Colonizing Bodies: Aboriginal Health and Healing in British Columbia, 1900-1950 (review)

Mary-Ellen Kelm. Colonizing Bodies: Aboriginal Health and Healing in British Columbia, 1900-1950. Vancouver: UBC Press, 1998. xxiii + 248 pp. Ill. $75.00 (cloth, 0-7748-0677-X), $25.95 (paperbound, 0-7748-0678-8).

Colonizing Bodies, originally a University of Toronto dissertation, exposes unnecessary suffering among British Columbia's Indians. Mary-Ellen Kelm angrily indicts legislators who "consistently sacrificed Aboriginal bodies" (p. 177). Worse, European medicine abetted the colonial agenda that "created" aboriginal ill-health, and Kelm promises to "explode the myth" of its "alleged superiority" over native means and to show how that misconception was "culturally constructed" (p. xix).

"Indians are good, and whites are bad" sums up the book's tenor. Traditional remedies worked wonders (colds disappeared "before you know it" [p. 163]), while Western ones had side effects and questionable efficacy. Natural ventilation in prehistoric pits (whose occupants kept warm by huddling) and multifamily long-houses promoted well-being; drafts in boarding schools harmed children's health. Native midwives sagely helped mothers with abortions and the killing of unwanted newborns, but Kelm waxes indignant over deaths she attributes to whites: for each one, "there was a person lost, an important community member prevented from contributing to the shaping of the future. The legacies of these losses and the ongoing nature of these processes shape the present as well as the past" (p. 177).

A whirlwind of facts heightens the stridency. Kelm often reaches decades on either side of her stated time period for a damning quote. And since her material is presented in thematic rather than temporal fashion, we are lurched back and forth through much of a century, often within the same paragraph. Contradictions abound. The high prevalence of tuberculosis, Kelm reminds us, proves the dreadful state of postcontact Indian life--but as late as 1935, she has consumptive boarding-school pupils returning to communities in which no one was as yet infected (p. 76). One cannot have it both ways. Similarly, Colonizing Bodies pinpoints low cubic-feet-of-air-per-student as promoting sickness--yet each child had its own single bed, far better than what was available in Indians' log-cabin homes.

The author's unquestioning faith in oral history also presents problems. A Sto:lo elder reports how each September, on returning to class, "everyone would always get the measles or the mumps . . . because we were always breathing on each other" (p. 66)--but an adjacent list shows that measles struck on average every five years, mumps every ten. This story also highlights a crucial flaw: the absence of comparative data. The parade of maladies seems horrendous, but placed beside that from a contemporary white school, or even from one today, it might look quite benign.

Colonizing Bodies searingly describes how youngsters hungered while produce from school-operated farms was profitably sold. But a book praised by Kelm offers powerful contrary evidence from the institutions she studied most: nutrition, several students reveal, was better at school than at home. ¹ If true, that may have translated into lower tuberculosis mortality. Hence, it is not at all "clear," as Kelm claims, that poor conditions "contributed to waves of ill-health that spread far beyond the school grounds themselves" (p. 76). Nor is that argument strengthened by citing Dr. Peter Bryce, an oft-sanctified Indian Health Service executive: his writings and those of his fellow officials contain numerous self-contradictory statements. When using their words, one must show why a particular quote, and not another, holds water; without such backing, one can find material to support almost any stance. And that, indeed, is the impression created by Kelm's archival hits.

Using Kelm's technique, one could easily construct the case that boarding schools, permanent housing, and altered diets had little to do with inciting disease. In 1771, for example, when Indians still lived in traditional...