A History of Food and Nutrition in Indigenous Communities In

Home , Robert Stanbury, Winnipeg Free Press

A History of Food and Nutrition

in Indigenous Communities in Canada, 1962-1985

Krista Walters

A Thesis submitted to the Faculty of Graduate Studies

of The University of Manitoba in partial fulfilment of the requirements of the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

Department of History University of Manitoba Winnipeg, Manitoba

This thesis explores the history of food and nutrition in Indigenous communities in mid- to late- twentieth century Canada. It does so through tracing changes in state policies and procedures, as well as Indigenous approaches to foodways, health, and healing from the 1960s into the 1980s. It looks at how the shifting discourses of nutrition and food science impacted educational materials and programs for Indigenous peoples, often aimed at mothers and children in Indigenous communities, and highlights a moment of possibility in the early 1980s when Indigenous peoples were increasingly being consulted on and leading state programs tailored to their communities and their cultures. It aims to privilege the experiences of Indigenous peoples through the choice of sources and attention to Indigenous methodologies. It therefore includes discussion of Indigenous activism and its impact on health and healing, food production and preparation, land use and agriculture, and data collection used for food and nutrition surveys.

Central to this dissertation is the concern that Indigenous peoples have been studied, pathologized, and racialized as part of a long history of settler-colonialism in Canada. Many of the state nutrition projects that informed policies and programs during the period were organized and carried out by non-Indigenous experts and their cadres, with a very top-down approach. These mirror colonial initiatives dating back a century in the most heavily studied regions, singling out Indigenous peoples as a unique category of subjects to be studied separately from the rest of the population. Accordingly, it focuses heavily on Manitoba and the Northwest Territories throughout, as these regions generated a wealth of archival materials on the subject and were also often the focus of federal Medical Services Branch studies and published documents.

In studying the history of ‘Aboriginal nutrition’ as a growing field of expertise during the period, this dissertation challenges narratives of decline, dispossession, and displacement of Indigenous peoples that have dominated Canadian history. It contributes to the growing literature that works instead to centre Indigenous peoples and their experiences of modernity, in this case their foodways and nutritional knowledge. It does so by exploring this subject as part of a transnational history of empire, which considers gender, food, and emotions as categories of historical analysis helpful in peeling back the layered relationships between Indigenous peoples and representatives of the state.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

First, I wish to acknowledge that much of my research and writing was done on Treaty One land, the original lands of the Anishinaabeg and Dakota peoples, and on the homeland of the Métis Nation. I have given careful attention here to Indigenous research methods, voices, and experiences, and hope that this project makes clear that the unequal health experiences of Indigenous and non-Indigenous people in Canada were neither biological nor inevitable, but a consequence of historical events that created persistent inequalities.

I have been fortunate to have so many amazing women scholars support this dissertation. Thank you to my committee, Esyllt Jones, Janis Thiessen, Jocelyn Thorpe, and Franca Iacovetta for making time to engage with this project. My supervisor, Mary Jane Logan McCallum at the University of Winnipeg, has been a prudent mentor, as she was when we met as graduate students. I am grateful to Adele Perry, my MA supervisor, for encouraging me to take food and nutrition seriously as categories of historical inquiry. The invaluable advice Franca Iacovetta provided in my brief time at University of Toronto helped shape how I researched and wrote this thesis. Kristin Burnett at Lakehead provided support and feedback early in my writing, and I am grateful both for her work and for her interest in mine.

Fellow students who shared this journey made it all the better. Thanks especially to Erin Millions, who made raising two babies while doing a PhD seem totally reasonable. At times, my life revolved around the U of M, and with my partner working and studying there and my daughter in campus daycare, it was my second home for many years. Time spent talking and laughing with faculty and staff there made the early years of this project a pleasure, especially conversations with Barry Ferguson, Natalie Johnson, Len Kuffert, Jorge Nállim, and David Watt. Archivist David Cuthbert found exactly what I hoped for when I reached out to him for help on a couple of missing pieces. Thank you also to the U of M Libraries staff, especially the Neil John Maclean Health Sciences Library for sharing their Indigenous Health Collection, which has opened up and made accessible a huge archive of materials.

This project would not have been possible without financial and collegial support from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, the University of Toronto, the University of Winnipeg (Indigenous History of Tuberculosis in Manitoba 1930-1970 Doctoral Research Fellowship), the University of Manitoba (UMGF; Institute for the Humanities Affiliateship; Aboriginal Issues Press Scholarship; MB History Internship; Dr. James Burns Award in History), the Centre for Rupert’s Land Studies, the Newberry Library, and St. John’s College.

Support from my family kept this project alive. My parents, Bonnie and Gerry, never really understood what I was working on, but always asked how it was going. My sister Kerri, the only high school and first university graduate in our family, made getting a PhD seem attainable. Rosalie and Linden have forever changed my perspective on motherhood, making this thesis richer from all of the joy and love they bring into my life. So much gratitude to Carl Klassen. I cannot count the hours of reading, advising, and listening you’ve put into this. You’ve been beside me through all of it and then some, and thankfully remain my best friend and partner.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Abstract i Acknowledgements ii Table of Contents iii List of Tables iv List of Figures iv

INTRODUCTION 1

CHAPTER ONE “It is up to the mothers”: consolidating postwar approaches to colonizing food and nutrition under the MSB 49

CHAPTER TWO Colonizing nutrition: establishing nutrition discourse, food surveys, and the field of ‘Aboriginal Nutrition’ 74

CHAPTER THREE Finding alternatives: the gendered experience of addressing food insecurity in Indigenous communities 112

CHAPTER FOUR Nutrition Canada: the separate treatment of Indigenous peoples in Canada’s first national nutrition survey 149

CHAPTER FIVE ‘Amused Natives’, ‘Happy Inuit’, and ‘(Dis)satisfied Researchers’: emotional encounters and experiences of food and nutrition 188

CHAPTER SIX “Extreme dissatisfaction will be organized and demonstrated”: Indigenous organizing for health and nutrition in the 1970s 220

CHAPTER SEVEN ‘New Perspectives’: shifting the dialogue from individualist to structuralist approaches to nutrition 247

CHAPTER EIGHT Centering Indigenous Foodways: the new Indian Health Policy and Indigenous approaches to nutrition, feeding, and teaching 266

CONCLUSION 305

BIBLIOGRAPHY 324

iii

LIST OF TABLES

Table I: Sample of Food Prices at Koostatak General Store, Koostatak Manitoba, 1968 106

Table II: Sample of Food Prices at Two Cross Lake Grocery Stores, Cross Lake Manitoba, 1971 108

Table III: Sample of Comparative Food Costs in Manitoba Communities, 1971 111

Table IV: Sampling of Imported Food Availability and Cost, Fort Smith Region (Winter 1978-79) 301

Table V: Sampling of Imported Food Availability and Cost, Baffin Region (Winter 1978-79) 302

Table VI: Sampling of Imported Food Availability and Cost, Keewatin Region (Winter 1978-79) 303

LIST OF FIGURES

Figure I: Comparative Percentages of Country Food in Diet (N.W.T. Households, Indigenous and non-Indigenous: 1982 and 1985) 304

INTRODUCTION

In the 1960s, the Canadian government undertook a spate of studies on the nutritional status of ‘Indian’ and ‘Eskimo’ children, youth, and adults across the country as part of a larger project to understand how to better educate Aboriginal peoples on nutritional improvement.1 Many of these projects, such as the Nutrition Canada Survey, were organized and carried out with a very top-down approach, mirroring colonial initiatives dating back a century in the most heavily studied regions (the western and northern provinces and territories).2 By the 1970s, some First Nations, Métis, and Inuit people in Canada were actively fighting against these interventions and forming organizations to challenge further colonization of their bodies, communities, and approaches to healthcare. Others, of course, were simply living their lives, in spite of decades of colonial programs that impacted geography, relationships, resources, and foodways. In this period, a movement towards Indigenous-run healthcare and healing services was underway, which was recognized by the Canadian state with some transfer of control over health services to First Nations and Inuit communities in the 1980s. While nutrition has been only part of the larger approach to healthcare, food – its production, purchase, preparation, and consumption – has been a critical site of regulation and resistance. More importantly, though, as this dissertation argues, eating and everything revolving around it is inseparable from community and personal histories, as food works in many ways to literally feed bodies, but also figuratively feed all aspects of daily life, including community bonds, rituals, and cultural identities.

1 These projects were carried out under the Departments of National Health and Welfare (DNHW) and Indian Affairs and Northern Development (DIAND), often conducted locally through the Medical Services Branch (MSB). Throughout this dissertation, the work of the variously named and governed Indian Affairs branches and departments will be referred to as they were during the period discussed. Specifically, prior to 1966, Indian Affairs Branch (IAB) will be used, then the change in governance and name from 1966 onward is reflected as Department of Indian and Northern Affairs (DIAND). When quoted directly from a source, the name used by that source will be used regardless of the appropriate historical period being referenced. This reflects a vernacular understanding and usage of naming that I wish to respect. 2 Some parts of this Thesis appear in modified form in Krista Walters, “‘A National Priority’: Nutrition Canada’s Survey and the Disciplining of Aboriginal Bodies, 1964-1975,” in Franca Iacovetta, Marlene Epp and Valerie Korinek, eds., Edible Histories, Cultural Politics: Towards a Canadian Food History (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012), 433-451.

My research looks at the history of ‘Aboriginal nutrition’ in Canada from the 1960s through 1980s, specifically how nutrition programs and education circulated in First Nations, Inuit, and Métis communities Canada. It takes a particular focus on Manitoba as a useful case study to explore more in-depth how state nutrition programs and studies were carried out, as well as how Indigenous peoples and communities understood their own health and foodways. It thus attempts to cover a range of issues including: the political climate of the period; Indigenous-state relationships both on a national and local scale; the state of food security and diet in Indigenous communities in Canada; the educational standards imposed by the Canada Food Guide and Department of National Health and Welfare, particularly the Medical Services Branch (MSB), along with how expert knowledge of nutrition as a science was being studied and formulated into educational materials for both families and schools; and the experiences – physical, material, and emotional – of Indigenous and non-Indigenous nutritionists, physicians, dentists, nurses, Community Health Representatives, as well as Indigenous subjects, pupils, and patients throughout the period examined. This dissertation analyzes the often-complicated relationships between Indigenous peoples and the Canadian state. Of particular interest is the nutrition education administered to Indigenous mothers and children, how mothers responded to these interventions into their families and communities, and how families operated in spite of such programs, whether incorporating guidelines and advice, acting subversively to blend expert advice into community teachings and standards, or resisting such initiatives altogether. It looks at studies and educational nutrition programs developed for school children and young families, and the experiences of both Indigenous and non-Indigenous people involved in such projects. Throughout the period, experts sought to elevate the nutritional status of Indigenous families based on the various versions of Canada’s Food Guide, prescribing ‘health and happiness’ through adherence to a dietary standard centred on western foods readily accessible in increasingly expansive urban grocery stores, yet continually unavailable or cost-prohibitive in northern communities. Throughout this project, I seek to find a balance between repressive colonial policy and human agency as it relates to a history of nutrition in Indigenous communities in Canada from

2 the 1960s through 1980s. The timeline this project follows correlates with the Department of National Health and Welfare’s creation of the MSB in 1962, through the mid-1980s when MSB experts and staff collaborated increasingly with Indigenous peoples, who were often also employees of the Branch. The 1980s in many ways marks a moment of change and possibility for Indigenous peoples in Canada, as by the end of the decade, the promise of self-sufficiency and Indigenized nutrition, health, and healing programs appeared to be becoming a reality. The dissertation closes at this moment, when services were in the slow process of being transferred to communities, with MSB regional staff having incorporated much of the advice and knowledge gained through collaborative or Indigenous-driven approaches to food and nutrition. After this point, many communities experienced the transfer of health services and all of the promise it held as lacking, and relationships between the state and Indigenous people in Canada have continued to be governed by the 1979 Indian Health Policy that grew out of the previous decade’s activist momentum. While this is primarily a history of non-urban experiences, it is informed in many ways by the experiences of Indigenous peoples in urban centres, along with the state medical and nutrition experts from large cities, often centralized in Ottawa, who rarely (if ever) met with the people living in Indigenous communities that their work directly affected.

