Colonizing bodies :

"Recent debates about the health of First Nations peoples have drawn a flurry of public attention and controversy, and have placed the relationship between Aboriginal well-being and reserve locations and allotments in the spotlight. Aboriginal access to medical care and the transfer of funds and responsibility for health from the federal government to individual bands and tribal councils are also bones of contention. Comprehensive discussions of such issues, however, has often been hampered by a lack of historical analysis.

Colonizing Bodies examines the impact of colonization on Aboriginal health in British Columbia during the first half of the twentieth century. Mary-Ellen Kelm explores how Aboriginal bodies were materially affected by Canadian Indian policy, which placed restrictions on fishing and hunting, allocated inadequate reserves, forced children into unhealthy residential schools, and criminalized Indigenous healing. She goes on to consider how humanitarianism and colonialism medicine were used to pathologize Aboriginal bodies and institute a regime of doctors, hospitals, and field matrons, all working to encourage assimilation. Finally Kelm reveals how Aboriginal people were to resist and alter these forces in order to preserve their own cultural understanding of their bodies, disease, and medicine." - Provided by Publisher