commonalities in the institutions operated by the bureaucracy initially known as ihs" (17). However, Separate Beds might have been more accurately subtitled "Indian Hospitals in the Canadian West." There are not very many examples east of Manitoba. And, in a way, that is not surprising, as most hospitals were in the West where tuberculosis was rampant. But it leaves unanswered the question of what the federal government was doing in terms of health care for Indigenous people in most of Ontario and everywhere east.

Lux's thematic approach, and lack of a chronological or geographic narrative, also means that the reader does not get a good sense of the story in any one place. For example, in one of the few references to the Lady Willingdon Hospital at Six Nations of the Grand River in southern Ontario, she describes how a group of Indigenous women from the reserve offered to form a hospital auxiliary to provide some comforts for those staying there, "but the physician's influential wife rejected the proposal" (25). Lux references anthropologist Sally Weaver's excellent dissertation from 1967 on health and culture at Six Nations. But a study that looked at the hospital in its local context might have uncovered the records of the auxiliary that exist in the collection of the Department of Indian Affairs. In fact, the Lady Willingdon Hospital Aid (lwha) was established in 1930 by a Six Nations woman, Mary Smith Styres, the founder of the Indian Moral Association earlier in the century, as an offshoot of the Ohsweken Women's Institute, a very active women's organization on the reserve already working to support the sick in the community. The organization provided services for close to a year before a conflict ensued over the extent of the lwha's role. Styres protested the use of the recreation room in the hospital for social functions by the staff (she was called an "anti-dance fanatic"); she also pushed for the use of the hospital as a bit of an old age home, which clashed with the local doctor's plans. The local Indian agent described the lwha as a "coterie of busybodies," and the group was forced to disband in 1931. A letter from Styres to...