![Sample our Social Sciences journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/110822/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Social-Sciences.jpg"})
Abstract
Canada’s program to examine, transfer and treat Indigenous and Inuit peoples with tuberculosis in Indian Hospitals (ca. 1936 and 1969) has generally been framed by official narratives of population health, benevolence, and care. However, letters written by Inuit patients in Indian hospitals and their kin, and which were addressed to government officials and translated by government employees, challenge this assumption. By focusing on the harmful effects of the segregation and long-term detainment of Inuit peoples away from their communities, the letters theorize TB treatment as multiply harmful and iatrogenic. The letters also showcase how Inuit peoples resisted Indian Hospital treatment and articulated the need for care and treatment to occur within a network of intimate relations, rather than in distant sanatoriums.
Acknowledgments
I am grateful to Saiba Varma and Emma Varley for their careful attention to this manuscript and for their many very helpful contributions (occurring throughout) to this paper. Thanks also to the staff at Library and Archives Canada.
Ethical approval
No ethics approval was required for this work.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Charles Camsell was a geologist and the Deputy Minister of Mines and Resources and Commissioner of the Northwest Territories. (https://web.archive.org/web/20100203041213/ /http://www.nrcan.gc.ca/com/deptmini/traipion/charlescamsell-eng.php, accessed March 14, 2020).
2 https://www.cbc.ca/news/indigenous/indian-hospitals-class-action-lawsuit-1.5425171, accessed January 15, 2021. During the early operation of the CCIH Métis people were denied Indian Status rights through legislation like the Indian Act (1876). Indian hospitals were officially designated for ‘Indians’ and ‘Eskimos’ but Métis peoples were also detained there. There is no full account of the numbers or experiences of Métis peoples detained in Indian Hospitals. See Maud (Citation2013) for an historical examination of perceptions of Métis and TB.
3 This quotation appears on the commemorative pillar on the northeastern corner of the property.
4 Which provided the foundations through which ‘Canada’ was constituted.
5 ‘Settler colonialism is a persistent social and political formation in which newcomers/colonizers/settlers come to a place, claim it as their own, and do whatever it takes to disappear the Indigenous peoples that are there’ (Arvin, Tuck and Morrill Citation2013, 12).
6 See Kelm (Citation1998) and Lux (Citation2001). IRS survivors indicate that treatment at Indian Hospitals resulted in loss and trauma (TRC Citation2015b). Bryce’s report of the deaths of Indigenous children in IRS from TB was published in the Ottawa newspaper at the time and so there have been public accounts of medical racism through forced detainment in dangerous environments coupled with medical neglect (Hay et al. Citation2020).
7 https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/indian-hospital-class-action-1.4508659, https://www.cbc.ca/news/indigenous/indian-hospitals-class-action-lawsuit-1.5425171 2020, accessed Nov. 25, 2020.
8 https://pm.gc.ca/en/news/speeches/2019/03/08/statement-apology-behalf-government-canada-inuit-management-tuberculosis, 2020 accessed January 8, 2020.
9 By ‘apologizing for the past, Canada effectively avoids any acknowledgement of continued racist and discriminatory policies’ (Soltani Citation2017, 24). Trudeau’s apology came six months before the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal (CHRT) found the federal government discriminated against ‘40,000 to 80,000 First Nations children [who] were deprived of public services and wrongfully removed from their families between 2006 and 2017’ (Hay et al. Citation2020, E223). Trudeau appealed that CHRT decision. There appears a relationship between confessing shame for past wrong-doing and perpetuating ongoing racism.
10 Title: Translated Inuit letters from correspondents with disc number E7, pt. 1, Reference: RG85, R216-1162-9-E, Volume number: 2357.
11 Following Tester et al. (Citation2001) and Olofsson, Holton, and Partridge (Citation2008), Quallunaaq is from the eastern Canadian Inuktituk to refer to non-Inuit, European, white or ‘southerner’. https://www.wordsense.eu/ᖃᓪᓗᓈᖅ/, 2001 accessed February 20, 2020.
12 Varma (Citation2016) shows gratitude is expected of those confined to a clinical context in Kashmir. Perhaps here too, gratitude was mobilized by those detained as a ‘resistance that does not involve direct confrontation, but which offered patients a culturally salient language … while avoiding additional discipline, violence or time in treatment’ (Ibid., 59).
13 Approval from the Research Ethics Board is not required. Information is within the public domain, at the Library and Archives Canada (LAC).
14 The Eskimo disk system was started in 1935 by the Quallunaaq who wanted to administer a colonial bureaucracy in the north and who struggled with Inuit systems of naming and did not learn Inuktitut and dialects (Alia Citation2008; Dunning Citation2012). RCMP maintained, updated and revised the disk system across the north. Alia highlights the many inconsistencies and absurdities of such attempts to intervene and control Inuit communities and families. Stevenson (Citation2014) addresses the deep importance of names in these same contexts.
15 ‘Eskimo’ was used in the letters. The Inuit Circumpolar Council Resolution 2010-1 On the use of the term Inuit in scientific and other circles asserts the ‘rights of an indigenous people to self-identify’, states ‘“Eskimo” is not an Inuit term’, and requires that ‘research, science, and other communities be called upon to use the term “Inuit,” instead of “Eskimo” … in the publications of research findings and other documents’
https://www.inuitcircumpolar.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/iccexcouncilresolutiononterminuit.pdf, 2014 accessed November 18, 2020.
