Segregated hospitals
September 18th, 2016
Gary Geddes has spent four years interviewing elders for his next non-fiction book, page due in January, more about Medicine Unbundled: Dispatches from the Indigenous Frontlines (Heritage House), about the segregated Indian hospitals in Canada, put in place not to help Indigenous patients but to keep them separate from a white, racist society.
These hospitals, he claims, were chronically under-funded (run for 50% of the cost for white hospitals), poorly staffed and struggling always to maintain a full complement of sick Indians.
Joan Morris, a Songhees elder, told Geddes how her mother was taken to the Nanaimo Indian Hospital at age 18, in apparent good health, and not released until she was 35. The hospitals, in cahoots with residential schools, were also responsible for forced sterilizations, gratuitous drug and surgical experiments, and electric shock treatment to destroy the short-term memory of sexual abuse. Geddes reveals that children spent years in the segregated hospitals as guinea pigs but their victimization has never been part of any compensation process.
“The big presses all said this is a great idea and an important project,” Geddes says, but they wouldn’t be able to sell it because ‘Alas, no one in Canada is interested in Indians.’
“I hope to prove those publishers wrong, not for my own sake, as I am giving any royalties to set up a scholarship in Indigenous Studies at UVic, but because the subject is so important.”
Leave a Reply