Section 16 - Violence Over Bodies and Land

Indigenous Histories

Professor Keith Carlson

Student Alessandro Tarsia
Mary-Ellen Kelm, Colonizing Bodies. Aboriginal Health and Healing in British Columbia, 1900-
50 (1998)

Colonizing Bodies is a comprehensive analysis of the modern aboriginal health through the
particular case study of BC, during the first half of the 20th century. In particular, it is a history
of connections, conflicts, and outcomes of the institutionalized Canadian healthcare among
Aboriginal peoples. Kelm is a professor of history at the Simon Fraser University. Van Kirk was
her Ph.D. supervisor at the University of Toronto, where she approached the New Social History
and feminist critique. In fact, Kelm underlines how the feminist critique of "bodies", as a natural
fact, is heuristically useful to deconstruct the same cultural object in an ethnic dimension.
Kelm’s primary sources are correspondences in religious, private, scholastic, museum and
government collections and archives; newspapers and magazines, memoirs, academic journals,
ethnographies; archaeological, ethnobotanical, statistic and nutritional data. Along with the
written sources, Kelm uses many interviews, testimonies and oral histories collected among the
aboriginal peoples. Moreover, Colonizing Bodies relies on a large number of secondary sources,
as well as studies on medicine and epidemics from other continents, on aboriginal people and
BC history. In 1999, it won the Sir John A Macdonald Prize.
In the wake of Said, Kelm wrote a post-colonial history of BC health care, in particular,
the ideological and political use of medicines through the Indian Health Services. According to a
theoretical paradigm close to the "contact zone" of Pratt (1992), initially, the Euro-American
introduction of new plant species and technologies had been favorable to the aboriginal
peoples. Subsequently, Canadian institutions ignored aboriginal history, culture, and medicine.
Their opinion was neither required nor taken into consideration, in an aboriginal ‘silence’.
Another outcome is the conclusion that the Euro-American governments have blamed the
aboriginal peoples, accusing them of being responsible for a situation created by the
governments themselves. However, as showed by Sioui and King, the change in diet,
environment, and residence has not completely eliminated traditional lifestyles, which have
joined the Euro-American ones. Kelm notes that Aboriginal and Euro-American medicines have
overlapped, giving rise to systems of pluralistic knowledge and practice, as well as in the “third
space” concept of Bhabha (1994). It is the place/space where the aboriginal body emerges. As
in the residential school studies of Lomawaima, (1994), Miller (1996), and Child (1998), the field
of history is not divided into the two factions of heroes and villains. In fact, as a sign of
complexity, the missionary doctors and field matrons behaved better than their government
counterparts, because of their involvement in the communities where they lived. Moreover,
the role of private and state borders and those of reserves in the anti-Aboriginal policies will be
accurately analyzed by Alan Taylor, in the context of the Iroquois Confederation, in The Divided
Ground (2006).
Colonizing Bodies underlines the difference between two different epistemologies of
body, disease, and medicine, in a perspective that combines the history of ideas and
postmodernism with ethnohistory. It does not take into consideration only the medical aspect.
In fact, Kelm also analyzes the legal, political and economic dimensions of Canadian and
Aboriginal health care. The wide perspective of Kelm has given a new impetus to the study of
Canadian and Aboriginal medicine, understood in a broader context of ethnic and post-colonial
cultural histories, of mentality and ideologies.
Ned Blackhawk, Violence Over the Land: Indians and Empires in the Early American
