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Medicine Unbundled
Medicine Unbundled: A Journey through the Minefields of Indigenous Health Care
by Gary Geddes
Victoria: Heritage House, 2017
Reviewed by Mary-Ellen Kelm
*
Sandy Morris grew worried when his brother Ivan did not return from surgery. When Sandy went to Ivan's cot on a ward in the Nanaimo Indian Hospital, he found two orderlies stripping it. He asked them what they were doing and where was his brother. They responded by twisting his arm behind his back to punish the impertinence of speaking to them at all. When they were through abusing him, they walked away, one orderly saying over his shoulder that Ivan would be of no use to Sandy now; he was in the morgue. Tearfully Sandy ran to the basement where he found Ivan on a gurney. Terrified and heartbroken, he pulled back the sheet to reveal Ivan's face. Leaning forward to kiss his brother one last time, he felt the subtle feathering of breath against his cheek. Ivan was alive. Clamouring noisily up the stairs as only a little boy can, Sandy confronted the orderly asking him to bring his brother back up the ward - he was not dead. The orderly responded: "If you want your brother so badly, bring him up yourself.";
While shocking, such stories no longer surprise us as Canadians. We have heard many like them of the Indian Residential Schools. Gary Geddes, in Medicine Unbundled, makes the case that the Indian Hospitals, like the one at Nanaimo, were part of an integrated system of institutions, including the residential schools, designed for the suppression of Indigenous peoples and having long-lasting health impacts on them. Canadians know little of the Indian Hospitals; their history is only now being documented. There were once twenty-two of them, mostly in the West, although there were three in Ontario. They were opened in an era when health officials worried that intransigently high rates of tuberculosis among Indigenous people (status and non-status Indians, Métis, and Inuit) would undermine the control over the disease that public health measures were gaining among Canadians. The Indian Act made treatment compulsory for status Indians with communicable diseases and so they had little choice but to go to hospital often far from home and sometimes on a moment's notice. Their hospital stays could be long, lonely and traumatic. Geddes writes that the treatment offered in Indian Hospitals was outdated. There surgeons continued to perform procedures, including the removal of bone, gland and lung tissue, long after such surgery was considered effective treatment. Antimicrobial drugs made their way to the hospitals first through clinical trials but their introduction as treatment was inextricably delayed. Not surprisingly, Geddes notes, few Indigenous people he met trust our medical system.
This book is not so much about medicine, though, as it is about relationships, about conversations and about listening. It begins with a conversation between Geddes and Joanie Morris, a Tsartlip survivor of Kuper Island Residential School and the niece of Sandy and Ivan Morris. Her mother spent seventeen years in the Nanaimo Indian Hospital. As she learns to trust Geddes, she opens the door to others who might wish to share their stories and they in turn introduce him to more people until he has travelled half way across this country. Some bring photos but mostly they talk and they challenge Geddes, and us, to listen. When he wonders whether he, as a white man, should be doing this work, Joannie responds, "Hey, Gary, no one has listened to us for the last two hundred years, so why don't you get off your butt and be the first?";
Listening, as it turns out, can be a problem for Canadians. As Joanie puts it, "the problem I have with white people is that they don't listen."; Publishers told Geddes that "no one in Canada cares about Indians."; For decades, Canadians dismissed the testimony of residential school survivors or simply refused to hear it. Some still wish to see the "good"; in the schools. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission and its public events across the country offered all Canadians a chance to hear survivors' testimony and many thousands did just that. Through the massive TRC report, we can hope that the weight of such testimony has removed disbelief.
On the Indian Hospitals, Geddes finds, we have a long way to go. Our ears remained blocked, partly because the stories are so horrific, but we have learned through the TRC that such stories are nonetheless true. Geddes, and the people he met, worry that Canadians will not listen because we are still inclined to weigh documentary evidence as more trustworthy than oral history. For those who want the documents to speak, getting access to them is not easy. Geddes, it seems, was refused access to the archival files he requested. Some of the most compelling examples of medical abuse remain uncorroborated - children, now adults, recall repeated vaccines, or other shots, but without school medical or hospital records we cannot know what the vaccines were, or why or how they were administered. Sometimes the records seem simply to no longer exist, such as those of the mysterious deaths at the Brandon Sanitarium in the 1950s. Access denied, files destroyed, Geddes writes that the archives have been cleansed of the evidence of our atrocities. We cannot hear the stories we cannot find.