OUTLINE The following is an outline of the dissertation chapters, which are organized with a contextual introductory chapter, followed by chapters organized relatively chronologically from the formation of the Medical Services Branch through to the transfer of control over health services to some First Nations and Inuit communities in the 1980s. It will conclude by drawing out important connections between the history of ‘Aboriginal nutrition’ and the contemporary personal and/as political experiences of Indigenous peoples in Canada, with particular attention to those claiming an active stand against colonialism and its legacy on food and nutrition. I am concerned with exploring how intensified nutrition research and education programs in Indigenous communities in mid-twentieth century Canada were received by

Indigenous people in urban, but especially non-urban communities.3 The mid-1960s through 1970s was a period of heightened interest in the lives of Indigenous peoples in Canada by the Canadian state, particularly the liberal social scientific community. A key concern centred on the possibilities of reconfigured programs for assimilation, or in the contemporary language of politicians and various experts even after the 1951 revisions to the Indian Act, “the integration of the Indian into the general life and economy of the country.”4 During this short period, Indigenous people and non-Indigenous Canadians were forced to reckon with the effects of colonialism, governed by the newly conceived of Act. For their part, many First Nations, Inuit, and Métis activists engaged Canadians in debates through political and social venues.5 Although its lasting impact on political events of the period is questionable, the level and type of participation of Indigenous people from across the country marked what some argue was the first public expression of dissatisfaction by Indigenous people in Canada on a national scale.6 I would argue that it is important to consider the various mobilizing movements of the period when discussing the nutrition curriculum and educational materials produced because these materials are a product of the very conditions against which many of these organizations were struggling.

3 Throughout this dissertation, communities will be referred to by name when appropriate or clear, but the use of First Nation or Reserve will also be used when appropriate or used in historical sources. Because the names of some communities have changed since the period discussed, I refer to places by the names used in the period unless specified. 4 Olive Patricia Dickason, Canada’s First Nations: A History of Founding Peoples from Earliest Times, Reprinted (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1992; 1994), 327. Quoting Walter E. Harris, Minister of Citizenship and Immigration from 1950-54 – the body responsible at the time for Indian Affairs – on “the ultimate goal of our Indian policy.” 5 This included the 1967 Indian Pavilion at Expo 67 in Montreal, the centennial of Canadian Confederation, and a series of National Film Board of Canada (NFB) documentaries. See PowWow at Duck Lake (Ottawa: National Film Board of Canada, 1967); Martin Defalco and Willie Dunn, directors, The Other Side of the Ledger: An Indian View of the Hudson’s Bay Company (Ottawa: National Film Board of Canada, 1972); Mort Ranson, director, You Are on Indian Land (Ottawa: National Film Board of Canada, 1969). 6 Myra Rutherdale and Jim Miller, “‘It’s Our Country’: First Nations’ participation in the Indian Pavilion at Expo 67,” Journal of the Canadian Historical Association 17, issue 2 (https://www.erudit.org/revue/jcha/2006/v17/n2/016594ar.pdf), 2006: 148-173.

Chapter One This chapter will consider the early establishment of state-funded and -driven nutrition programs uniquely designed for Indigenous peoples and communities, beginning with the creation of the Medical Services Branch in 1962.7 It looks at nutrition studies and programs for Indigenous children and families, particularly those aimed to educate mothers how to best raise their families on Canada’s Food Rules. I am interested not only in the scientific information, but also in analyzing the discourse of these educational tools in relation to government nutrition programs, which were embedded with strains of both Victorian and postwar ideology. This chapter therefore explores changes to how medical services were delivered to Indigenous people in non-urban communities, which illustrates not only the increased attention the state was paying to Indigenous bodies understood as ‘in crises’, but also some very real implications for shifts in Indigenous-state relations. While statistically, First Nations, Métis, and Inuit people in Canada were more likely to become ill with diseases now considered rooted in poverty- related malnutrition, such as Tuberculosis,8 and to which vulnerable individuals often succumbed, the state focus on embodiment of biologically determined ‘failure to thrive’ continued to deny the structural causes of malnutrition and poverty-related illness. As this history hinges on food, Chapter One includes discussion of Indigenous foodways, both historically and as various communities and Nations were engaging with food and nutrition in the period.

Chapter Two This chapter explores how food insecurity became a crisis in many Indigenous communities,

7 Health Canada, “History of Providing Health Services to First Nations people and Inuit,” accessed 12 May 2015, http://www.hc-sc.gc.ca/ahc-asc/branch-dirgen/fnihb-dgspni/services- eng.php. “Medical Services Branch was formed in 1962 by merging Indian Health and Northern Health Services with other independent federal field services.” 8 See Maureen Lux, Medicine That Walks: Disease, Medicine, and Canadian Plains Native People, 1880-1940 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001); Georgina Feldberg, Disease and Class: Tuberculosis and the Shaping of Modern North American Society (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1995); Mary Jane Logan McCallum, Indigenous Women, Work, and History, 1940-1980 (University of Manitoba Press, 2014).

5 primarily through looking at nutrition studies conducted by student researchers in Manitoba. It considers how nutritionists perceived and thus studied their clients through analyzing data and interviews collected by university students from Winnipeg, who traveled to Manitoba First Nations communities to survey grocery prices and availability. I also look at the expert literature that framed their approach to studying, surveying, and educating Indigenous peoples, particularly mothers. In two separate initiatives led by the Medical Services Branch (MSB), small teams of women research assistants showed that cost, quality, consistency, and availability of foods were leaving some communities with limited healthy options, making nutrition goals defined and promoted by the MSB an impossibility for most community members.

Chapter Three As the previous chapter details, food insecurity was both deeply entrenched and increasingly damaging in many Indigenous communities in the 1960s and 1970s. Frequent surveys of food costs in northern stores, particularly in Manitoba, showed grocery options precluded the possibility of families accessing safe, nutritious, affordable, and stable food sources as prices were often fifty to over one hundred percent higher than those in Winnipeg stores.9 Moreover, items promoted by nutrition experts – whose wisdom was being disseminated in communities through nurses, CHRs, and a range of pamphlets on nutrition and lifestyle – were rarely available, expired, or improperly stored for safe consumption. This chapter looks at the gendered experiences of addressing food security and food-related self-sufficiency projects. It considers community and individual responses to inflated food costs and lack of access to affordable, healthy, fresh, and/or traditional foods from the 1960s through 1970s, with some discussion of a longer history when programs and ideologies grew out of earlier experiences. Issues concerning food security were being handled in various ways throughout Indigenous communities in the prairie provinces. These included gardening, agriculture, food cooperatives, and other initiatives that educated and united families, such as homemakers clubs.

9 See “Table III: Sample of Comparative Food Costs in Manitoba Communities, 1971” in Chapter Two. This table presents only a sampling of the communities included in the larger report, but helps illustrate the disparity in pricing between First Nations communities in Manitoba and Winnipeg’s average.

Chapter Four The fourth chapter is concerned with the largest and first comprehensive national nutrition survey, Nutrition Canada, that included research in various First Nations and Inuit communities in Canada in the late 1960s to early 1970s. Nutrition Canada (NC) was organized and run by the Department of National Health and Welfare (DNHW) for roughly a decade, and studied evidence of nutritional health in Canadian communities. It was published as a series of reports under a summary report, Nutrition: A National Priority.10 This research was quantified based on medical examinations that included interviews, questionnaires, blood samples, food tracking, and body measurements. Nutrition and medical analysts then drew conclusions based on grouping the white settler society with new immigrant bodies into a ‘general population,’ which was conceived of as separate from two other distinct groups: Indians and Eskimos.11 The surveys in First Nations and Inuit communities were conducted by Department of Health and Welfare and MSB medical personnel, and ran from 1968 through 1970. The three groupings used in the survey draw attention to the special otherness of First Nations and Inuit bodies and suggest that the project was not simply a benign attempt at raising the standard of health. Instead, as part of an ongoing assimilationist agenda, the NC project served to reinforce the colonial power structure of Indigenous-government relations.

Chapter Five While the national Nutrition Canada (NC) food survey detailed in the previous chapter presents a history of food and nutrition in Canada, with special attention to Indigenous communities across the country, the materials generated by nutritionists, dieticians, physicians, nurses, and others involved in the Survey also provide a history of emotions. In conducting the NC fieldwork, nutrition experts and their cadres entered ‘foreign’ places where they encountered

10 Canada, Nutrition Canada for the Department of National Health and Welfare, Nutrition: A National Priority (Ottawa: Department of National Health and Welfare, 1973). 11 Concerning terminology, the study uses the terms Indian and Eskimo in defining these research subjects from what they term the General Population. Where these terms are used in this paper, they are in reference to the subjects of the study in the legal terminology used by Nutrition Canada and the Canadian Government. Métis was not used as a distinct category, and appears infrequently, almost never, in period sources.

‘Amused Natives’, ‘Happy Inuit’, and an ‘alien race’ of often difficult study participants.12 By reading these encounters through theories of emotion, this chapter examines the emotive expressions documented by both visiting experts and resident study-participants in northern communities. I am interested here in questions of perception, performance, and communication as it is shaped through discourses on ‘Indians’ and ‘Eskimos’, ‘whites’, ‘outsiders’, and other categories perpetuated by uneven relationships between health experts, state officials, and Indigenous peoples. This is further complicated in the late 1960s with the increased participation of Indigenous people in medical service positions.13 These experiences, thus, were not only shaped by racialized categories rooted in colonial relations, but highly gendered, classed, and intersectional for both men and women.

Chapter Six During this same period of state and MSB nutrition surveys and studies, some Indigenous people in Canada were actively fighting against what western medicine, education, and other state programs had to offer, and were forming organizations to challenge further colonization of their bodies, communities, and approaches to healthcare. For many Indigenous peoples, the 1970s were experienced as a decade of intensified political organization. Scott Rutherford writes that, in Canada “between 1973 and 1976, twice as many indigenous protest actions and legal challenges took place per year as compared to any year between 1960 and 1969.”14 The

12 Andree Beaulieu, “A Nutrition Surveyor’s Journal,” Nutrition Today 9(1) (January/February 1974): 16-18. Preliminary research on this discussion presented in a conference paper, Krista Walters, “‘Amused Natives’, ‘Happy Inuit’, and ‘(Dis)satisfied Researchers’: Nutrition Experts’ Emotional Encounters with an ‘Alien Race’ in Northern Canada, 1960-1980,” at the 2014 Annual Meeting of the Canadian Historical Association, Brock University, St Catharine’s, ON, May 2014. 13 For example, Community Health Representatives (CHRs) would have been community members identified as Indian or Inuit with cultural and linguistic knowledge that enabled them to train and act as sort of intermediary members of northern healthcare teams. The position was initiated as part of a Medical Services Branch program in the 1960s, “in an attempt… to increase the amount and effectiveness of health teaching done among the Indian and Eskimo people,” with a Representative “qualified by lifetime knowledge of his community, as well as by training.” Canada, The Community Health Worker in Indian and Eskimo Communities (Ottawa: Department of National Health and Welfare Medical Services Branch, 1970): 1. 14 Rutherford, “Canada’s Other Red Scare,” 77-78.

8 political climate of the period influenced the 1968 formation of the first Canadian pan-Indian organization, the National Indian Brotherhood (NIB), which reflected a similar national scale of organizing seen in Expo 6715; reforms to education throughout the 1970s, through which some First Nations and Métis communities took over local elementary and secondary schools16; local activism located within a global or transnational anticolonial movement in the 1970s, such as the forty-day armed occupation in 1974 of Kenora Ontario’s Anicinabe Park by the Ojibway Warriors Society17; and protests by Indigenous women to reform the Indian Act’s discriminatory sections that stripped women of their status upon marriage, which were not formally addressed until Bill C-31 (returning legal status to women who married non-Indians and their children) was passed in 1985.18 Chapter Six, accordingly, will look at Indigenous organizing, activism, and approaches to food, nutrition, and health care for Indigenous people, arguing that the 1970s was a moment of possibility for genuine change and self-sufficiency previously not experienced by Indigenous peoples and communities in Canada. As part of this reclamation of Indigenous methods of feeding and healing, many Indigenous women and mothers embraced and promoted breastfeeding, which was a significant space for women’s activism in the 1970s and 1980s.

Chapter Seven As detailed in the previous chapters, nutritional status of Indigenous peoples in Canada was a focused field of study in the 1960s and 1970s, when the Canadian government established the Medical Services Branch and undertook a spate of studies on the nutritional status of ‘Indian’ and ‘Eskimo’ children, youth, and adults. The consensus by many of these experts was that

15 Myra Rutherdale and Jim Miller, “‘It’s Our Country’: First Nations’ participation in the Indian Pavilion at Expo 67,” Journal of the Canadian Historical Association 17, issue 2 (https://www.erudit.org/revue/jcha/2006/v17/n2/016594ar.pdf): 148-173. 16 Dickason, Canada’s First Nations, 337. By 1984, 187 bands were fully operating their own schools. 17 See Scott Rutherford, “Canada’s Other Red Scare: The Anicinabe Park Occupation and Indigenous Decolonization,” in ed. Dan Berger, The Hidden 1970s: Histories of Radicalism (New Brunswick, NJ, and London: Rutgers University Press, 2010): 77-94. 18 On Bill C-31, see Dickason, Canada’s First Nations, 331, and Bonita Lawrence, Real Indians and Others: Mixed Blood Urban Native Peoples and Indigenous Nationhood (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2004).