West (2006)
Violence over the land is a history of the colonial conquest of the Great Basin and of the
resistance and warfare of the aboriginal groups Ute, Paiute and Shoshone, included in the wider
historical, geographical and environmental context of the American West’s history. The primary
sources are documents and letters from the archives of religious missions and the Spanish and
American governments in New Mexico; those of the Indian Affairs and Congress in Washington
DC; published documents from various State archives, Colorado Magazine included;
cartographic studies, explorers' diaries; the essays and histories written by Europeans or Euro-
American intellectuals and historians, anthropologists and ethnologists. For example, Bancroft,
of which he uses the Californian archive. Moreover, Blackhawk uses written aboriginal sources,
and two oral stories, including that of his family, according to a personal criticism approach. In
fact, he belongs to the Te-Moak tribe, Western Shoshone. Blackhawk is a professor of American
history and studies at Yale University. In 2007, this book received the Frederick Jackson Turner
Award and the Robert M. Utley Prize.
Blackhawk shows a gap in the American History, the lack of Great Basin Indians’ agency.
Blackhawk's perspective is similar to that of White's Middle Ground.1 The European society
relied initially on aboriginal peoples in order to accommodate. The historical myth (Barthes,
1957) of the United States was constructed from narratives filled of gender, class and ethnicity
biases. Therefore, in the Said critique’s path, the author intends to decolonize the
triumphalistic, progressive and civilizing rhetoric of the United States’ historiography.
Furthermore, anthropologists depicted Native Americans as the most primitive peoples of the
planet, orientalizing them in a discourse of antithetical otherness.2 Therefore, he places those
aboriginal peoples at the center of the history of the Great Basin and subsequently of the
American nation-building. As with Andersen's Métis, violence is also the identity frame of
Aboriginal slaves, often captured elsewhere, and their descendants. A long line of
dispossessions and abuses marks the US history of Termination and Relocation, from the use of
the army to that of cartography and science. Borders and fur trade were themes at the center
of two sections, where from Canada the traders' routes descended into the United States
through the Great Lakes or the Mississippi. In this case study, Spanish, Mexican and than
American southwestern borders and fur trade are on the background of land-oriented violence.
Blackhawk shares the idea of "body in pain" with Kelm, but in the former, the effect of colonial
violence on aboriginal cultures, lands and bodies is much more destructive than in latter.
He uses violence, accommodation, and movement as interpretative keys.3 Despite his
intentions, and contrary to Kelm, Blackhawk does not make extensive use of interviews,
community engaging or Aboriginal oral history in order to frame the Aboriginal agency.
According to him, violence and the movement of colonial waves erased or dispersed the
aboriginal past. His approach seems to be more historical than anthropological. Moreover, he
juxtaposes two principles of philosophical anthropology by Hobbes and Heraclitus: “homo
homini lupus” and “panta rei” to the post-colonial anthropological paradigms of Said, in order
to justify the complexity of Great Basin aboriginal histories. In a ‘third space perspective’, a
more in-depth ethnohistorical research on cultural dynamics among Aboriginal peoples and
Settlers in the Great Basin history would allow the anti-pain emergence of hundreds of micro-
histories, looking for a diasporic epistemology.
James William Daschuk, Clearing the Plains: Disease, Politics of Starvation, and the Loss of
Aboriginal Life (2013)

