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

Medicine That Walks: Disease, Medicine, and Canadian Plains Native People, 1880-1940. By Maureen K. Lux (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001. xii plus 300 pp. $50.00/cloth $22.95/paper).

Medicine That Walks gives an in-depth look at health conditions and medical treatment on several Canadian Native reserves at the turn of the twentieth century. Much of what Lux describes will be familiar to Native studies scholars and probably nearly as familiar to social and cultural historians interested in how dominant social classes have directed self-serving, prejudicial health policies against immigrants and the poor. Although offering little that is new in its overarching thesis, the book is still useful as a case study demonstrating how the economic hardship and chronic disease environment characteristic of Canadian reserves (and equally characteristic of American Indian reservations in the U.S.) in this time period affected the Blackfoot, Blood, Cree, Assiniboine, and other Native peoples living on the Canadian plains.

Relying primarily on the records of government agents, missionary schoolteachers, and medical personnel appointed to serve reserve populations, Lux shows how negligence and racism informed government policies towards Canada's aboriginal peoples and led to malnutrition, heightened disease susceptibility, and extraordinarily high death rates relative to other Canadians. In landmark treaties with the Native inhabitants of the plains, Canadian officials promised to provide sustenance, health care, and local schooling, all of which, Lux argues, failed to materialize in the decades after plains Native peoples accepted and settled on designated reserves. Under the influence of social Darwinism and scientific racism and intent on economizing whenever their own welfare was not at stake, policymakers and public servants assigned to care for Native populations doled out insufficient, contaminated food rations only to those deemed deserving; herded children off to poorly maintained boarding schools where they were likely to fall ill and die, mostly from tuberculosis; and managed medical care facilities and programs under the leading assumption that Native people's ill-health stemmed from an inherent biological and cultural inferiority. Lux places the blame for high Indian morbidity and mortality on government agents, who failed to see that Native health problems originated in the poverty that the agents themselves were fostering on Native reserves.

Lux also conducted several interviews with Native elders and does make an occasional attempt to bring in personal memories about Native healing methods and individuals' experiences with western medicine as practiced by agency doctors. Lux's stated objective to show the survival of Native healing practices throughout the time period of her study is, however, undeveloped. In general comments, Lux insists on cultural continuity, but the book's content overwhelmingly focuses on non-Native health policies and gives few details about Native medicine and healing ceremonials. Moreover, the main point to emerge from Lux's interview material is the belief contemporary Native people have that the government was deliberately intending to kill them or, later, used them in medical experiments, as several say, like guinea pigs. In contrast, most of Lux's evidence, which is derived from public documents, points toward racial prejudice and negligence as the motivations guiding policies implemented on reserves. Medicine That W alks thus leaves the reader wanting some explanation for why the written records of the colonizers and the memories of the colonized so dramatically disagree on the intent behind colonial medical policies. This is the same issue currently raging in international human rights debates over the definition of genocide, and as Lux's material demonstrates, at least some of Canada's colonized people have interpreted colonial policies as genocidal.

Lux's most interesting contributions to the literature on the history of Native health policies are in the details. In particular, she does provide substantive support for Native suspicions that they were laboratory rats in western medicine's development of treatments for epidemic disease. Lux describes the many sporadic, ineffectual, and on occasion overtly experimental efforts to inoculate and vaccinate Native peoples on the Canadian plains, first for smallpox and later for tuberculosis. In addition, Lux's graphic descriptions of economic conditions on Native reserves at the turn of the twentieth century establish a firm link between rising impoverishment and rising death rates.