Colonizing bodies: Aboriginal health and healing in British Columbia, 1900--1950

This thesis examines the impact of the processes of colonization on aboriginal health and healing in British Columbia in the first half of the twentieth century. The first section looks at the ways in which government restrictions on the procurement of food and limitations on the land bases available to the First Nations negatively affected aboriginal nutrition and sanitation and created a situation in which aboriginal health was undermined. In addition, government insistence on residential schooling for aboriginal children produced stresses on the physical, familial and emotional health of First Nations communities.;The second section focusses on the role of Indian Health Services on aboriginal conceptions of the body, illness, health and healing. This section begins with an overview of Native healing as it was (and continues to be) practiced among the First Nations of British Columbia in the twentieth century. The next chapters examine how non-Native medical care was designed to promote assimilation and how the policies associated with this were implemented in aboriginal communities. The final chapter points out how the First Nations were able to maintain their notions of the body, disease etiology and therapeutics by assimilating some aspects of Euro-Canadian medicine as supplementary to their own systems. Ultimately this thesis argues that while colonization has certainly detrimentally affected aboriginal health and has had an impact on aboriginal therapeutics, aboriginal people have been able to adapt to the changing health circumstances brought on by such processes and have continued to survive both physically and culturally.