Mainly, Geddes argues, we have trouble listening because we lack a narrative into which to fit what we are hearing. The national history we embrace -- of the multicultural peacemaker -- simply does not equip us to reckon these other stories, the ones Geddes tells here of residential schools, medical abuse, and the segregated hospital system. As Canadians we remain fractured from our own past until we find a new narrative: one that embraces all of our history, the contradictory impulses, the heartbreaking realities alongside the growth we perceive in ourselves. Without the truth, we cannot heal. That is, we - Canadians -- cannot heal. As Richard Wagamese wrote: "It's been a story of generations of abducted children, intergenerational pain and wounds passed down because the whole story has not been told...First Nations people know that. It's time that Canada came to understand the nature of that truth as well."; As we approach the 150th anniversary of Confederation we can start to craft a new honest history of our nation, one that embraces the darkness of that past.
As in his previous books on violence and reconciliation in sub-Saharan Africa, Geddes is fascinated by healing. Repeatedly, he asks the people he speaks with why they are not angry, why they do not hate. They respond that in healing they have let go of their anger. They are turning inward to their own cultures, their languages, their foods, and their medicines. This is what Indigenous writers like Taiaike Alfred and Lee Ann Betasamosake Simpson call resurgence. It is healing for Indigenous people by Indigenous people.
There is not much of Geddes the poet in this book. Yet there are compelling images here. An eagle and a heron battle in the sky above Geddes' Thetis Island home; the heron escapes the raptor because it has strong wings that carry it aloft to safety. Thetis Island sits adjacent to Penelakut Island, where Kuper Island Indian Residential School once stood -- the site of many of the saddest and most terrifying stories in the book. Thetis is Penelakut's twin, Geddes tells us; they are connected. Just as Canadians are connected to these histories, to this past, and to Indigenous people now and in the future.
by Gary Geddes
Victoria: Heritage House, 2017
Reviewed by Mary-Ellen Kelm
*
Sandy Morris grew worried when his brother Ivan did not return from surgery. When Sandy went to Ivan's cot on a ward in the Nanaimo Indian Hospital, he found two orderlies stripping it. He asked them what they were doing and where was his brother. They responded by twisting his arm behind his back to punish the impertinence of speaking to them at all. When they were through abusing him, they walked away, one orderly saying over his shoulder that Ivan would be of no use to Sandy now; he was in the morgue. Tearfully Sandy ran to the basement where he found Ivan on a gurney. Terrified and heartbroken, he pulled back the sheet to reveal Ivan's face. Leaning forward to kiss his brother one last time, he felt the subtle feathering of breath against his cheek. Ivan was alive. Clamouring noisily up the stairs as only a little boy can, Sandy confronted the orderly asking him to bring his brother back up the ward - he was not dead. The orderly responded: "If you want your brother so badly, bring him up yourself.";
While shocking, such stories no longer surprise us as Canadians. We have heard many like them of the Indian Residential Schools. Gary Geddes, in Medicine Unbundled, makes the case that the Indian Hospitals, like the one at Nanaimo, were part of an integrated system of institutions, including the residential schools, designed for the suppression of Indigenous peoples and having long-lasting health impacts on them. Canadians know little of the Indian Hospitals; their history is only now being documented. There were once twenty-two of them, mostly in the West, although there were three in Ontario. They were opened in an era when health officials worried that intransigently high rates of tuberculosis among Indigenous people (status and non-status Indians, Métis, and Inuit) would undermine the control over the disease that public health measures were gaining among Canadians. The Indian Act made treatment compulsory for status Indians with communicable diseases and so they had little choice but to go to hospital often far from home and sometimes on a moment's notice. Their hospital stays could be long, lonely and traumatic. Geddes writes that the treatment offered in Indian Hospitals was outdated. There surgeons continued to perform procedures, including the removal of bone, gland and lung tissue, long after such surgery was considered effective treatment. Antimicrobial drugs made their way to the hospitals first through clinical trials but their introduction as treatment was inextricably delayed. Not surprisingly, Geddes notes, few Indigenous people he met trust our medical system.
