Medicine That Walks : Disease, Medicine And Canadian Plains Native People, 1880-1940

MEDICINE THAT WALKS Disease, Medicine, and Canadian Plains Native People, 1880–1940 In this seminal work, Maureen Lux takes issue with the ‘biological invasion’ theory of the impact of disease on plains Aboriginal people. She challenges the view that Aboriginal medicine was helpless to deal with the diseases brought by European newcomers and that Aboriginal people therefore surrendered their spirituality to Christianity. Biological invasion, Lux argues, was accompanied by military, cultural, and economic invasions, which, combined with both the loss of the bison herds and forced settlement on reserves, led to population decline. The diseases killing the plains Aboriginal people were not contagious epidemics but the grinding diseases of poverty, malnutrition, and overcrowding. Medicine That Walks provides a grim social history of medicine from the end of the nineteenth to the middle of the twentieth century. It traces the relationship between the ill and the well, from the 1880s, when Aboriginal people were perceived as a vanishing race doomed to extinction, to the 1940s, when they came to be seen as a disease menace to the Canadian public. Drawing on archival material, ethnography, archaeology, epidemiology, ethnobotany, and oral histories, Lux describes how bureaucrats, missionaries, and particularly physicians explained the high death rates and continued ill health of the plains people in the quasi-scientific language of racial evolution that inferred the survival of the fittest. The plains people’s poverty and ill health were seen as both an inevitable stage in the struggle for ‘civilization’ and as further evidence that assimilation was the only path to good health. The Native people lived and coped with a cruel set of circumstances, but they survived, in large part because they consistently demanded a role in their own health and recovery. Painstakingly researched and convincingly argued, this work will change our understanding of a significant era in western Canadian history. maureen k. lux is a post-doctoral fellow at the Hannah Institute for the History of Medicine. This page intentionally left blank Medicine That Walks Disease, Medicine, and Canadian Plains Native People, 1880–1940 MAUREEN K. LUX UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS Toronto Buffalo London © University of Toronto Press 2001 Toronto Buffalo London Printed in THE53! Reprinted 2007, 2011  ISBN 0-8020-4728-9 (cloth) ISBN 0-8020-8295-5 (paper) Printed on acid-free paper National Library of Canada Cataloguing in Publication Data Lux, Maureen K. (Maureen Katherine), 1956– Medicine that walks : disease, medicine and Canadian Plains Native people, 1880–1940 Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8020-4728-9 (bound) ISBN 0-8020-8295-5 (pbk.) 1. Indians of North America – Health and hygiene – Prairie Provinces – History. 2. Indians of North America – Medicine – Prairie Provinces – History. 3. Indians of North America – Prairie Provinces – Government relations. 4. Indians of North America – Prairie Provinces – Social conditions. I. Title. E78.P7L89 2001 362.1a089a970712 C00-933159-X University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Humanities and Social Sciences Federation of Canada, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support for its publishing activities of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP). For Glen, Molly, and Sarah This page intentionally left blank Contents List of Tables ix Acknowledgments