Starvation, Experimentation, Segregation, and Trauma: Words for Reading Indigenous Health History

Abstract

This article discusses the most important recent contributions in the field of Indigenous health history. This scholarship implicates health and medicine in the complicated work of the long and continuing project of colonization and the building of a white settler nation in Canada. Four key terms in this work will be discussed: starvation, experimentation, segregation, and trauma. I will show how these terms, and the historians who use them, have sharpened the broader analytics of race and colonialism in Canada as they operate in the field of Indigenous health history.