Indigenous people were struggling to succeed nutritionally due to a lack of adequate knowledge and effort, which was proposed to be overcome through the right amount and type of education to help people help themselves. This individualist approach, however, continually failed, not because experts were missing a key element to educating people, but quite simply because they continued to assign responsibility to individuals when the structural forces that created conditions of food insecurity remained largely absent from survey and study project conclusions. This chapter looks at how some nutrition and medical experts started questioning this premise, as they engaged with the possibility that the structural systems of colonizing projects were the underlying cause of compromised nutritional status. Some, like Dr. Otto Schaefer, became champions of studying Indigenous foodways and traditional healing, which led them to begin the work of promoting a hybrid nutritional science that embraced Indigenous foods and nutrition. As the chapter will show, this shifting perspectives of a small but influential group of experts, led largely by the organizing efforts of Indigenous communities detailed in the previous chapter, generated sweeping changes to the MSB and state nutrition policy and programs for Indigenous peoples in Canada.

Chapter Eight In exploring the immediate outcomes of the Indian Health Policy announced in 1979, as introduced at the closing of the previous chapter, this chapter centres on the tension between a concerted effort by some Indigenous peoples and nutrition experts towards greater use of Indigenous or ‘country’ foods, and the increased contamination of Indigenous lands, waters, and resources that threatened to poison the fish and sea mammals that so many communities relied on for sustenance. It also looks at the related food and nutrition curriculum implemented for Indigenous school children, and how these reflected the shifting perspectives on Indigenous foodways. The introduction of this dissertation and Chapter Six highlight Indigenous political organizing because I am interested in how materials were beginning in the 1970s to reflect a shift from non-Indigenous expert-driven nutrition education, based on western dietary standards and the four food groups of the Canada Food Guide, to increasingly include Indigenous foods and foodways through Indigenous peoples’ involvement in MSB projects.

The ultimate goal of the state continued to be integration, as modified food guides and educational materials served to replicate western nutrition in Indigenous communities, but with indigenous dietary staples added into the lists of ‘healthy foods’. Yet, it is important to see that the changes to materials also reflected the opinions and approaches of long-time medical and nutrition experts working among Indigenous peoples, such as Dr. Otto Schaefer and Dr. Jean Steckle. Moreover, as this chapter also illustrates, most of the formalized nutrition education materials, school curriculum, and community food events at this time had moved from a top-down project to a conversation that centered Indigenous voices and interests.

Conclusion A critical element motivating this study is the subject’s relevance to contemporary Indigenous politics. There is presently much social scientific and medical exploration into issues of food security and increasing diabetes and obesity and how these conditions are understood structurally, yet often solutions are still understood through discourses of embodiment and racialized biological determinism. Although my research started before recent organizing efforts, such as Idle No More (INM), I have found it impossible to ignore the legacies of colonialism in Canada that INM and other movements have illuminated, especially in Manitoba and Northwest Ontario, where many nutrition surveys and elevation programs were conducted in the mid-twentieth century.19

That continually inflating prices and lack of access to foods in Indigenous communities as diseases of malnutrition, especially type two diabetes and childhood obesity, are regularly declared a crisis for Indigenous peoples are examples of a cycle created by colonialism. It is critical to make the connections between seemingly benign state efforts at improving people’s

19 INM “calls on all people to join in a peaceful revolution, to honour Indigenous sovereignty, and to protect the land and water." See Audra Simpson, “Whither Settler Colonialism?” Settler Colonial Studies 6:4 (2016), 440-441; The Kino-nda-niimi Collective, ed., The Winter We Danced: Voices From the Past, the Future, and the Idle No More Movement (Winnipeg: ARP Books, 2014); Rick Harp and Tim Fontaine, directors, The Power Was With Us: Idle No More (Winnipeg: APTN News, 2020). In recent years, activists have brought issues of food insecurity for First Nations and Inuit communities to the fore. In relation to the work of the INM, a six-week hunger strike held by Chief Theresa Spence, Attawapiskat, ON, in 2012-2013 raised attention to First Nations food, housing, and water security issues.

11 lives and the implications for such intrusions, often imposed by non-Indigenous elites in major urban centres, and carried out primarily by non-Indigenous experts overseeing groups of non- Indigenous and Indigenous health care workers and community volunteers in complicated relationships of power.20 However, it is also important to recognize and explore movement towards sovereignty, education, health and healing, and foodways organized by Indigenous peoples and in concert with non-Indigenous allies. Along with food insecurity, and amidst a host of other legacies of colonialism in Canada, many First Nations are in an ongoing struggle for clean water.21 Colonialism’s legacies also persist through medical crises, most visibly with the 2008 death of Brian Sinclair in Winnipeg’s Health Sciences Centre Emergency Department.22 Thus, in addition to reviewing the key points and contributions of this thesis, it will conclude with an awareness of the contemporary politics of food and nutrition for Indigenous peoples in Canada. It will consider how the history detailed here is reflected in current nutrition guidelines and policies, with a focus on how this history has contributed to a lasting state of food insecurity in Indigenous communities, both urban and on Reserve. It will also consider how the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) has

20 See Kristin Burnett, Taking Medicine: Women's Healing Work and Colonial Contact in Southern Alberta, 1880-1930 (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2010). 21 Members of the Shoal Lake 40 First Nation, in Southeast Manitoba and Northwest Ontario, have been under a boil water advisory since 1997, “hauling in drinking water from Kenora” while they live on the Lake that provides tapwater to the city of Winnipeg. See Shoal Lake 40 First Nation, http://www.sl40.ca/water.htm Accessed 12 May 2015; Adele Perry, Aqueduct: Colonialism, Resources, and the Histories We Remember (Winnipeg: ARP Books, 2016). Though not discussed here, the epidemic of missing and murdered Aboriginal women in Canada, which continues to be inadequately addressed by the state, is a tragedy related to the history of colonialism in Canada and one with which Idle No More is concerned. See Sisters in Spirit, http://www.nwac.ca/programs/sis-research Accessed 12 May 2015; also Amnesty International, http://www.amnesty.ca/our-work/campaigns/no-more-stolen-sisters and http://www.amnesty.ca/blog/missing-and-murdered-indigenous-women-and-girls- understanding-the-numbers Accessed 12 May 2015. 22 See Mary Jane Logan McCallum and Adele Perry, Structures of Indifference: An Indigenous Life and Death in a Canadian City (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2018); Ignored to Death Manitoba http://ignoredtodeathmanitoba.ca/wp2/ Accessed 12 May 2015; Annette Brown et al, “Racism in health system: Expert Working Group gets at factor sidelined at Sinclair inquest,” Winnipeg Free Press (13 June, 2014): A15. Accessed May 12, 2015, http://www.winnipegfreepress.com/opinion/analysis/racism-in-health-system- 262987221.html.

12 addressed the state of food insecurity in Indigenous communities. As various levels of government and Indigenous peoples seek solutions to the high cost and lack of access to safe, affordable foods in Indigenous communities, this thesis argues that they can only be meaningful and effective when arrived at through Indigenized approaches and methods.

PREVIOUS WORK IN THE FIELD My dissertation draws primarily on four main fields of historical scholarship: Indigenous history, gender history with a particular focus on gender and empire, the history of emotion, and most significantly on food and nutrition history. While still often neglected in historical research, historians of food study diets, consumer patterns, recipes, domestic goods, and culinary practices as sources of social, economic, and particularly women’s cultural and ethnic history. The growing field of food history, which emerged in the North American historiography out of gender and ethnic histories, argues for the centrality of food to historical understandings of individuals, culture groups, and nations.23 American historians like Harvey Levenstein, Donna Gabaccia, Sherrie Inness, Janet Theophano, and Psyche A. Williams-Forson have centred food in their studies. In Canada, as Canadian food historians Franca Iacovetta, Valerie Korinek, and Marlene Epp introduce in the collection Edible Histories, Cultural Politics, the field developed out of popular and community histories written by food enthusiasts, heritage museums, and community organizations documenting “historical foodways in Canada.”24 Long-time Culinary Historians of

23 Pioneering American works in the field include Harvey Levenstein’s Revolution at the Table: The Transformation of the American Diet (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988) and especially Paradox of Plenty: A Social History of Eating in Modern America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); examples of gender and women’s history in the field include: Donna Gabaccia, We Are What We Eat: Ethnic Food and the Making of Americans (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998); Sherrie Inness, Dinner Roles: American Women and Culinary Culture (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2001); Janet Theophano, Eat My Words: Reading Women’s Lives through the Cookbooks They Wrote (New York: Palgrave, 2002); and Psyche A. Williams-Forson, Building Houses out of Chicken Legs: Black Women, Food, and Power (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2006). 24 Franca Iacovetta, Marlene Epp and Valerie Korinek, eds., Edible Histories, Cultural Politics: Towards a Canadian Food History (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012), 8. See also: Nathalie Cooke, ed. What’s to Eat? Entrées in Canadian Food History (Montreal: McGill- Queen’s University Press, 2009); Culinary Historians of Canada, http://culinaryhistorians.ca/

Canada executive member, Elizabeth Driver, helped popularize cookbooks as historical evidence by making them accessible and, thus, illuminating their significance as sources for historians.25 Published the same year, historian Steve Penfold’s study of food through a cultural, economic, and social history of The Donut shows how deeply entrenched and interconnected food and eating are in all aspects of life.26 Janis Thiessen’s Snacks, published a decade later, similarly explores a business history of food and eating through her study of some of the oldest, independent snack food producing companies in Canada.27 Further, her work shows that the field in Canada is still both small and growing. Consequently, some of the more significant contributions remain articles or chapters, such as those collected in Edible Histories, Cultural Politics. Editors Iacovetta, Korinek, and Epp, all early contributors to the field, have added important forays into new areas, particularly Valerie Korinek’s “‘Meat Stinks!/Eat Beef Dyke!’.”28 Exploring singer k.d. lang’s participation in vegetarian political activism, for which her home province of Alberta declared her a traitor, Korinek moves the focus away from food and ethnic identity, looking instead “at food choices as signifiers of contested notions of ‘radical’ and ‘traditional’ sexualities with the region.”29 Thinking through food as a form of activism or protest is a critical point for studying histories of diet and health in First Nations, Inuit, and Métis communities, where food has served as both a site of empowerment and dispossession in over a century of colonial ‘encounters’, relations, and struggles. Other chapters in Edible Histories, Cultural Politics introduce this discussion, such as Alison Norman’s “‘Fit for the Table of the Most Fastidious Epicure’,” and my own contribution, “‘A National Priority’,” which presents preliminary research on the Nutrition about.htm accessed 14 May 2014; Canadian Association for Food Studies, http://www. foodstudies.ca/ accessed 14 May 2014. 25 Elizabeth Driver, Culinary Landmarks: A Bibliography of Canadian Cookbooks, 1825- 1949 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008). See also Diane Tye, Baking as Biography: A Life Story in Recipes (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2010). 26 Steven Penfold, The Donut: A Canadian History (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008). 27 Janis Thiessen, Snacks: A Canadian Food History (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2017). 28 Valerie Korinek, “‘Meat Stinks!/Eat Beef Dyke!’ Coming Out as a Vegetarian in the Prairies,” in Edible Histories, Cultural Politics, 326-348. 29 Korinek, “‘Meat Stinks!/Eat Beef Dyke!’,” 327.

Canada National Survey.30 An early contributor to the field who similarly addresses the overlooked links between food and colonial relations is historian Jeffrey Pilcher, whose book, Planet Taco, explores debates on authenticity through a history of ‘Mexican food’.31 The works represented by the Canadian historiography reflect the interdisciplinary roots of food history. Like those in the United States, historians in the field of Canada’s food history have also been informed by scholars from other disciplines, such as anthropologists, who asserted that food production and consumption form the foundations on which a culture group is studied and identified over time. It was in the late 1960s that anthropologist Claude Lévi- Strauss and his followers “sought to understand food as a cultural system,” approaching food “as analogous to language,” as a symbol or metaphor to be read and decoded.32 While this illustrates a structuralist anthropological approach, the perception of food as a cultural symbol is not unique to Lévi-Strauss. Recently, the anthropological field of Food Studies has begun seriously studying food and appetite, with particular concern for how culture and gender operate in relation to eating.33 Arguably, an holistic approach to studying human cultures shapes many anthropologists’ focus on food, while a similar interdisciplinary interest in food and its relation to identity informs the growing sociological study of food. Another discipline concerned with food is women’s and gender studies. Studying food history pushes scholars to consider gender, as Joan Scott and many since have argued, as a social and historical category of analysis rather than biological, calling for historians to think

30 Alison Norman, “‘Fit for the Table of the Most Fastidious Epicure’: Culinary Colonialism in the Upper Canadian Contact Zone,” in Edible Histories, Cultural Politics, 51; Krista Walters, “‘A National Priority’: Nutrition Canada’s Survey and the Disciplining of Aboriginal Bodies, 1964-1975,” in Edible Histories, Cultural Politics, 433-451. 31 Jeffrey M. Pilcher, Food in World History (New York: Routledge, 2006); Pilcher, ¡Que Vivan los Tamales!: Food and the Making of Mexican Identity (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1998); Pilcher, Planet Taco: A Global History of Mexican Food (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012). 32 Pat Caplan, “Approaches to the Study of Food, Health and Identity,” in Food, Health and Identity, ed. Pat Caplan, 1-31 (London and New York: Routledge, 1997) 1. 33 See Carole Counihan and Penny Van Esterik, eds., Food and Culture: A Reader (New York: Routledge, 1997).

