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 the loss of the bison herds and forced settlement on
reserves, led to population decline. The diseases killing the
Plains people were not contagious epidemics but the grinding
diseases of poverty, malnutrition, and overcrowding.
"Medicine That Walks" provides a grim social history of medicine
over the turn of the 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 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.
Winner of the 2001 Clio Award, Prairies Region, presented by the
Canadian Historical Association, and the 2002 Jason A. Hannah
Medal
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