Beyond Biology

--Description taken from "Beyond Biology:Disease and its Impact on the Canadian Plains Native people,1880-1930"-- The impact of disease and the demographic collapse of Native communities has often been seen as a "natural", albeit horrendous, consequence of the New World encounter between Native people and Europeans. Non-immune Native groups quickly succumbed to little-understood epidemics in this "biological invasion" that set off a terrible cycle of cultural and ultimately spiritual collapse. The theory discounts the military, economic, and political invasions that accompanied the biological invasion. This study examines the history of health and disease of the Canadian Plains Native people in the immediate post-treaty period from 1880-1930. The loss of their bison economy dealt a severe economic blow, while government limited food rations and material aid to forestall pauperization. Death rates from influenza, measles, whooping cough, tuberculosis, infant and maternal mortality soared. Native people called for economic solutions to their clearly-recognized diseases of poverty. They approached the Euro-Canadian medical care cautiously and selectively since it was made to shoulder the assimilationist goals of the government. Native people persisted in their indigenous ceremonies, despite government repression, because those ceremonies offered the regeneration and renewal necessary to conceptualize their changed social, economic and health status. This study is based on the archival collections of the federal government's department of Indian Affairs, church bodies and manuscripts. A concerted effort has been made to incorporate the voices of the Native people, whether those voices were collected in memoirs or buried in the government records.