15 through gender as a shift from a history of subjects to a history of relations.34 Studying these relations shows a fairly consistent, cross-cultural and -regional perception that women and food are inherently linked, which has translated into gendered roles that have both oppressed and empowered women. As well as the gendering of food preparation and the intimate relationship between women and nourishment inherent in childbearing and breastfeeding, the effects of food and eating on women’s bodies, particularly relating to body image and eating disorders, present important questions and concerns for feminist scholars.35 It is not surprising, then, that much work on food in the American and Canadian historiography is written by feminist historians, who approach their work with a similar interdisciplinary concern of women’s unique and gendered relationship to food. Food is important to historians of gender, culture, and Indigenous North America because of its centrality to everyday life, cutting across as well as distinguishing cultural and physical boundaries, consumed as both necessity and pleasure. Food’s cultural significance can be seen in magazines from the decades examined in this dissertation, presenting ‘exotic’ or ‘ethnic’ recipes to Canadian housewives to spice up their family dinners, with what Iacovetta and Korinek referred to as “bastardized versions of ‘foreign’ recipes, with most of the chili peppers

34 Joan W. Scott, Gender and the Politics of History. New York: Columbia University Press, 1988. For a range of voices on the utility of gender as a category of historical analysis, and on feminist methodology see: Joyce Green, ed., Making Space for Indigenous Feminism (Winnipeg: Fernwood, 2006); Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, "African-American Women's History and the Metalanguage of Race," Signs 17:2 (Winter 1992); Franca Iacovetta, “Gendering Trans/National Historiographies: Feminists Rewriting Canadian History” Journal of Women’s History 19, 1 (2007): 206-13; Caren Kaplan and Inderpal Grewal, “Transnational Practices and Interdisciplinary Feminist Scholarship: Refiguring Women’s and Gender Studies,” in Robyn Wiegman, ed, Women Studies on its Own (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002): 66-81; Mary Ellen Kelm and Lorna Townsend, eds. In the Days of Our Grandmothers: A Reader in Aboriginal Women’s History in Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006); Deborah Gray White, ed. Telling Histories: Black Women Historians in the Ivory Tower (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2007); Sue Morgan, “Introduction: Writing Feminist History: Theoretical Debates and Critical Practices,” in Morgan, ed., The Feminist History Reader, 1-48 (New York: Routledge, 2006). 35 See Arlene Voski Avakian and Barbara Haver, eds., From Betty Crocker to Feminist Food Studies: Critical Perspectives on Women and Food (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2005); Esther Rothblum and Sondra Solovay, eds., The Fat Studies Reader (New York: NYU Press, 2009).

16 or other pungent spices removed.”36 In demeaning one another, culture and food have become familiar insults, as Gabaccia demonstrates: “Germans [have been labelled] as ‘krauts’, … Frenchmen as ‘frogs’, and British as ‘limeys.’”37 Bodies and consumption, particularly those of immigrants and Indigenous peoples, have become inseparable, affirming the popular phrase, ‘you are what you eat’. Moreover, as anthropologists like Carole Counihan and Penny Van Esterik have established, eating in itself is “an endlessly evolving enactment of gender, family, and community relationships.”38 Food is also an important signifier of how women of different culture groups, particularly Indigenous people and recent immigrants to Canada, are perceived and often pathologized for their habits of food production, purchase, and preparation. Most significantly for this dissertation, food has been central to colonial relations, and has served as a cultural marker of difference in regulating bodies, defining those who belong in opposition to ‘others’ based on who most closely adheres to national nutrition standards. Nutrition standards and the history of nutrition in Canada are well documented in Ian Mosby’s book, Food Will Win the War. His attention to how nutrition was legitimated though the ‘discovery’ of nutrients as units of measurement and, ultimately, how the field of nutrition was established as a social science that grew out of war time demands is critical for understanding the fluidity of dietary standards. As Mosby illustrates, food rules were restructured regularly to reflect food shortages, research sponsors, new findings, as well as debates between a factious field of specialists.39 His short section on the application of nutrition in Indigenous communities, especially children in Residential Schools in Manitoba, illustrates both the “limits of postwar nutritional research in Canada” and the violence inflicted on vulnerable populations under state care.40 Many of the schools that Indigenous children

36 Franca Iacovetta and Valerie Korinek, “Jell-O Salads, One-Stop Shopping, and Maria the Homemaker: The Gender Politics of Food,” in Sisters or Strangers: Immigrant, Ethnic, and Racialized Women in Canadian History, eds. Marlene Epp, Franca Iacovetta, and Frances Swyripa, 190-230 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004), 190. 37 Gabaccia, We Are What We Eat, 8-9. 38 Counihan and Van Esterik, eds., Food and Culture, 1. 39 Ian Mosby, Food Will Win the War: The Politics, Culture, and Science of Food on Canada’s Home Front (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2014). 40 Mosby, Food Will Win the War, 199-201; for more detail, see Mosby, “Administering Colonial Science: Nutrition Research and Human Biomedical Experimentation in Aboriginal

17 attended during the 1960s and into the ‘70s were residential schools, operating under joint church-government supervision before being taken over by the Department of Indian and Northern Affairs in 1969. As John Milloy asserts in his study of the Canadian Residential School System, by the 1960s, teaching children in Residential Schools “new food habits,”41 “based not upon the old Aboriginal economy but upon western science” or “the sacred four food groups,”42 was an attempt at redirecting Aboriginal children from their cultural foods towards “strange Canadian food.”43 As Mary Ellen Kelm argues, these schools taught children “to hate the food their mothers cooked and reject their standards of cleanliness.”44 Thus, a major point of contention that created an ongoing struggle between the students and administration revolved around diet. Residential School students during the period were documented struggling against a western diet and adhering to cultural dietary habits that mimicked the food provided by their families. Milloy illustrates the significance of a cultural diet to many students within the Residential School system during the late 1960s through ‘70s. An Indian Health Services dietitian “charted the influence of home on standard non-Aboriginal meals,” where she expressed, “students here prefer stew cooked without the addition of vegetables … likely because of home food habits.”45 Students were also noted for their fondness for bannock or bread, while they generally shared a dislike for vegetables. Moreover, staples such as game meat, dried fruit, lard, and roots brought to the students by visiting relatives were replaced daily with western foods, such as macaroni and cheese, bologna, and hot dogs: “the cheapest

Communities and Residential Schools, 1942–1952,” Histoire sociale/Social History 46, no. 91 (May 2013): 145-172. See also Veronica Strong-Boag, Fostering Nation? Canada Confronts its History of Childhood Disadvantage (Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2010). 41 John S. Milloy, A National Crime: The Canadian Government and the Residential School System, 1879 – 1986 (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 1999), 275. 42 Milloy, A National Crime, 277. 43 Milloy, A National Crime, 275. 44 Mary Ellen Kelm, Colonizing Bodies: Aboriginal Health and Healing in British Columbia, 1900-1950 (Vancouver: UBC Press, 1998) 57. 45 Milloy, A National Crime, 276. The activities of the MSB were formerly overseen by Indian Health Services (IHS).

[and least nourishing] food on the market.”46 In a sense, the government’s training of generations of Indigenous children, who were raised in the Residential School system with terribly inadequate and unhealthy foods, not only detracted from the legitimacy of a ‘traditional’ diet, but also created a dietary template for poor eating habits that Health Canada is still purportedly working to correct. Despite the access to sweets and ‘junk food’ that many western children are accustomed to, Indigenous children in the system longed for the food of their homes, which represented more than mere physical nourishment. Because food and culture are intimately connected, it would be surprising were there not a struggle over diet. Particularly in these institutions, where it was commonly reported that menus were limited to inadequate amounts of food,47 it should also have been expected that dietary disagreements would be commonplace. As anthropologists Carole Counihan and Penny Van Esterik argue, “food-sharing creates solidarity,” while “food scarcity damages the human community and human spirit.”48 Since Residential Schools inherently served to “damage … community and … spirit,” dietary habits based on sharing learned from family or community would have carried an even stronger uniting effect, making “the dining room table every bit as much a site of cultural struggle as was the classroom desk,” while the documented persistence of hunger in the schools would serve to damage and divide.49 Further, the imposition of a western diet akin to that espoused by period nutritionists, and evident for example in the various nutrition surveys this project will explore, demonstrates how dietary expectations reflected the “assimilative intention”50 of the Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development (DIAND), a government body with a hand in both the operation of the Schools and the Survey during the decades examined. Milloy also details conflicts surrounding food shortage and malnutrition in schools such as Norway House, Manitoba, where staff “found it difficult and at times impossible to live within the allowances set out” for meals while at the same time, “Indian Health Services

46 Milloy, A National Crime, 276-277. 47 Milloy, A National Crime; also Kelm, Colonizing Bodies, 57; and Mosby, “Administering Colonial Science.” 48 Counihan and Van Esterik, eds., Food and Culture, 1. 49 Milloy, A National Crime, 275. 50 Milloy, A National Crime, 275.

19 dietitians inspected the schools more regularly than had ever been the case before.” Essentially, without the funds to comply, administrators were nonetheless expected to adhere to “detailed menu planning advice with a view to providing ‘a standard equivalent to the diet recommended by Canada’s Food Rules’.”51 Mosby’s research led him to similarly conclude that nutrition experts were visiting First Nations communities and schools, but focuses on their findings of “verifiable cases of malnutrition” or ‘starvation’.52 Worse, some used it as an opportunity to study and hone their new science, perpetuating a cycle that created hunger and malnutrition to begin with. His attention to how the nutrition studies in postwar Manitoba were used as an opportunity to do research instead of finding immediate solutions to a medical emergency, or as “evidence of the need for larger structural political and economic changes,” is an important critique of the state and how it has continued to organize itself with Indigenous peoples and communities.53 This argument, that starvation was a tool of colonizers, is compelling, and is evident in much of the data. James Daschuk’s heralded research on the history of food and disease in the Canadian west, Clearing the Plains, details the degree of violence enacted on plains First Nations in the settlement of Canada, particularly through the use of starvation as a weapon.54 Both have opened up discussion on Canada’s history of colonialism, and their contributions raise new and important methodological questions for historians of food and nutrition.55 However, the information conveyed through their respective works also draw attention to what Métis-Cree historian Jesse Thistle shares with his research on trauma: …my ancestor’s stories linger and revisit me and harm me as they are trying to be remembered. I now find it difficult to read about “Sir” John A. Macdonald’s starvation policies, the subjugation of the Plains Cree, and the plight of the Métis over the long century; and I find it hard to talk about how I feel because most people just don’t “get”

51 Milloy, A National Crime. 52 Mosby, Food Will Win the War, 202. 53 Mosby, Food Will Win the War, 202. 54 James Daschuk, Clearing the Plains: Disease, Politics of Starvation, and the Loss of Aboriginal Life (Regina: University of Regina Press, 2013). 55 For discussion of central themes in Indigenous health histories, see Mary Jane Logan McCallum, "Starvation, Experimentation, Segregation, and Trauma: Words for Reading Indigenous Health History," The Canadian Historical Review 98, no. 1 (2017): 96-113.

how traumatic it is to listen to the vivid stories of people like Rose [a Métis-Cree informant], and most people aren’t haunted by their ancestors like I am.56 This dissertation is written with careful attention to the impact of working to avoid what Perry and McCallum call “corrosive relationships and impacts when Indigenous trauma is relayed, especially by non-Indigenous scholars and writers.”57 It is, accordingly, informed by the extensive work of historians of gender and empire, some of whom have argued that a particular type of settler colonialism has shaped Canadian history.58 Especially relevant to this thesis are the ‘geographies of intimacy’, of which Ann Laura Stoler writes, “Understanding why those who governed cared so much” about “the intimate spaces in which people lived” has “altered our sense of governance and of how people defied it.”59 These “tense and tender ties” of empire “played out in beds, kitchens, nurseries, and schoolrooms were secured and subverted by too much knowledge and not enough.”60 Indigenous women’s bodies have, thus, been paid extra attention and exhaustingly pathologized, studied, and regulated as part of colonizing projects. Those historians of gender and empire who have explored women’s bodies and historical perceptions of racialized women’s sexualized, grotesque, or otherwise inappropriate relationship to feeding children, provide a particularly useful framing for thinking about more recent expert approaches to treating racialized women and children. The relationship between mid-twentieth century non-Indigenous Canada’s treatment of Indigenous women to the history of earlier imaginings of non-European women’s pregnant, child-rearing, and nursing bodies

56 Jesse Thistle, “Vicarious Trauma: Collecting the Herd,” Active History (3 November 2015), http://activehistory.ca/2015/11/vicarious-trauma-collecting-the-herd/. 57 McCallum and Adele Perry, Structures of Indifference, 17-18. 58 See Adele Perry, On the Edge of Empire: Gender, Race, and the Making of British Columbia, 1849-1871 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001); Audra Simpson, “Whither Settler Colonialism?” Settler Colonial Studies 6, no. 4 (2016): 440; also J. Kehaulani Kauanui, “A Structure, Not an Event: Settler Colonialism and Enduring Indigeneity,” Lateral: Journal of the Cultural Studies Association 5, no. 1 (Spring 2016); Scott Morgensen, “The Biopolitics of Settler Colonialism: Right Here, Right Now,” Settler Colonial Studies 1, no. 1 (2011): 52–76. 59 Ann Laura Stoler, “Intimidations of Empire: Predicaments of the Tactile and Unseen,” in Stoler, ed., Haunted by Empire: Geographies of Intimacy in North American History, 1-22 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), 3. 60 Stoler, “Intimidations of Empire,” 3. See also Stoler, “Tense and Tender Ties: The Politics of Comparison in North American History and Post-Colonial Studies,” Journal of American History 88 (December 2001): 829-865.

