Medicine that Walks: Disease, Medicine, and Canadian Plains Native People, 1880-1940

by Maureen K. Lux

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

Genres: History Of Medicine, Nonfiction, History

288 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 2001

Reviews

[Dasha · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a significant piece of work as evidenced by its winning of the CHA’s Clio Prize and the Royal Society of Canada’s Hannah Medal for the History of Medicine. Lux explores how Indigenous people adapted and retained their traditional healing practices and that these practices serve as a foundation to set-up care facilities today that cater to Indigenous people without solely relying on biomedical practices that historically did not improve Indigenous peoples’ health outcomes. It is also illuminates how a disease impacts a population is socially constructed around living conditions, access to food and quality of food, poverty, and isolation.

[Sadie Ruin · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a very hard to read amazing book and should be mandatory for any university history class dealing with the Canadian prairies. I feel this books is more readable than James Daschuks clearing the plains, and it also includes more authentic own voices. Seriously, just skip the Daschuk, you won’t be let down but your heart will be ripped out.

[Amanda Alice · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book re-examined a rather dark period in Canadian history in a fascinating new light. Some of the content was truly heartbreaking - Lux was objective, yet presented the subject matter without dehumanizing the past. Very interesting to see how contemporary historians are re-shaping our understanding of history.

[Katie · Rating 4 out of 5]

In Medicine that Walks, Maureen Lux examines how disease, colonialism, and government policies impacted Indigenous health and medicine. Considered groundbreaking for it's thorough examination of the numerous government policies and interventions that lead to the ill health and death of numerous Plains people, Lux examines how the Canadian government moved from viewing Indigenous peoples and their medicinal systems as "primitive" but adaptable towards being racially inferior to white Canadians. As Lux outlines, mass starvation and famine in the Plains in the 1880s was not a natural occurrence - but one implemented through government neglect that was built on the belief that Indigenous people should not receive "hand-out" or charity as it would make them dependent on the government - even as the government enacted policies that stole land, limited ability to travel, and forced Indigenous people to interact with colonizing forces and thus forced dependency upon these groups. A bit repetitive at times, but also thorough and damning it what is presents, Lux's text provides an excellent examination of the ways government policies shaped and changed Indigenous health.

[Brandon Zhao · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reads like a textbook, but clearly explains the interventions the colonial governments made to decrease the health of and harm Indigenous peoples on the prairies.

[Noel · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book taught me that Aboriginal people has many effective ways to deal with diseases in traditional way. However, the depravation of resources, the newcomers invasion, death, lost of knowledge and other factors decimated the population of Aboriginal people.