Category: Embodied Citizenship

This week’s reading focused on the way in which health is a form of embodied citizenship, specifically looking at Indigenous health.  Most know that Indigenous peoples were assimilated and discriminated through public policy by enclosing children into residential schools and banning cultural practices.  Furthermore, Indigenous people were out casted from society, misrepresented and assimilated through notions of health.   These prescribed notions of health lead to a new vision of citizenship in Canada that was reliant on one’s ability to fit within Western norms of health in order to be seen as a decent citizen

During the time around and after the turn of the 20^th century, the perceived health of Indigenous peoples was under attack.  Many were dying from tuberculous, the Spanish flu, and many other forms of diseases.  The increased number of deaths projected an image of poor health onto Indigenous peoples.  As Mary Ellen Kelm states, “with the exception of the dreadful toll taken by infectious diseases, Aboriginal bodies were still strong”.  The cancer, heart and circulatory disease were all considerably lower than the Canadian non-Aboriginal average.[i] Despite Indigenous peoples having a relatively healthy lifestyle, the people as a whole were labeled as unhealthy because of the prescribed notions of health.

The Canadian government also used health as a means of teaching Indigenous peoples the Western ideals, while disregarding traditional practices.  For example, Ian Mosby discusses the forms of medical experimentation in residential schools, and how they were not just an attempt to improve dietary concerns but also to fulfill the general goal of the Residential schools, to end the “Indian Problem”. They would “lead Indian people away from their indolent habits.”[ii]

Health was also used as a means to segregate or devalue Indigenous lives. During the first half of the twentieth century, there were many medical studies done on elderly or disabled people because they were seen as a burden of society.  The lives of the residential schools kids were seen in the same way, as the medical experiments illuminated that their lives were viewed as useless until rendered useful through these experiments.[iii]  Similarly in the case of “Indian hospitals,” Ingenious peoples were systematically separated from the rest of the population in order to make certain that they were safe from the diseases and the unhealthiness of the Indigenous.  The Indigenous bodies were viewed as a threat to the communities.[iv]

Putting these readings and their ideas into the larger context of embodied citizenship, they all assert the importance that health played in determining your worth as a citizen.  Anyone that was not exactly fitting into the notions of health set up by Western ideals, were treated as non-citizens. In the case of the Indian Hospitals, Indigenous exclusion from mainstream hospitals and segregation due to safety of the regular citizens were rooted in the ways they saw Indigenous peoples health.  The exclusion in medical services reveals the want to exclude the Indigenous populations from basic citizenship rights, due to their perceived “healthiness.”

In preparation for my final essay I read about a woman’s experience visiting a Hutterite colony.  One of the major takeaways she learned about these people was their overall happiness with life despite a lack of material possession and a non-modern version of life.  Establishing the surprisingly low number of mental health cases, where asylums were not a part of Hutterite life.  The communal sense of health and well-being was vital in keeping a strong community.  Looking at embodied citizenship, the Hutterites looked at health by a group standard not individual, thus making health less of a defining feature of Hutterite citizenship.  This is much different than the notions brought forward in this week’s readings, where health was viewed as an individual problem.  This creates a complex structure of health standards that one is evaluated on, however this is absent from a Hutterite community.[v]

Bibliography

[i] Mary Ellen Kelm, “The Impact of Colonization on Aboriginal Health in British Columbia” in Colonizing

Bodies: Aboriginal Health and Healing in British Columbia, 1900-1950, Vancouver: UBC Press, 1998: 16- 17.

[ii] Ian Mosby , “Administering Colonial Science: Nutrition Research and Human Biomedical Experimentation in Aboriginal Communities and Residential Schools, 1942-1952” Histoire sociale/Social History, XLVI, No. 91 (Mai/May 2013), 633..

[iii] Ibid., 637

[iv] Lux, Maureen, “‘Care for the ‘Racially Careless’: Indian Hospitals in the Canadian West, 1920-1950s” Canadian Historical Review, 91, 3 (2010).

[v] Staebler, Edna, “The Lord Will Take Care of Us.” Maclean’s Magazine.  March, 15, 1952.

This week’s readings were based around the standards of health that were prescribed onto peoples of different race, ethnicity, sex and class through their children. These standards of health were based around Western European ideals.  Health is an important lens that can tell us as historians more than level of healthiness of a society however it shed lights on other facets of society helping understand cultural ideas and perspectives.

In the chapter of Children’s Health Issues in Historical Perspective, written by Mona Gleason, she investigated the ways Inspectors across British Columbian schools set up standards of health to discipline children that did not fit within the Western ideas of health.  The inspections carried out by teachers on children unfairly attacked the kids of different races, classes and locations. Her research was facilitated by University of British Columbia and used the Public Health Board of British Columbia’s reports to write the chapter. Even though the chapter seems a bit extreme when it claims that there was intentional pathologizing of those outside the health norms of white middle class British Columbians, the chapter is still useful in its application of using health as a historical lens. Rather than looking directly at the actual “healthiness” of children, the chapter rather illuminates the differences in personal experience and culture depending on people’s ethnicity, location and class, using the notions of health.  For example, a Chinese child from Armstrong, British Columbia did not meet the health standards in place because of the time she spent working before school, thus coming to school unclean.[1]

In Myra Rutherdale’s chapter in Children’s Health Issues in Historical Perspective, she focuses on many of the similar ideas about health, however looking at how Western ideals in Northern Aboriginal communities were used to intervene in Aboriginal lives and create good health habits by reshaping Aboriginal children.  “Children and their bodies stood at the centre of the battled waged with Native people over the regimes and rituals.”[2]  Through the help of the University of Saskatchewan, Rutherdale relied heavily on the testimonies of newcomers that were entering many of these northern communities to help with perceived health problems.  In the context of Canadian Aboriginal history, it is hard to imagine the number of levels of discrimination and attempts to “culture” Native children.  Health became another avenue of this “assimilating” taken in order to make Native people adopt Western ways.

In Health Promotion in the Hutterite Community and the Ethnocentricity of Empowerment, the authors focus in on the struggle to find ways to implement healthy living techniques for Hutterites in way that is culturally specific to them. Considering their different modes of life, the authors take a historical look at the views of health and empowerment in Hutterite communities.  In this article, the authors illuminate that health in Hutterite communities is much different where it is not appropriate to pray for good health and death or disability are not a motive to leading healthy lives because there is little fear associated with these factors due to their religious beliefs.[3]  Understanding health from the Hutterite perspective shows the Hutterian culture and ways of thinking.

 

Bibliography

 

[1] Gleason, Mona. “School Medical Inspection and ‘Healthy’ Children in British Columbia, 1890-1930,” in Krasnick Warsh and Strong-Boag (Eds.), Children’s Health Issues in Historical Perspective, Waterloo, WLU Press, 2005: 298.

[2] Rutherdale, Myrna “Children, Health, and Hygiene in Norther Canadian Communities,” in Krasnick Warsh and Strong-Boag (Eds.), Children’s Health Issues in Historical Perspective, Waterloo, WLU Press, 2005: 320.

[3] Brunt, J.Howard, Elizabeth Lindsey, and Jennifer Hopkinson. “Health Promotion in the Hutterite    Community and the Ethnocentricity of Empowerment.” Canadian Journal of Nursing Research 29, no. 1 (1997): 24.