21 seems too familiar. In early ‘contact zones’ such as North America, Indigenous women’s bodies were integral to a narrative that measured civilization by “women’s behaviour and physiognomy,” as women’s bodies were used to “mark European national identities and inscribe racial hierarchy.”61 Jennifer Morgan argues, “Europe had a long tradition of identifying Others through the monstrous physiognomy or sexual behaviour of women.”62 Morgan’s accounts of Indigenous women in the New World entail travel and exploration narratives of women’s bodies that defined women by their supposedly inherent sexual deviance, physical health – read through either an “aesthetically pleasing” or “repulsive” body – and ability to endure pain during labour.63 The sexed, ‘monstrous,’ deviant bodies of Native American women served to contrast the “European female weakness” and “white gentlewomen’s unsuitability for physical labour.”64 Most significant to these narratives, however, was the focus on women and nourishment, both as producers and consumers of food. Thus, a fixation on women’s bodies, especially as mothers, has historically been central to the colonial discourse on civilization. This discourse, moreover, was not unique to North America, but can be seen in documented sources from other spaces of contact and colonialism. For instance, scrutinized black female bodies form a common theme in the seventeenth- through nineteenth-century narratives of white, male travelers leaving Europe for the New World.65 The fascination with racialized mothers’ bodies also carried over into popular culture in the early twentieth century. In 1917, the popular American magazine, National Geographic, published “Madonnas of Many Lands,” a photographic discovery of the conflicting erotic and ‘barbarous’ mothers in the non-

61 Jennifer Morgan, Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004) 18. See Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992); Katie Pickles and Myra Rutherdale, eds., Contact Zones: Aboriginal and Settler Women in Canada’s Colonial Past (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2005). 62 Morgan, Laboring Women, 16. 63 On Indigenous women as ‘naturally’ or biologically designed for childbirth, see Patricia Jasen, “Race, Culture, and the Colonization of Childbirth in Northern Canada,” Social History of Medicine 10, no. 3 (1997): 383-400; Wendy Mitchenson, Giving Birth in Canada: 1900-1950 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002). 64 Morgan, Laboring Women, 17. 65 Morgan, Laboring Women, 12-13.

22 western world.66 It was not simply the mothers’ bodies, but how they fed their children that was expressed in the work of white male writers and artists. African women in particular were presented as “of a cruder nature and stronger posture than the Females in our Lands in Europe,” understood as such through their feeding choices.67 Like many maps, illustrations, descriptive written accounts, and attempts at scientific classifications of ‘the races,’ the writing from explorers referenced in Morgan’s work demonstrate the European males’ fixation on “women’s reproductive identity.” As Dutch explorer Pieter de Marees wrote in 1602, “When the child crieth to sucke, the mother casteth one of her dugs backeward over her shoulder, and so the child suckes as it hangs.”68 This image was commonly used to illustrate the ‘backwardness’ of African cultures, reiterated by explorers writing of Hottentot women, and Indigenous women of South, Central, and North America. It also contrasts the account of Amerigo Vespucci’s 1502 voyage to the New World, which shows the alternate role of women’s bodies as consumptive: Vespucci “fixed the indigenous woman as a dangerous cannibal” through his tale of women cutting up and roasting a slain ‘Spaniard.’69 As Morgan illustrates, colonial discourses on racialized women’s bodies hinged on food, both consumed and produced, as marks of ‘civilization,’ or a supposed lack of it. Though this overtly racist imagery that sexualizes Indigenous women’s bodies appears as something from ‘far away’ in place and time, it underpins the not so distant foundations of Canadian colonialism and nationhood. Adele Perry’s discussion of Indigenous women in early British Columbia, for example, who “were constructed as lascivious, shameless, unmaternal, prostitutes, ugly, and incapable of high sentiment or manners – the dark, mirror image to the idealized nineteenth-century visions of white women,” provides useful evidence that these perceptions carried over to Canada’s early history.70 Further, the image in Perry’s book of a Lekwammen (Songhees) woman breastfeeding a child is representative of the white male

66 Matthew Frye Jacobson, Barbarian Virtues: The United States Encounters Foreign Peoples at Home and Abroad, 1876–1917 (New York: Hill and Wang, 2000), 175. 67 Morgan, Laboring Women, 31. 68 Morgan, Laboring Women, 31. 69 Morgan, Laboring Women, 18-19. 70 Perry, On the Edge of Empire, 51.

23 combination of fascination and disgust with the premodern displays by Indigenous women in relation to their bodies and food.71 Breastfeeding, therefore, has been central to mid-twentieth century debates on childhood nutrition. Amongst North American Indigenous peoples, several studies have been conducted considering the effects of breastfeeding on children from New Mexico to Alaska. A study of Native and Inuit fertility, taken from 1950-1978 in Alaska, led Larry Blackwood of the Alaska Area Native Health Service to conclude in part that “a gradual rise in fertility prior to 1962 was most likely the result of increased fecundity due to declining breast feeding.”72 While the correlation is one historically recognized by Indigenous mothers, who often utilized breastfeeding as a form of family planning,73 it places responsibility on mothers for the decline in Native fertility, which for Blackwood marks the success of colonialism: “rates for Alaska Natives based on officially registered births have shown considerable change since 1950, reflecting the incorporation of this group into the dominant American culture.”74 Other mother- and child-centred studies of nutrition also indicate the heightened gendered scrutiny of Indigenous women’s bodies. In a 1944 publication, based on a 1943 study of only eleven Shoshone women and their children conducted by the U.S. Indian Service Nutrition Laboratory in New Mexico, issues of childhood anemia based on ‘prolonged and exclusive milk feeding’ were expressed by white researchers as one of “numerous vicious circles of disease [which] occur in many Indian children.”75 Children of one to two years old were studied, based on blood samples, and their mothers “kept in the hospital for a period of investigation.” During this time, it was found the mothers were, indeed, breastfeeding with “little supplementary feeding, if any, of vegetable purees, eggs, or meat.” In other words, they were deviating from the ‘normal’ mothers in the study. As the authors indicate, these deviant Native women and their consequently anemic children were measured against a supposedly

71 Perry, On the Edge of Empire, 50. 72 Larry Blackwood, “Alaska Native Fertility Trends, 1950-1978,” Demography 18, no. 2 (May 1981), 173. 73 See Jasen, “Race, Culture, and the Colonization of Childbirth.” 74 Blackwood, “Alaska Native Fertility Trends,” 173. 75 M. Pijoan and C. A. Elkin, “Secondary Anemia Due to Prolonged and Exclusive Milk Feeding Among Shoshone Indian Infants,” Journal of Nutrition 27 (January 1944), 67.

24 standard level of iron found in “four normal, healthy white women.” Thus, they conclude, “it would appear that in normal healthy women of our own culture the figure is somewhat higher than that for the Shoshone Indian.”76 The problem for these researchers was not simply the inappropriate amount and exclusive feeding of breastmilk to Native children. Blame for the children’s anemia is also placed on Shoshone mothers’ diets, which experts purported were “high in refined cereal carbohydrate and fat and low in meat and vegetable proteins and iron containing foods.”77 It is the “maternal milk,” low in iron, that is making malnourished children, as they and their mothers are the embodiment of malnutrition. Essentially, they argue, “as the child continues in life ... vicious circles are established wherein anemia, infection and certain avitaminoses mutually conspire against the body economy of these people.”78 Thus, the perceptions that link racialized, pre- to mid-twentieth century mother’s bodies to the 1975 publication of the Nutrition Canada Indian and Eskimo surveys centre on what amounts to food technology, implicating Indigenous, pregnant, and breast-feeding women’s bodies as manifestations of premodernity amongst supposedly modern settler populations. Of course, there are differences between the earliest and most recent examples here; however, that there is clearly a thread linking perceptions of Indigenous women and their capacity as mothers makes thinking through these longer histories an important part of this project. While this dissertation is a history concerned with Indigenous people in Canada and the Canadian nation, there are moments that invite exploring connections encouraged by the literature on transnational history and histories of empire. For example, Community Health Representative programs, international economic and social development projects, Jean Steckle’s work in Africa, and doctors whose work in other parts of the (often ‘developing’) world as part of transnational networks of health experts, like agents of empire in Canada before them, influenced their approach to Indigenous health and nutrition and its unique

76 Pijoan and Elkin, “Secondary Anemia,” 71. 77 Pijoan and Elkin, “Secondary Anemia,” 71. 78 Pijoan and Elkin, “Secondary Anemia,” 74.

25 challenges, whether real or perceived.79 Because this project already takes on a scope that is wider than anticipated in breadth, subject matter, and geography, many of these paths were left unexplored in the hopes they will be picked up again, either by myself or other historians. While recognizing the violence and legacies of colonialism is important work, a respectful approach to exploring food as a tool of colonial violence is Hugh Shewell’s Enough to Keep them Alive. Shewell argues that the state has used welfare, relief, or social assistance to undermine First Nations cultures and induce assimilation, essentially disappearance, into the dominant Canadian economic and social order.80 In their studies, Milloy, Shewell, and Mosby

79 The University of Guelph Archives & Special Collections writes, Jean Steckle served “the United Nations in Africa and Rome, the Canadian International Development Research Centre in Africa, and Ottawa and Health Canada working with native populations in many parts of the country.” “Jean Steckle,” Alumni-in-Action Oral History Interviews, accessed March 5, 2017, https://www.lib.uoguelph.ca/find/find-type-resource/archival-special-collections/ alumni/jean-steckle. As Mary Jane Logan McCallum shows, Ethel Martens also gained experience outside of Canada that she applied to her work as a CHR program leader, particularly drawing on projects in Mexico, Alaska, Guatemala, Peru, and the south western United States. See Mary Jane Logan McCallum, “Labour, Modernity and the Canadian State: A History of Aboriginal Women and Work in the Mid-Twentieth Century” (PhD Diss., University of Manitoba, 2008), 197-198. Some works that consider the connections between colony and metropole, the movement of people, or the spread of colonial ideas and programs include: Thrush, Coll, Indigenous London: Native Travelers at the Heart of Empire (New Haven, NJ: Yale University Press, 2016); Jane Carey and Jane Lydon, eds., Indigenous Networks: Mobility, Connections and Exchange (New York: Routledge, 2014); Karen Dubinsky, Adele Perry, and Henry Yu, eds., Within and Without the Nation: Canadian History as Transnational History (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015); Adele Perry, Colonial Relations: The Douglas- Connolly Family and the Nineteenth-Century Imperial World (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015); Perry, On the Edge of Empire: Gender, Race, and the Making of British Columbia, 1849-1871 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001); Catherine Hall, Civilising Subjects: Colony and Metropole in the English Imagination, 1830-1867 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002); Barnita Bagchi, Eckhardt Fuchs, and Kate Rousmaniere, eds., Connecting Histories of Education: Transnational and Cross-Cultural Exchanges in (Post-)Colonial Education (New York: Berghahn, 2014); Erin Millions, “‘By Education and Conduct’: Educating Trans-Imperial Indigenous Fur-Trade Children in the Hudson’s Bay Company Territories and the British Empire, 1820s to 1870s” (PhD diss., University of Manitoba, 2017); Laura Ishiguro, Nothing to Write Home About: British Family Correspondence and the Settler Colonial Everyday in British Columbia (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2019); Ann Laura Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). 80 Hugh Shewell, ‘Enough to Keep Them Alive:’ Indian Welfare in Canada, 1873 -1965 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004).