16 On occasion, TB patients and translators were the same; Mini Aodla Freeman (Citation2015), a patient at the Hamilton Mountain Sanatorium was later a translator for the Department of Northern Affairs and Natural Resources. Freeman describes the loss of meaning that occurred in translation of these letters (Stevenson Citation2014). https://thepeopleandthetext.ca/featured-authors/MiniFreeman, 2014 accessed November 23, 2020.
17 Important future research includes analyses of original texts by Inuktitut speakers.
18 The denial of settler colonial violence is ongoing. In Alberta, documents leaked from the government-appointed educational curriculum advisers suggest all references to IRS be eliminated from kindergarten to grade 4 curriculum. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/education-experts-slam-leaked-alberta-curriculum-proposals-1.5766570?fbclid=IwAR1G_try5B50o7ua07UZ7fPDzKwWbjc35gLqrVP10wEa7N7-GJ40hoe172o, 2014 accessed December 2, 2020.
19 See Dreier (Citation2019, 69) for ‘colonial iatrogenesis’.
20 The Canadian Museum of Human Rights (https://humanrights.ca/news/confronting-genocide-in-canada, 2019 accessed October 4, 2020) and National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women. (https://www.mmiwg-ffada.ca/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/Supplementary-Report_Genocide.pdf, 2019 accessed October 4, 2020) describe strategies like residential schools, the 60s’ scoop, and violence against Indigenous women and girls as attempts towards genocide.
21 https://www.cpha.ca/history-tuberculosis, 2019 accessed February 20, 2020.
22 These segregated institutions functioned as sanatoria and general hospitals – a situation that would have iatrogenic effects for patients. Indian hospitals were ‘admitting all Aboriginal patients, tubercular and otherwise. The costs of such contradictions were borne by patients whose care and safety became seriously compromised’ (Lux Citation2016, 48).
23 Twenty-eight months was the average (Nixon Citation1988).
24 Olofsson, Holton and Partridge (2008, 131) use a photograph to show that the letters TB were written on people’s hands with a black felt pen.
25 Lux (Citation2016, 13) describes the surgical removal of lungs (pneumonectomy) and the collapsing of lungs either through injecting air or removing ribs (pneumothorax treatments or pneumectomies).
26 A201700505_2018-07-19_10-22-30.pdf, RG 85 v.2357, E7 – pt. 3, p. 26.
27 A201700505_2018-07-19_10-23-56.pdf, RG 85 v.2357, E7 – pt. 4, p. 163.
28 A201700505_2018-07-19_10-23-56.pdf, RG 85 v.2357, E7 – pt. 4, p. 59.
29 A201700505_2018-07-19_10-23-56.pdf, RG 85 v.2357, E7 – pt. 4, p. 224.
30 A201700505_2018-07-19_10-23-56.pdf, RG 85 v.2357, E7 – pt. 4, p. 190.
31 McCallum (Citation2017) identifies segregation as a key feature of colonial medicine in Canada.
32 A201700505_2018-07-19_10-23-56.pdf, RG 85 v.2357, E7 – pt. 4, p. 63.
33 A201700505_2018-07-19_10-25-19, pg. 193.
34 A201700505_2018-07-19_10-23-56.pdf, RG 85 v.2357, E7 – pt. 4, p. 9.
35 Such regulatory categories (Lawrence Citation2003) are at the root of heteropatriarchy embedded in the 1876 Indian Act and defined by Arvin, Tuck and Morrill (Citation2013), as ‘the social systems in which heterosexuality and patriarchy are perceived as normal and natural, and in which other configurations are perceived as abnormal, aberrant, and abhorrent’ (13).
36 A201700505_2018-07-19_10-23-56.pdf, RG 85 v.2357, E7 – pt. 4, p. 51.
37 A201700505_2018-07-19_10-22-30.pdf, RG 85 v.2357, E7 – pt. 3, p. 83.
38 A201700505_2018-07-19_10-23-56.pdf, RG 85 v.2357, E7 – pt. 4, p. 71.
39 A201700505_2018-07-19_10-23-56.pdf, RG 85 v.2357, E7 – pt. 4, p. 63.
40 This is a pseudonym.
41 A201700505_2018-07-19_10-23-56.pdf, RG 85 v.2357, E7 – pt. 4, p. 224.
42 Thanks to Saiba Varma for clarification on this point.
43 A201700505_2018-07-19_10-23-56.pdf, RG 85 v.2357, E7 – pt. 4, p. 13.
44 A201700505_2018-07-19_10-23-56.pdf, RG 85 v.2357, E7 – pt. 4, p. 63.
45 A201700505_2018-07-19_10-23-56.pdf, RG 85 v.2357, E7 – pt. 4, p. 2.
46 A201700505_2018-07-19_10-23-56.pdf, RG 85 v.2357, E7 – pt. 4, p. 122.
47 https://www.rcaanc-cirnac.gc.ca/eng/1552073111368/1552073153674, 2013 accessed September 27, 2020.
48 290 times that for non-Indigenous peoples (https://www.cbc.ca/news/health/cbc-explains-tuberculosis-banerji-tb-1.5046336, 2013 accessed October 25, 2020).