Limited Space, Declining Health

FNAT 102 – Arts One

Lecture

Spring/2008

Quick Review: Making Native Space

• Term 13 prevented Fed. Gov’t fr. following the guidelines for settling treaty est. by the Royal Proclamation 1763

• Modus Vivendi—Joint Indian Reserve Commission

• Forced the Fed. Gov’t to abandon its policies & considerably strengthened the stranglehold the province had on First Nations territories

• Issue of title subsumed in the vision of each commission

Looking Back Through Lee Maracle’s Ravensong

• Sto:lo/Cree/Squamish• Born 1950 • Granddaughter of

Chief Dan George • Widely acclaimed,

prolific writer who challenges assumptions about First Nations people in popular culture

“I AM NOT A MARGINALIZED FIRST NATIONS WOMAN!” Lee Maracle

Taking the “Master” out of the Master Narrative

• Stacey’s people, stories, value system set the norm against which all who live in ‘white town’ are judged

• Along all points of comparison, ‘white town’ ways are found wanting

• Points of Comparison • Disrupt the common

direction of judgment & turns on repercussions of oppression for Stacey’s people

Surveillance & Survival

• Despite Fish & Game monitoring of river, Old Nora who continues to fish despite surveillance

• “She watched her fish the river without a boat, alone under the cover of darkness, one eye on her children, the other watching for the game warden while her hands worked her dip net, filling it with fish” (22).

Narrative Lines

–Raven’s narrative

–Community’s narrative

–Family’s narrative

–Stacey’s narrative

Momma Momma Jim Jim Ned Ned

Stacey

Celia

Jim

Benny

Kate

STACEY’S FAMILY

on the periphery of field of vision, psychic

Helpful, quits school

Has a vision, goal

Differences Similarities Differences Graphic Organizer by Neil Smith

ObjectEvent

Person

Object, Event

Person

Sex

People, like the birds & the bees, do it

Not hidden

Not repressed

Young people are teased

Babies are encouraged

Hidden

Repressed

Patriarchal rules

Women are dependent

Courtship rituals

Mating rituals

Sex

Village Funerals

White TownFunerals

Differences Similarities Differences Graphic Organizer by Neil Smith

ObjectEvent

Person

Object, Event

Person

As if grieving is individual

Death

Mourning Rituals

More overt displays of emotion

Emphasis on decorum

Grieving is shared

Space is made for grieving

More a public formality

grief shared Expressed differently

Mary Ellen Kelm’s Colonizing Bodies: Aboriginal Health and Healing in British

Columbia 1900-50“Aboriginal ill health was

created not just by faceless pathogens, but by the colonial policies and practices of the Canadian gov’t.” (xix)

Aboriginal medicine was not supplanted by western medicine.

Introductions

• Acknowledges her position of privilege • Stresses that she doesn’t speak for First Nations

peoples but rather speaks from a place of seeking to undo the racist teachings of history

• Attributes cause for high First Nations mortality rates to policy makers rather than to First Nations genetics

• Policy makers assumed – High mortality was to be expected– First Nations leaders had no voice in the matter– Social construction of the body/disease is ultimately shaped

by historical forces

Kelm’s Study draws from:

• Archival records from Indian Health Services

• Ethnography • Anthropology• Oral testimony • As with Cole Harris, she acknowledges

her own background & maintains this text is her contribution to the necessary process of decolonization

Transformed Landscapes; Transformed Lives

Legislated changes in environment, food resources, traditional methods of healing, religious ceremonies, contributed to the highest mortality rates of First Nations people on any scale one cared to measure.

Uneven Effects of Colonization

• Attributes variations in population figures between 1895 and 1939 to uneven effects of colonization

• Indian population figures reached lowest point in 1934 followed by a slow increase in subsequent years

“No doctor, no help…”• “Under the shabby

arguments about hospitals being full and doctors already overworked lay an unspoken assumption: white folks were more deserving of medical care. There is a hierarchy to care.” (Maracle, 69)

Environmental health

• The move from well ventilated big house structures to smaller housing (often w/lack of running water) & the cramped quarters of cannery row housing, hopfields housing created the conditions ripe for infectious diseases.

Subsistence to Wage Labor

“Statistics tell a Similar Story” (6)

Per 1000 live births, Aboriginal mortality rates for new born babies peaked in ’37 & ’39

Per 1000 live births for children w/in their first five years, Aboriginal mortality rates peaked in ’37

Tuberculosis Epidemic

• Kelm said that one of the biggest ethical dilemmas facing Aboriginal health is lack of informed consent of medical testing and research. Aboriginal people have been exposed to tuberculosis drug testing without consent for example. . .

Raven’s Eye Top News Dec. 2005

TB Indian Hospitals

• Tuberculosis in the first half of the 20th century affected all of Canadian society, & for First Nations populations it was easily spread amongst those living in Residential schools as well as those living in row housing.