26 are at times engaging with the same archival materials, but their treatment of them and attention to methodology informs my dissertation research, which aims to attend to Indigenous research methods and sensitivity towards revealing evidence that could cause further trauma to the survivors of Residential Schools and medical or nutrition studies, as well as their descendants. While Shewell’s is a historical work, as a social worker, he introduces a different discipline into the discussion, which likely accounts for his very different treatment of often overlapping sources. Thus, while Mosby and Daschuk address an important and difficult topic in Canadian history, the documented experiences of children in Milloy’s work, for example, lend voice to the emotional experience of food memory, as well as starvation, but without the potentially exploitative approach of Mosby’s and Daschuk’s research. It is, however, important to think about children and histories of childhood with Mona Gleason’s analysis of what she calls “the agency trap” or “agency ideal,” which she argues may have “particular import for studies that focus on vulnerable and marginalised children.”81 Gleason expands on cultural anthropologist David Lancy’s work on agency, in which he warns: “An uncritical focus on children’s expressions of agency entrenches an ethnocentric and middle- class view of the world and of childrearing and it problematically promotes interviews with children themselves as the most authentic source of data on young lives.”82 Further, in exploring the ramifications of this critique for historians, she explains that he “questions a tendency to valorise social and cultural rebellion as an expression of children’s agency while ignoring or marginalising agentic expression that might involve children’s compliance with mainstream cultural traditions or adult priorities.”83 Recognizing the important contributions made by historians of food and nutrition also allows for engagement with scholars whose work explores not only Indigenous peoples, but also recent immigrants in various interactions with the Canadian state. As historians like Iacovetta, Epp, and Julie Guard have all ably demonstrated, food and nutrition policy in postwar Canada were significantly shaped by incoming immigrants from more ‘exotic’ regions around

81 Mona Gleason, “Avoiding the agency trap: caveats for historians of children, youth and education,” History of Education 45 no. 4 (2016): 448. 82 Gleason, “Avoiding the agency trap,” 446. 83 Gleason, “Avoiding the agency trap,” 446.

27 the globe.84 Histories of food and nutrition, thus, serve in many ways as windows into resistance to assimilation by both recent immigrants and Indigenous people, particularly highlighted through distinctly gendered relationships to food. The Canadian government met growing diversity and increasing pressure from groups maintaining their distinct cultural identities by scrutinizing the family, in part through studying dietary habits. Most notable was the government focus on food and nutrition concerning Indigenous peoples in rural or ‘remote’ northern communities, with special attention to the bodies of pregnant women and their children who were understood through gendered discourses. As Mary Ellen Kelm argues, in “stories told about health, disease, and cross-cultural interaction” from the encounter through colonial periods, the “causes of Aboriginal pathology ... were deeply gendered,” as “authors wrote specifically about the failings of men and women to live up to their ‘natural roles’ either as providers or caretakers.”85 Kelm writes, “the erosion of the Aboriginal land and resource bases led to poor living conditions and ultimately to the deaths of Aboriginal children.”86 Yet, as Maureen Lux and Kelm show, such diseases were not understood in structural terms, but in the postwar decades were contextualized as racial and cultural afflictions. ‘Experts’ argued that “Native people,” Lux writes, “would only gain the good health enjoyed by non-Native Canadians when they ceased being Native.”87 These gendered perceptions and prescriptions, then, were deeply embedded in colonial discourse, and have in many ways persisted into the present. They have contributed to shaming Indigenous women who fail to live up to impossible standards, imposed nuclear family models

84 See, for example: Julie Guard, “Women Worth Watching: Radical Housewives in Cold War Canada,” in Whose National Security?: Canadian State Surveillance and the Creation of Enemies, eds. Gary Kinsman, Dieter Buse, and Mercedes Steedman, 72-88 (Toronto: Between the Lines, 2000); Guard, “The Politics of Milk: Canadian Housewives Organize in the 1930s,” in Edible Histories, 271-284; Iacovetta, Gatekeepers: Reshaping Immigrant Lives in Cold War Canada (Toronto: Between the Lines, 2006); Iacovetta, “Food Acts and Cultural Politics: Women and Gendered Dialectics of Culinary Pluralism at the International Institute of Toronto, 1950s- 1960s,” in Edible Histories, 359-384; Marlene Epp, “More than ‘Just’ Recipes: Mennonite Cookbooks in Mid-Twentieth Century North America,” in Edible Histories, 173-187. 85 Mary Ellen Kelm, “Diagnosing the Discursive Indian: Medicine, Gender, and the ‘Dying race’,” Ethnohistory 52, no. 2 (Spring 2005), 384. 86 Kelm, Colonizing Bodies, 7. 87 Lux, Medicine That Walks, 224.

28 of organizing households, and demanded Indigenous men perform masculinity as prescribed by Anglo-Canadian notions of manliness. Moreover, they have contributed to naturalizing certain diseases and nutrition deficiencies as racially embodied, and facilitated state efforts at regulating bodies through diet and nutrition surveys and guidance. The body thus also presents a useful category of historical analysis, as bodies can be read as texts on which contemporary ideology of race, class, and gender have been written. This is particularly illustrated in studies of working-class bodies, which Ava Baron and Eileen Boris argue “are both constituted by and constitutive of the workplace and the racialized and gendered class relations that work both expresses and creates.”88 Esyllt Jones, in her study of Winnipeg’s Influenza epidemic of 1918, shows how the bodies of working-class men, women, and children were read by contemporaries as the source of disease due to class and ethnicity.89 The historical regulation of bodies, guidance (also ‘uplift’ or moral education programs), along with physical constraints and surveillance are often addressed in the historiography on immigration and citizenship in Canada’s history.90

88 Ava Baron and Eileen Boris, “‘The Body’ as a Useful Category for Working-Class History,” Labor: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas, 4, no. 2 (2007), 23. 89 Esyllt Jones, Influenza 1918: Disease, Death, and Struggle in Winnipeg (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007). 90 The historiography is extensive, but influential works for this project include: Kay Anderson, Vancouver’s Chinatown: Racial Discourse in Canada, 1875-1980 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1991); Constance Backhouse, Colour-Coded: A Legal History of Racism in Canada, 1900-1950 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999); Ivana Caccia, Managing the Canadian Mosaic in Wartime: Shaping Citizenship Policy, 1939-1945 (Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queens University Press, 2010); Catherine Carstairs, Jailed for Possession: Illegal Drug Use, Regulation, and Power in Canada, 1920-1961 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006); Mona Gleason, Normalizing the Ideal: Psychology, Schooling, and the Family in Postwar Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999); Iacovetta, Gatekeepers; Sarah-Jane Mathieu, North of the Color Line: Migration and Black Resistance in Canada (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2010); Angus McLaren, Our Own Master Race: Eugenics in Canada, 1885-1945 (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1990); Joan Sangster, Regulating Girls and Women: Sexuality, Family, and the Law in Ontario, 1920-1960 (Don Mills, ON: Oxford University Press, 2001); Carolyn Strange and Tina Loo, Making Good: Law and Moral Reform in English Canada, 1867-1939 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997); Mariana Valverde, The Age of Light Soap and Water: Moral Reform in English Canada, 1885-1925, Rev. Edition (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008); and Barrington Walker, Race on Trial:

Efforts at controlling bodies have focused on both physical and psychological regulation, and the state has been instrumental in the racialization and gendering of bodies through policies and practices, especially those of Indigenous and immigrant populations. Continued bodily control and surveillance was central to separating those who ‘belonged’ from those who did not, and informed the relocation of First Nations and Inuit children from their families and communities into government and church-operated residential schools throughout the twentieth century.91 While Lux and Kelm similarly look at how racialized and classed bodies have been understood as diseased, and moreover blamed for the spread of epidemics like influenza and tuberculosis, these historians are concerned specifically with the bodies and health of Indigenous people in Canada’s West.92 They argue that Indigenous bodies have long been central to the colonial process in Canada, and notions of food and dietary health in particular have historically legitimated a discourse around Indigenous bodies as weak, diseased, and consequently a ‘dying race’.93 As Kelm argues, “in medical journals of the first half of the twentieth century,” which stem from the dying race epistemology, “we see the beginning of a discourse of pathology in which the Indian problem was medicalized and the discursive Indian diagnosed, a trend with which we must contend today.”94 This was not entirely unique to Indigenous peoples’ experiences, as projects such as the Japanese-Canadian movement into spaces of internment during the Second World War, as well as the incarceration of ‘enemy aliens’ such as Italians feared to be pro-fascist supporters, point to the body as a constant site of regulation.95

Black Defendants in Ontario's Criminal Courts, 1858-1958 (The Osgoode Society and University of Toronto Press, 2010). 91 See Milloy, A National Crime. 92 Lux, Medicine That Walks; Kelm, Colonizing Bodies. 93 See Kelm, “Diagnosing the Discursive Indian.” Kelm illustrates how “social medicine was emerging as a key contributor to the production of racial hierarchies,” through which Indigenous disease was constructed as a “racialized and gendered phenomenon. (371)” Out of this late-Victorian discourse, the notion that Indians were a dying race, doomed to be culturally erased through evolution, was fixed in both medical and popular writing. 94 Kelm, “Diagnosing the Discursive Indian,” 373. 95 See Franca Iacovetta, Roberto Perin, and Angelo Principe, eds., Enemies Within: Italian and Other Internees in Canada and Abroad (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 2000)

Most significantly, in the settlement of Canada, the signing of treaties and creation of government-controlled reservations, largely for regulating Indigenous bodies, served to consolidate Canada as a white nation. In his work on the social and geographical construction of reserve territories in British Columbia, Cole Harris “seek[s] to explain how the map of reserves emerged in British Columbia, and also, beyond the map, how the province’s most basic colonial spaces were brought into being.”96 The process of mapping out land to facilitate white settlement conceived of reserves largely as temporary spatial solutions that would force inhabitants away from their traditional resources and economies into the paid workforce and agriculture. While integration into the workplace occurred on some level, these jobs were often temporary, seasonal, and were not enough on their own to provide stability for marginalized groups who were often actively resisting assimilation.97 This mapping and consequent marginalization or ‘isolation’ of First Nations, Métis, and later Inuit communities into remote or distant spaces with lack of rights, roads, or other essential resources is a critical point in understanding how food insecurity in Indigenous communities was created through colonial projects. It also marks the beginnings of settler desire for government intervention into Indigenous peoples’ health, nutrition, and foodways, which the emergent government initiated and subsequent leaders have perpetuated. Like Harris, Keith Thor Carlson crystallizes the implications for spatial isolation as a means of assimilating, or ‘mingling’ in the language of reserve system architects, which would encourage learning the so-called civilized habits of thrift, industry, and materialism.98 Carlson’s careful, collaborative work with Stó:lõ communities in Lower Fraser River BC demonstrates for discussions of the contentious history of incarceration and redress in Italian- and Ukranian- Canadian communities. Also Mona Oikawa, “Cartographies of Violence: Women, Memory, and the Subject(s) of the ‘Internement’,” in Race, Space, and the Law: Unmapping a White, Settler Society, ed. Sherene Razack, 71-98 (Toronto: Between the Lines, 2002); and Milloy, A National Crime, which both address the centrality of food for both the government and the incarcerated. 96 Cole Harris, Making Native Space: Colonialism, Resistance and Reserves in British Columbia (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2002), xxi. 97 See Rolf Knight, Indians at Work: An Informal History of Native Indian Labour in British Columbia, 1858-1930 (Vancouver: New Star Books, 1978); Paige Raibmon, Authentic Indians: Episodes of Encounter from the Late-Nineteenth-Century Northwest Coast (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2005). 98 Harris, Making Native Space, xxviii.