Daschuk investigates the humanitarian tragedy of the aboriginal peoples in the Plains between
the 18th and 19th centuries. The diseases and government policies of starvation are interpreted
as two forms of joint violence on the body of peoples and aboriginal land. Among the primary
sources, in addition to the already avidly studied archives of HBC and Indian Affairs, Daschuk
explores the archives of Western Canada. Among the archives of Manitoba, Alberta, and
Saskatchewan, he also investigates the most remote posts. He uses any type of document,
public and private, governmental and journalistic, mortality statistics. He also uses many
secondary sources, as well as historical, geographical, environmental, geological, zoological,
medical, and so on. Among others, he cites Carter, Friesen, Innis, Krech, Miller, Milloy, Morton,
Ray, Sahlins, Van Kirk, and Waiser. Daschuk is a Professor of History at University of Regina
(Health and Kinesiology Department). His materialistic training allows him to comprehend the
realistic and concrete aspects of the history of violence over bodies and Land. In fact, the
materialistic investigation is flanked by postmodern critique, by the new social history. In 2014,
Clearing the Plains won the John A. MacDonald Prize. Ironically, the award has the name of the
prime minister that the author accuses in the book.
As well as Kelm, Daschuk addresses the issue of the huge disparity between the
healthcare of Canadian citizens and that of the aborigines. As Said claims, the root cause can
be found in the biases, prejudices, stereotypes and racism of the dominant ideology towards
the aboriginal peoples, considered spiritually and physically inferior, in a primitive stage of
evolution. In the path of Kelm, Daschuk analyzes the devastating role of epidemic agency in the
genocide of the aboriginal peoples, in the period before the Canadian acquisition of the plains
(1870). Moreover, in an Environmental history perspective less anthropological than
Cruikshank, the semi-nomadic life among the tree-lined valleys in which to live in winter and
the endless prairies in summer guaranteed for centuries a healthy diet and lifestyle for the
Aboriginal peoples. Unlike Blackhawk, armed clashes, accidents, nothing would have been as
catastrophic as the epidemics imported by the settlers. As in Podruchny (Making the Voyageur
World, 2006), when the taiga was open to trade, the merchants' policy became brutal, the
exploitation of the compulsive environment, until degradation.4 The acquisition of Rupert's
Land by Canada marks the transition from smallpox to tuberculosis epidemics. In this last period
of Treaties, Aboriginal schooling, and farming, the government policy of famine and starvation
creates paternalistic relationships of dependence, determining the crisis, the impoverishment
and the physical and mental degradation among the aboriginal peoples.5
Clearing the Plains is precious for Canadian history because it seeks the historical causes
of the social problem of the disparity in health rights, which is still present in the west. The life
expectancy Aboriginal people is still lower than that of non-Aboriginal citizens. The book shows
how the history of diseases is useful for the reconstruction of profound changes in the human
organization of the territory. It shows how the Termination and Relocation’s attempts of
Governments were functional and consequent to the entry of the territory into the global
capitalist economy and to the detriment of the aboriginal peoples of the plains. The end of the
fur trade and the introduction of agriculture, extraction, and industry centralized economically
and politically the dominant society and marginalized the aboriginal peoples.6
Joseph Auguste (Augie) Merasty, The Education of Augie Merasty: A Residential School
Memoir, edited by David Carpenter (2015).
The Education of Augie Merasty is a memoir of a retired elder Cree, a former student (1935-44)
of the St Therese Residential School in Sturgeon Landing, northeast of Prince Albert. Merasty
was not an intellectual. He was a power company employee, fisherman, trapper, boxer and also
an artist. He spent his life in a community between the parkland and the boreal forest. After a
long marriage, he divorced. Consequently, he spent a lot of time on the streets of Prince Albert,
with problems of alcoholism, prostate cancer and dementia, which led him to death a few
months ago. Although he was not an academic, his wisdom, character, irony and a great sense
of endurance make his testimony noteworthy. David Carpenter is an established and prolific
writer born in Edmonton and moved to Saskatoon decades ago. His novels and stories are
related to Saskatchewan and he also studies the literature of this province. His literary genius
framed the Merasty experience when Carpenter was a professor of English at the University of
Saskatchewan. If we consider the contribution of Carpenter, this book is an editing of the
written story of the main protagonist, paired with their correspondence. From Merasty's point
of view, his reworked memories and family/community storytelling are the primary sources of
his story. In 2017, this book was voted “One Book/One Province”.
If the studies of Kelm and Blackhawk are in the Middle Ground of a historiography
influenced by the theory of White, then Merasty is in the Native Ground by Kathleen Duval
(2006). In other words, the point of view is totally aboriginal, although it has the agency of a
Cree child at the mercy of teachers and adult school staff, Franco-Canadian Catholics. For this
reason, Merasty is even closer to Witgen's epistemology in An Infinity of Nations (2012).
Although in the former appears a galaxy of stories and biographies while in this text there is
only one star. At the end of the 1990s, Merasty's testimony served the first exploratory
dialogue committee which later became the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The various
versions in between the letters and the manuscript instill a sense of horror, piety, and esteem
for his resilience, which are larger than the individual experience, because thousands of
students had similar experiences, in a mass school system.7 As also shown by Kelm, Blackhawk
and Daschuk, the government's starvation and poverty’s policies are the causes of nowadays
conditions of aboriginal peoples. They have been robbed, decimated, relocated and raped in
body and mind for so many years and for many reasons. The negative experiences in the
relationship between the Canadian government and the aboriginal peoples were determined by
the will to profit of the churches and companies, or to defer the "Indian question" or due to
ineptitude, disorganization and disinterest.
This text shows the merits and defects of the historical monograph. On the one hand,
individual history allows identification, sympathy, empathy, and sharing of the emotional
meaning of experience. On the other hand, precisely for this reason, the reader tends to
generalize individual experience, making this text problematic for an undergraduate course. In
this case study, reading this book should be accompanied by reading that of Miller, Child,
Lomawaima, and Raptis, in order to preserve the complexity of the Aboriginal Schooling
histories. The Panoptic-Punishment regime of the Canadian religious school can easily be
compared to the schools of fascist and Nazi regimes. However, on the contrary, the comparison
between the experiences of the holocaust seems more suitable to represent the history of
colonization as a whole rather than that of residential schools.
Tom Swanky, The True Story of Canada’s “War” of Extermination on the Pacific (2012)

