Colonizing Bodies: Aboriginal Health and Healing in British Columbia, 1900-50 - Softcover

Kelm, Mary-Ellen

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0774806788 ISBN 13: 9780774806787

Publisher: UBC Press, 1999

Synopsis

Recent debates about the health of First Nations peoples have drawn a flurry of public attention and controversy, and have placed the relationship between Aboriginal well-being and reserve locations and allotments in the spotlight. Aboriginal access to medical care and the transfer of funds and responsibility for health from the federal government to individual bands and tribal councils are also bones of contention. Comprehensive discussion of such issues, however, has often been hampered by a lack of historical analysis.

Colonizing Bodies examines the impact of colonization on Aboriginal health in British Columbia during the first half of the twentieth century. Mary-Ellen Kelm explores how Aboriginal bodies were materially affected by Canadian Indian policy, which placed restrictions on fishing and hunting, allocated inadequate reserves, forced children into unhealthy residential schools, and criminalized Indigenous healing. She goes on to consider how humanitarianism and colonial medicine were used to pathologize Aboriginal bodies and institute a regime of doctors, hospitals, and field matrons, all working to encourage assimilation. Finally, Kelm reveals how Aboriginal people were able to resist and alter these forces in order to preserve their own cultural understanding of their bodies, disease, and medicine.

About this title

About the Author

Mary-Ellen Kelm is an assistant professor of history at the University of Northern British Columbia who has written extensively on Aboriginal health concerns and Indigenous-European relations.

Mary-Ellen Kelm is a Canada Research Chair in the Department of History, Simon Fraser University. Her previous books include Colonizing Bodies: Aboriginal Health and Healing in British Columbia. She is an avid animal trainer, competing in agility and obedience with her dog, Rusty. She lives in North Vancouver with her husband, Don, and spends her summers outdoors, hiking and paddling in British Columbia.

Review

"A worthy read, a sophisticated, interdisciplinary analysis of the health situation of Aboriginal peoples and the way in which whites and Aboriginals themselves responded to it."―Wendy Mitchinson, Canadian Historical Review

"By discrediting the destructive and paternalistic deficit model, Kelm plays an important role in pointing communities, academics, and public health officials to the vital task of continuing to recognize and support the sources of community resilience and, ultimately, health."―Bruce Miller and Laraine Michalson, BC Studies

"Colonizing Bodies is an innovative and engaging book . . . an important contribution to the history of First Nations and the health care history."―Peter Twohig, Canadian Bulletin of Medical History

About this edition

• Publisher: UBC Press
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0774806788
• ISBN 13: 9780774806787
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 5
• Number of pages: 272