31 how, through imposing European notions of residence and governance, reserves facilitated systems of colonial surveillance, which involved manipulation and control over people’s day-today lives. Thus, only once reserves were assigned could government effectively impose the Indian Act.99 Surveillance was the primary means of regulating this civilizing process, as First Peoples stripped of resources on small parcels of unclearly bound land were forced out of necessity to migrate off their reserves for food, water, and work, which Paige Raibmon’s work perhaps best illustrates.100 Harris argues that reserves served as a means to create normalized individuals through the eradication of deviance by intensive surveillance, which Michel Foucault termed ‘biopower’ or “the control of bodies” through “the analytical arrangement of space.”101 This process involved not only the Indian Agent, but other eyes, particularly hostile settlers and absentee landowners, who served to enforce the capitalist value of work-discipline based on a standardized hourly schedule.102 Foucault argued that while power was everywhere, the power to regulate bodies hinged on knowledge gained through pervasive surveillance.103 During the late 1960s, such knowledge was central to Indigenous-state relations, as the liberal agenda to achieve ultimate assimilation of Indians into the general population was proposed by Indian and Northern Affairs’ Jean Chretien, through a White Paper on Canadian Indian Policy.104 This grew out of nearly a century of such surveillance on Indigenous bodies,

99 Keith Thor Carlson, The Power of Place, The Problem of Time: Aboriginal Identity and Historical Consciousness in the Cauldron of Colonialism (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010). 100 Paige Raibmon, Authentic Indians: Episodes of Encounter from the Late-Nineteenth- Century Northwest Coast (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005). 101 Harris, Making Native Space, 268-269. 102 See E.P. Thompson, “Time, Work-Discipline and Industrial Capitalism,” in E.P. Thompson, Customs in Common, 97-184 (London: Merlin Press, 1991) for a discussion of the shift with industrial capitalism to scheduling work on the 24 hour clock; also Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Pantheon Books, 1979), which illustrates the utility of the schedule for disciplining prisoners. 103 See Foucault, Discipline and Punish; also Harris, Making Native Space, 269. 104 See Canada, Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development (DIAND), Statement of the Government of Canada on Indian Policy (Ottawa: the Honourable Jean Chrétien, PC, MP Minister of Indian Affairs and Northern Development Ottawa, 1969); Indian Chiefs of Alberta, Citizens Plus: A Presentation of Indian Chiefs of Alberta to Right Honourable P.E. Trudeau, Prime Minister and Government of Canada (Edmonton: Indian Association of

32 combined with containment of Indians on reserve lands, as well as cultural regulation that sought to destroy the practices associated with resistance to modernity and industrial capitalism.105 The White Paper, which primarily proposed the end of reserves and assisted relocation of Indians into urban centres, was heatedly resisted by many First Nations.106 The mid-1960s through 1970s, then, was a period of intensified interest in the lives of Indigenous peoples in Canada by the Canadian state, particularly the liberal social scientific community. A key concern centred on the possibilities of reconfigured programs for assimilation, or in the contemporary language of politicians and various experts even after the 1951 revisions to the Indian Act, “the integration of the Indian into the general life and economy of the country.”107 During this short period, Indigenous peoples and non-Indigenous Canadians were forced to reckon with the effects of colonialism, governed by the newly conceived Act. For their part, Indigenous peoples across the country actively engaged Canadians in debates through political and social venues. This included the 1967 Indian Pavilion at Expo 67 in Montreal, the centennial of Canadian Confederation. Although its lasting impact on political events of the period is questionable, the level and type of participation of First Nations people from across the country

Alberta, 1970); Indian Tribes of Manitoba, “Wahbung: Our Tomorrows,” (Manitoba Indian Brotherhood, 1971); Dale Turner, This Is Not a Peace Pipe: Towards a Critical Indigenous Philosophy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006). 105 See Jean Barman, “Taming Aboriginal Sexuality: Gender, Power, and Race in British Columbia, 1850-1900,” in In the Days of Our Grandmothers: A Reader in Aboriginal Women’s History in Canada, eds. Mary-Ellen Kelm and Lorna Townsend, 270-300 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006). Barman argues that the banning of Aboriginal ceremonial Potlatches in the west was largely an attack on the failure of First Nations to assimilate into the industrial capital model. As the ceremony was fundamentally anti-capitalist in its transfer of goods from the wealthy to the poor, particularly the communal sharing of food, it inherently rejected the notion of private property and, thus, was seen as a threat to national stability in the period of settlement from the late nineteenth to early twentieth century. 106 See Dale Turner, This is Not a Peace Pipe: Towards a Critical Indigenous Philosophy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006); also J.R. Miller, Skyscrapers Hide the Heavens: A History of Indian-White Relations in Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1989). 107 Olive Patricia Dickason, Canada’s First Nations: A History of Founding Peoples from Earliest Times, Reprinted (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1992; 1994), 327. Quoting Walter E. Harris, Minister of Citizenship and Immigration from 1950-54 – the body responsible at the time for Indian Affairs – on “the ultimate goal of our Indian policy.” Emphasis added.

33 marked what some argue was the first public expression of dissatisfaction by Indigenous people in Canada on a national scale.108 The political climate of the period also influenced the 1968 formation of the first Canadian pan-Indian organization, the National Indian Brotherhood (NIB), which reflected a similar national scale of organizing seen in Expo 67; reforms to education throughout the 1970s, through which some First Nations and Métis communities took over local elementary and secondary schools;109 local activism located within a global or transnational anticolonial movement in the 1970s, such as the forty-day armed occupation in 1974 of Kenora Ontario’s Anicinabe Park by the Ojibway Warriors Society;110 and protests by Indigenous women to reform the Indian Act’s discriminatory sections that stripped women of their status upon marriage, which were not formally addressed until Bill C-31 (returning legal status to women who married non-Indians and their children) was passed in 1985.111 In Canada, Scott Rutherford writes, “sociologist Howard Ramos argues that … during the period between 1973 and 1976, twice as many indigenous protest actions and legal challenges took place per year as compared to any year between 1960 and 1969.”112 Consequently, while the period of the mid-twentieth century in Canada (not unlike the United States) tends to be read by historians as one of social and political organizing and action on both local and national or pan-national levels, it is critical to look beyond the postwar decades to see Indigenous peoples in both countries featuring prominently as historical actors struggling for political, legal, and social change. It is important to recognize these mobilizing movements as part of a study on nutrition curriculum and educational materials, since these materials are a product of the very conditions

108 Myra Rutherdale and Jim Miller, “‘It’s Our Country’: First Nations’ participation in the Indian Pavilion at Expo 67,” Journal of the Canadian Historical Association 17, issue 2 (https://www.erudit.org/revue/jcha/2006/v17/n2/016594ar.pdf), 2006: 148-173. 109 Dickason, Canada’s First Nations, 337. By 1984, 187 bands were fully operating their own schools. 110 See Scott Rutherford, “Canada’s Other Red Scare: The Anicinabe Park Occupation and Indigenous Decolonization,” in ed. Dan Berger, The Hidden 1970s: Histories of Radicalism (New Brunswick, NJ, and London: Rutgers University Press, 2010): 77-94. 111 On Bill C-31, see Dickason, Canada’s First Nations, 331, and Lawrence, Real Indians and Others. 112 Rutherford, “Canada’s Other Red Scare,” 77-78.

34 against which many of these Indigenous organizations were struggling. Parallel to ongoing organization and efforts at cultural and political autonomy, recognition of women’s legal status under the Indian Act, or community control over services and land, Indigenous peoples’ daily lives were being scrutinized by the Medical Services Branch of Health Canada. While American Indian Movement activists like Dennis Banks joined Ojibway protestors in northwestern Ontario in anticolonial struggles, ‘experts’ like Nutrition Canada’s research team were publishing the results of 1970s studies of ‘Indian’ and ‘Eskimo’ communities across Canada, with a focus on the consequences of what experts perceived as a lack of nutrition education in isolated regions. Of particular interest to these individualists, who placed responsibility on the cause and effect of personal choice without regards for the socioeconomic or cultural contexts raised by Indigenous activists of the period (and the present), were the diets of mothers and young children. When dieticians, physicians, dentists, and other experts sought to reform diets through demonstrating nutrition risks associated with the foodways of Inuit, Métis, and First Nations peoples, they did so with little recognition of the structural factors that limited access to fresh foods in remote communities. Rather than seeing them as people legitimately driven by their own agendas or interests, and with little to no recognition or respect for guiding cultural or community beliefs and practices, scientists and social scientists of various disciplines continued to see Indigenous peoples in Canada through the gaze of earlier explorers. A driving interest to know “an alien race”113 culminated in a spate of studies relating to housing, education, health and, of particular concern for this project, diet and nutrition. As works by historians like Kelm, Lux, Milloy, and others have shown, colonizing food and nutrition was not a new project, but was revisited in moments of anxiety around Indigenous people’s bodies and their place in Canada, particularly in relation to non-Indigenous people and urban settlements.114 While this has been explored by medical histories, which tend to issues such as health, healing, and how these are handled by Indigenous and western cultures, thinking of the colonization of food and nutrition as histories of emotion can shift the

113 Andree Beaulieu, “A Nutrition Surveyor’s Journal,” Nutrition Today 9(1) (January/February 1974): 16-18, 18. Beaulieu is referring to the ‘Indian’ and Inuit people in the Canadian North she interviewed as part of the national nutrition survey, Nutrition Canada. 114 Kelm, Colonizing Bodies; Lux, Medicine that Walks.

35 approach and perspective of such studies, moving into personal and communal experiences of feeling. While often more commonly engaged with in other disciplines like cultural or feminist studies, theories of emotion therefore can be an important window into the impact of colonialism on relationships between myriad people involved in the history of ‘Aboriginal nutrition’ in Canada. Historians of emotion, such as Barbara Rosenwein, have articulated the utility of such an approach.115 Rosenwein argues that emotional communities are “largely the same as social communities.” They include, for example, families, neighbourhoods, syndicates, academic institutions, monasteries, factories, platoons, and so on. The researcher’s work here is, above all, to uncover systems of feeling, to establish what these communities (and the individuals in them) define and assess as valuable or harmful to them (for it is about such things that people express emotions); the emotions that they value, devalue, or ignore; the nature of the affective bonds between people that they recognize; and the modes of emotional expression that they expect, encourage, tolerate, and deplore.116 While this will not be the primary framework for my analysis, informed by historians of emotion, I will look at the unexplored emotional responses in interactions between healthcare workers – Indigenous as well as non-Indigenous workers – in nutrition studies and programs, and how these framed program outcomes for Indigenous peoples. As a social history, it concerns affirming human agency, rather than writing Indigenous people into history as invisible or homogeneous subjects. I am interested in understanding ‘Aboriginal health’ from Indigenous, community perspectives, as well as how the Canadian government’s construction of, and response to, perceived health crises in Indigenous communities was experienced by individuals fulfilling state mandates. By exploring how individuals fit their own agendas and emotional responses into state policy, though not intentionally addressed by these historians, I draw on the work of Sarah Carter, Katherine Pettipas, Robin Jarvis Brownlie, Bonita Lawrence, Philip J. Deloria, and Paige

115 See: Barbara H. Rosenwein, “Problems and Methods in the History of Emotions,” Passions in Context I (1/2010), 11. www.passionsincontext.de/uploads/media/01_ Rosenwein.pdf. Accessed October 8, 2013; Nicole Eustace et al, “Conversation: The Historical Study of Emotions,” American Historical Review 117/5 (2012): 1487-1531; Benno Gammerl, “Emotional Styles—Concepts and Challenges,” in Rethinking History 16/2 (2012): 161-175. 116 Rosenwein, “Problems and Methods in the History of Emotions,” 11.

Raibmon. In addition to extending the field of Indigenous history in Canada into the twentieth- century, this literature recognizes the complicated and diverse practices of government officials and Indigenous community leaders and members, which ranged from upholding and enforcing policy to challenging and overturning it at the community level, and beyond.117 Moreover, I am informed by critical race studies and histories of race and racism, including the work of Robin D. G. Kelley and Audre Lorde, and particularly Nayan Shah’s work on public health, each of which pushes historians to rethink the emotional expressions or responses of people of colour and marginalized people.118 In my dissertation, to build on the historiography, I will consider the emotional responses of receiving communities, those both self-expressed and documented by visiting healthcare workers, within the historical context of a multitude of medical studies and the broader colonial project. Scholars like Kim Anderson and Laurie Meijer Drees have intervened in the historiography of the period with personal and emotional life stories. In those told by Indigenous women to Anderson, many reveal their gendered experiences under colonialism as shaped less by state policy and, instead, by community and family relations.119 My research suggests this approach could lead to new interpretations and access to different knowledge and experiences in histories of health and medicine, specifically the emotional intimacies that might develop between researchers or medical experts and study participants

117 See: Robin Jarvis Brownlie, A Fatherly Eye: Indian Agents, Government Power, and Aboriginal Resistance in Ontario, 1918-1939 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003); Sarah Carter, The Importance of Being Monogamous: Marriage and Nation Building in Western Canada to 1915 (Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 2008); Lawrence, ‘Real Indians’ and Others; Raibmon, Authentic Indians; Katherine Pettipas, Severing the Ties that Bind: Government Repression of Indigenous Religious Ceremonies on the Prairies (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 1994). 118 Robin D.G. Kelley, Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class (New York: The Free Press, 1994); Audre Lorde, “The Uses of Anger,” Women's Studies Quarterly Vol. 25, No. 1/2, Looking Back, Moving Forward: 25 Years of Women's Studies History (Spring - Summer, 1997), 278-285; Nayan Shah, Contagious Divides: Epidemics and Race in San Francisco’s Chinatown (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001). 119 Kim Anderson, Life Stages and Native Women: Memory, Teachings, and Story Medicine (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2011); Laurie Meijer Drees, Healing Histories: Stories from Canada’s Indian Hospitals (Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 2013). While Drees’ storytellers share similar experiences, they frequently express their relationship to a colonial state through their accounts, which are at times talking back to medical experts and researchers who violated them.