This book is not so much about medicine, though, as it is about relationships, about conversations and about listening. It begins with a conversation between Geddes and Joanie Morris, a Tsartlip survivor of Kuper Island Residential School and the niece of Sandy and Ivan Morris. Her mother spent seventeen years in the Nanaimo Indian Hospital. As she learns to trust Geddes, she opens the door to others who might wish to share their stories and they in turn introduce him to more people until he has travelled half way across this country. Some bring photos but mostly they talk and they challenge Geddes, and us, to listen. When he wonders whether he, as a white man, should be doing this work, Joannie responds, "Hey, Gary, no one has listened to us for the last two hundred years, so why don't you get off your butt and be the first?";
Listening, as it turns out, can be a problem for Canadians. As Joanie puts it, "the problem I have with white people is that they don't listen."; Publishers told Geddes that "no one in Canada cares about Indians."; For decades, Canadians dismissed the testimony of residential school survivors or simply refused to hear it. Some still wish to see the "good"; in the schools. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission and its public events across the country offered all Canadians a chance to hear survivors' testimony and many thousands did just that. Through the massive TRC report, we can hope that the weight of such testimony has removed disbelief.
On the Indian Hospitals, Geddes finds, we have a long way to go. Our ears remained blocked, partly because the stories are so horrific, but we have learned through the TRC that such stories are nonetheless true. Geddes, and the people he met, worry that Canadians will not listen because we are still inclined to weigh documentary evidence as more trustworthy than oral history. For those who want the documents to speak, getting access to them is not easy. Geddes, it seems, was refused access to the archival files he requested. Some of the most compelling examples of medical abuse remain uncorroborated - children, now adults, recall repeated vaccines, or other shots, but without school medical or hospital records we cannot know what the vaccines were, or why or how they were administered. Sometimes the records seem simply to no longer exist, such as those of the mysterious deaths at the Brandon Sanitarium in the 1950s. Access denied, files destroyed, Geddes writes that the archives have been cleansed of the evidence of our atrocities. We cannot hear the stories we cannot find.
Mainly, Geddes argues, we have trouble listening because we lack a narrative into which to fit what we are hearing. The national history we embrace -- of the multicultural peacemaker -- simply does not equip us to reckon these other stories, the ones Geddes tells here of residential schools, medical abuse, and the segregated hospital system. As Canadians we remain fractured from our own past until we find a new narrative: one that embraces all of our history, the contradictory impulses, the heartbreaking realities alongside the growth we perceive in ourselves. Without the truth, we cannot heal. That is, we - Canadians -- cannot heal. As Richard Wagamese wrote: "It's been a story of generations of abducted children, intergenerational pain and wounds passed down because the whole story has not been told...First Nations people know that. It's time that Canada came to understand the nature of that truth as well."; As we approach the 150th anniversary of Confederation we can start to craft a new honest history of our nation, one that embraces the darkness of that past.
As in his previous books on violence and reconciliation in sub-Saharan Africa, Geddes is fascinated by healing. Repeatedly, he asks the people he speaks with why they are not angry, why they do not hate. They respond that in healing they have let go of their anger. They are turning inward to their own cultures, their languages, their foods, and their medicines. This is what Indigenous writers like Taiaike Alfred and Lee Ann Betasamosake Simpson call resurgence. It is healing for Indigenous people by Indigenous people.
There is not much of Geddes the poet in this book. Yet there are compelling images here. An eagle and a heron battle in the sky above Geddes' Thetis Island home; the heron escapes the raptor because it has strong wings that carry it aloft to safety. Thetis Island sits adjacent to Penelakut Island, where Kuper Island Indian Residential School once stood -- the site of many of the saddest and most terrifying stories in the book. Thetis is Penelakut's twin, Geddes tells us; they are connected. Just as Canadians are connected to these histories, to this past, and to Indigenous people now and in the future.
Submitted on April 4, 2017 in By David.