The true story is a historical-police investigation that aims to demonstrate an accusatory

thesis, casting an obscure shadow on the foundation of BC and the Canadian nation-building. In
the early 1860s, Governor Douglas spread smallpox for the purpose of bending Aboriginal
resistance and initiating the exploitation of natural resources on a large scale, freeing the way
with small wars (or rather raids), such as the Tsilhqot'in war. According to Swanky, this means
the extermination of about 100,000 natives. In 1864, the end of the great epidemic coincides
with the "human sacrifice" of the aboriginal martyrs. ‘Shawn Swanky’ is a business company
formed by two people, a homonymous young artist and his father, Tom Swanky. Shawn is a
"movie producer, director, screenwriter and story creator", who is filming a documentary on
the smallpox epidemics in BC. Tom defines himself as a "long-life" student of the relationships
between settlers and Aboriginal peoples in BC. The primary sources are few, from government
archives and from the articles of newspapers and magazines. The bibliography is also very thin.
Swanky's point of view is in the Native Ground. The aboriginal supremacy of the contact
zone was annihilated through the Trojan horse of the great epidemic. Later, surgical wars,
deportations, and marginalization policies disarmed and weakened the aboriginal resistance
but not the resilience. With a similar warlike Wasáse attitude invoked by Alfred, Swanky follows
the epistemological invitation of Tuhiwai Smith (1999), about rewriting aboriginal histories
through their point of view. However, he does so as an outsider of the academy. On the
contrary, Tuhiwai Smith invites Aboriginal scholars to decolonize the academy from within.
Swanky is also close to Sioui's Amerindian Autohistory theory (1992), with a tendency to self-
study, self-evaluation, and aboriginal cultural revanchism. Other scholars have dealt with the
same smallpox epidemic in BC. For example, Keith Carlson noted how the catastrophe
strengthened the identity of the surviving Coast Salish, giving the community new narrative
strength in an ancient mythological frame. Swanky's victimized outlook, similar to that of
Gutiérrez (1991), does not permit the frame of the Aboriginal agency, being crushed by a
predominant position of power. On the contrary, through the wise use of written colonial
primary sources and the oral aboriginal ones, Carlson traces the aboriginal agency in its
semantic and identity foundational moment. Swanky’s Factory is reminiscent of editorial and
ethnohistorical work of Bancroft, between amateur history and artistic-literary creativity,
although from a post-colonial perspective.
The quotation of the word ‘truth’ in the title poses questions about the nature and
possibility of truth in the historical narration. It is also in the name of the Reconciliation
Commission. In the 1980s, the most extreme postmodernist derives considered the problem of
truth superfluous, since historical practice is semiotic of infinite representations, from which
reality is expunged. Therefore, the problem of truth was only postponed from the reality to the
representation.8 More than historical discipline, truth belongs to the jargon of politics and
religion. However, history and truth are not enemies or strangers, indeed. It does not even
seem logical the populist: vox populi vox dei.9 Yet, like any mythological rhetorical construction,
the question of biases also arises for the aboriginal primary sources. Probably, the use of the
word truth also implies the concepts of reconciliation through sharing commonalities. It is true
that the smallpox epidemic made many deaths, but the intention to spread it seems difficult to
prove. Furthermore, the absence of evidence is not proof of their intentional deletion.
1
In fact, he completed his doctorate with White at the University of Washington.
2
As Perdue warns in Cherokee Women (1998), Blackhawk is also concerned about the ahistorical attitude of the
Western sciences for the Great Basin’s aboriginal civilizations.
3
The allegory of the aboriginal body is the land, which suffers rape and violence from the exploitation of
resources, the construction of infrastructure, cities, farms, and industries, pollution. Between attacks and counter-
attacks, wars, massacres and torture, the Spanish and Mexican frontier first, and the American one later become
the places for the manifestation of colonial power and counter-power, with forms that condition and nourish each
other. In the contact zone, the equestrian Ute groups imitated the colonial martial model. They imposed violence
against both the Spanish-Americans and the less belligerent Paiute and Shoshone, extending the slave trade.
4
Podruchny and Kelm attended the conference on the book by Daschuk, whose contributions were published in
2015.
5
The environment influences history, it shape cultures and economies that inhabit them. In this active scenario,
the social groups, aboriginal peoples or dominant society, interpret also active roles.
6
The history of the epidemics and decimation of the aboriginal peoples coincides with the first 150 years of their
meeting with settlers. The history of medicine and the agency attributed to the illnesses link this study to two texts
in the field, Colonizing Bodies (1998), by Mary-Ellen Kelm, and Medicine that Walks (2001), by Maureen Lux. There
were two topics in vogue among scholars and that this research intends to refute. The first is that the Cree moved
from east to west led by capitalist’s willingness and global fur trade. The second is the notion of dependence, as
developed by the ‘Third World-oriented’ materialist theories in the 1980s. According to these arguments, the
aboriginal peoples were the undefended victims of colonial caprice and of the capitalist system, relegated to an
economic, geographical and cultural periphery. Both theses have been denied by studies that have shown the
settlers' dependence on aboriginal people for subsistence and that Cree were not the HBC pawns.
7
Carpenter is aware of the biases (e.g. pederasty as a synonym of homosexuality) and the telescope effect in the
narratives of Merasty, which is evident in the comparison between the memoir and the correspondence
8
Is the representation that the historian has reconstructed about ancient Greek civilization true, conforming to
that of the Greeks?
9
When colonialism or trade among distant peoples imported tremendous diseases such as the bubonic plague, the
peoples of Europe often tried and executed the Jews by calling them carriers, with a folkloristic image very similar
to that used on Swanky's website.