37 or patients, and the emotional bonds and important feelings that historically sustained families and shaped how they organized. Historians have yet to really consider the history and legacies of colonialism in Canada through theories presented by historians of emotion. I am also working to make connections between the experiences mid-twentieth century Indigenous and non-Indigenous people in Canada shared in relation to the literature on emotional history in intimacies of empire.120 In this analysis, I have taken care to consider who is reporting on emotions, as even in the mid- to late-twentieth century, much of the document- based evidence of First Nations, Métis, and Inuit people’s histories was written by non- Indigenous people, particularly evidence of nutrition history documented in Medical Services Branch publications and archives. I am especially interested in exploring further how both First Nations and Inuit Nutrition Canada study participants were resisting, manipulating, and protesting, but through their own specific, distinct, and local emotional cultures. Theories of emotion inform how I approached writing this dissertation, and appear in nuanced analyses throughout; however, in Chapter Five I examine a set of sources not only through this theoretical framework, but specifically as a study of emotional history and emotional communities. I am not interested in pushing theories of emotion onto the sources, but found some materials invited this particular analysis through their own claims that they held evidence

120 Arguably, historians like Sylvia Van Kirk, examining women’s intimate relationships in fur trading communities, was leading us into such territory, introducing the intimacies of empire as a site of inquiry. I would argue, however, that this was simply the beginning of such an inquiry, and more studies working through the methodology of contemporary historians of emotion will lead to new sets of questions and different historical analysis. See: Van Kirk, Many Tender Ties: Women in Fur Trade Society, 1670-1870, Revised Ed. (Winnipeg: Watson and Dwyer, 1996); Robin Jarvis Brownlie, and Valerie J. Korinek, eds. Finding A Way to the Heart: Feminist Writings on Aboriginal and Women’s History in Canada (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2012); also, Ann Laura Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule (Berkley: University of California Press, 2002); Stoler, “Tense and Tender Ties: The Politics of Comparison in North American History and Post-Colonial Studies,” Journal of American History 88 (December 2001): 829-865; Stoler, ed., Haunted by Empire; Angela Wanhalla, Matters of the Heart: A History of Interracial Marriage in New Zealand (Auckland University Press, 2013); Judith Bennett, Jacqueline Leckie, and Angela Wanhalla, “Mothers' darlings: Secrets and silences in the wake of the Pacific War,” in C. Twomey & E. Koh, eds., The Pacific War: Aftermaths, Remembrance and Culture, 214-232 (New York: Routledge, 2015).

38 of a specific set of feelings and emotional responses, which I felt encouraged further consideration that merited its own chapter. Because theories of emotion encourage engagement with literature that is rooted in belief in biologically-influenced reactions, which are simultaneously socially constructed and given meaning through culture, I have worked to think through questions of application in this specific field. Analyzing an emotional community in writing such a history, as Rosenwein argues, “must not deny the biological substratum of emotions, since it is clear that they are embedded in both the body and the brain.”121 Studying this topic as a history of emotions raises important questions: How does an historian of Canada’s colonial history, who is always faced with the challenge of keeping colonialism’s persisting foundations of biologically rooted racial difference and hierarchy in its place, then bring in arguments to suggest that claiming biological inheritance is acceptable? Could one not reify the other? With works such as James Daschuk’s – those that treat the history of colonialism in North America as a narrative of decline and cultural devastation, loss, or death – dominating the field, and serving as examples of how emotional communities might be read through a focus on affect, does it make sense to deny Rosenwein’s position and remove all evidence suggesting emotions cannot be removed from biology? When historians argue that there is, first of all, such a thing as a culture that exists tidily and unchanging and, following through on this basis, that a culture can disappear, are they not constructing and reinforcing the colonial trope of the ‘dying race’? If this is the trajectory of the field, should it be pursued? If so, how can it be challenged without further essentializing a culture by grouping people into an emotional community who might not see themselves in such a way? My research, therefore, also aims to move away from a historiography that depicts Indigenous people as static, passive, removed or, as Mary Jane Logan McCallum highlights, ‘isolated’122 recipients of western healthcare and education. It works to recognize that Indigenous peoples, as Carlson argues, are more than simply reactive victims in the history of western development, a narrative on which historians seeking to highlight agency often place

121 Rosenwein, “Problems and Methods,” 10. 122 See Mary Jane Logan McCallum, “This Last Frontier: Isolation and Aboriginal Health,” CBMH/BCHM 22, no.1 (2005): 103-120.

39 too much importance. Further, it demonstrates how Indigenous peoples have been actively engaged in larger conversations and movements that span beyond community and even country, often as part of a global dialogue whether directly or indirectly through their local and personal actions. Many critical studies that will inform my research, including the work of Maureen Lux and Mary Ellen Kelm, focus mostly on care provided by both non-Indigenous healthcare workers in western Canada in earlier decades, and tend to situate involvement of Indigenous people as responding or reactionary.123 McCallum best summarizes the influence of Kelm and Lux on new work in the field: Four key arguments came out of this literature: first, that Indigenous people are not “naturally unhealthy” or “susceptible” to disease; second, that ill health is not just a matter of germs but also colonial policies and practices of the Canadian government; third, that Canadian medicine served colonialist agendas that included at different times the elimination, coercion, and assimilation of Indigenous people; and, last, that Indigenous medicine was never fully replaced by an allopathic bio-medical model. These arguments remain central to the field.124

Others, like Laurie Meijer Drees and Kristin Burnett, make important contributions to the slowly growing field of Indigenous or Aboriginal health history by focusing more on sharing Indigenous perspectives and working from an Indigenous methodology. Like their colleagues in the field, they are interested in Indigenous and western health practices occupying the same time, place, and space in Indian Health Services and other hospitals.125 These works challenge narratives of decline or cultural persistence, so prominent in the field of Indigenous history (particularly the still dominant ‘Native-newcomer’ or ‘Aboriginal-settler’ histories that stop in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century), bringing the histories of First Nations, Métis, and Inuit people in Canada out of the fur trade era and into the twenty-first century.126

123 See Kelm, Colonizing Bodies; Maureen Lux, Medicine that Walks. 124 McCallum, "Starvation, Experimentation, Segregation, and Trauma,” 100. 125 Drees, Healing Histories; Kristin Burnett, Taking Medicine: Women's Healing Work and Colonial Contact in Southern Alberta, 1880-1930 (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2010). 126 See Carlson, The Power of Place, for a useful analysis and critique of this problematic narrative, which he refers to as a ‘metanarrative of native-newcomer history in Canada’. This follows a trajectory of initial contact, with a phase of ‘meaningful relationships’ with Europeans dependent on First Nations’ good will. It is followed by a period when disease was introduced, which reduced First Nation populations; therefore relations soured as more Europeans arrived,

Building on these works, my project attempts to centre Indigenous women, men, and children as active participants in living and making their history. Unlike Ian Mosby’s recent publication on nutrition research studies on Indigenous populations in Canadian history,127 which positions Indigenous people as passive victims of colonial medicine, I hope to find a balance between repressive colonial policy and human agency. My research, therefore, is also informed by the fields of medical history, labour history, histories of childhood and education, and Canadian social history as a framework for thinking about regional, gendered, and racialized experiences in relation to national and global policies and events that cannot easily be separated.128

settlement encroached, exploitation increased, and Aboriginal peoples were perceived as impediments rather than facilitators of European aspirations. This led to displacement and marginalization through ‘a series of state-sponsored systematic assimilative initiatives’. Ultimately in this metanarrative, historians assert that Aboriginal people avoided cultural extinction and instead began process of cultural revival; as ‘contact becomes conflict and resistance transforms into renewal/renaissance’. Significantly, the metanarrative’s focus is on the colonial perspective, with Aboriginal people as reactive rather than existing without these relationships. 127 Mosby, “Administering Colonial Science.” 128 These fields are vast and growing, but a selection of key works for my research include: Laura Briggs, Reproducing Empire: Race, Sex, Science, and U.S. Imperialism in Puerto Rico (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002); Georgina Feldberg, Molly Ladd-Taylor, Alison Li, and Kathryn McPherson, eds., Women, Health, and Nation: Canada and the U.S. since 1945 (Montreal, Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2003); Mona Gleason, Small Matters: Canadian Children in Sickness and in Health, 1900-1940 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2013); Esyllt Jones, Influenza 1918: Disease, Death, and Struggle in Winnipeg (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007); Mary Jane Logan McCallum, Indigenous Women, Work, and History, 1940-1980. (University of Manitoba Press, 2014); Kathryn McPherson, Bedside Matters: The Transformation of Canadian Nursing, 1900-1990 (Don Mills, ON: Oxford University Press, 1996); Nancy Christie, Engendering the State: Family, Work, and Welfare in Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000); Cynthia Comacchio, Nations are Built of Babies: Saving Ontario's Mothers and Children 1900-1940 (Montreal, Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1998); Comacchio, The Dominion of Youth: Adolescence and the Making of Modern Canada (Waterloo: WLU Press, 2006); Mona Gleason, Normalizing the Ideal: Psychology, Schooling, and the Family in Postwar Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999); Veronica Strong-Boag, Fostering Nation? Canada Confronts its History of Childhood Disadvantage (Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2010); Constance Backhouse, Colour- Coded: A Legal History of Racism in Canada, 1900-1950 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999); Catherine Carstairs, Jailed for Possession: Illegal Drug Use, Regulation, and Power in

METHODOLOGY AND APPROACH The methodology for this dissertation involves a close reading of archival and document-based sources in combination with archived oral history interviews, informed by social history’s approach of studying ‘history from below’, feminist historical methods, Indigenous methodology, and oral history theory and methodology.

Archival and Document-Based Research As this dissertation relies on archival and document-based research, I have aimed to focus on a broad range and diverse source of records. I have accessed archival records primarily in Manitoba and at the national Library and Archives Canada’s Winnipeg location, specifically the abundant RG29 Department of National Health and Welfare: Medical Services Branch (MSB) collections for nutrition guidelines, surveys, publications, brochures, and related materials. Of particular interest in the RG29 collection will be original materials relating to nutrition surveys, including some organized by the MSB summer student program initiative in Manitoba as well as the Nutrition Canada Survey records pertaining to the Indian and Eskimo Surveys. These fonds include resources such as brochures and pamphlets that provided guidance and framework for those running nutrition studies in the period. I am not interested in reading these as data sets of quantitative evidence, but in what I can gather from these sources as evidence of social histories of health and nutrition. Further, these sources can serve as discursive evidence of the assumptions and ideas at work in conducting surveys, or writing educational materials and curriculum, which illustrates change over the decades examined here. As I have been reviewing sensitive materials related to health and nutrition, and in consideration of the contemporary period I am researching, I place utmost importance on carefully working within the ethical guidelines established by the University and outlined by

Canada, 1920-1961 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006); Tina Loo, States of Nature: Conserving Canada's Wildlife in the Twentieth Century. (Vancouver: UBC Press, University of Washington Press, 2006); Alison Marshall, The Way of the Bachelor: Early Chinese Settlement in Manitoba (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2011); Sarah-Jane Mathieu, North of the Color Line: Migration and Black Resistance in Canada (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2010); Jennifer Morgan, Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004); Stephanie Olsen, ed., Childhood, Youth, and Emotions in Modern History (London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2015); Walker, Race on Trial.

42 other historians in the field. I will use these documents qualitatively, looking for evidence of lived experiences, policies and their enforcement, as well as emotive responses from individuals, organizations, and the state. Many of the more sensitive materials housed in these fonds were carefully and respectfully redacted by Archivists before I was provided access to them. While it would have provided a different perspective to include oral history stories and interviews in this dissertation, and was part of my original plan for this project, the rich scope and wealth of textual and visual sources I amassed early in my research surpassed my expectations. After spending time with my sources, I felt it was important to do the work of hearing and amplifying the many Indigenous voices present in the documents explored throughout this dissertation. In addition to the archival sources and Medical Services Branch publications, I will examine the government publication, The Indian News. This Department of Indian and Northern Affairs newspaper documented social, political, economic, and community issues through stories of Indigenous achievements in northern communities and major Canadian cities throughout the 1960s and 70s (1954-82). It includes contributions from Indigenous authors in different parts of the country, discussing a variety of topics and events ranging from daily activities and lifestyle to labour and education, as well as political issues and opinions from different perspectives. Although the Canadian Government created the publication during an era that celebrated elements of cultural retention constrained by an overarching program that pushed for assimilation, the documented voices of Indigenous peoples, nonetheless, contribute to document-based resources for this type of historical inquiry. Sources like The Indian News provide a window into the lived experiences and, in particular, the emotional or affective histories of Indigenous people in Canada during the mid- to late-twentieth century. The entire publication is now accessible as an online resource through the University of Winnipeg Library, which will allow for efficient review due to improved access and image collection. While The Indian News is an invaluable resource, it is not without its problems. It is, for example, curious that during the same time events and issues documented in National Film Board (NFB) documentaries by First Nations people, for example in the NFB’s PowWow at Duck Lake (1967), Mort Ranson’s You Are on Indian Land (1969) and Martin Defalco’s The Other Side

43 of the Ledger: An Indian View of the Hudson’s Bay Company (1972), The Indian News made little to no mention of moments of protest and critique, which ran counter to the success stories that more frequently fill its pages. I have worked to be mindful of these competing, and even conflicting, narratives. In addition, therefore, I have done an extensive review of all Medical Services Branch Regional and Annual Reports, as well as their Nutrition Newsletters, published annually with stories, reports, and images throughout the period. These publications were regularly filled with reports, stories, and images made by and for Indigenous peoples. I have also reviewed newspapers produced by Indigenous communities, such as the Kainai News, as well as published community cookbooks, nutrition guidelines, and related documents. In exploring these resources and giving them the same weight as archival documents, I hope to provide significant space for Indigenous voices in this project, which dominate some sources while they are subsumed, even silenced, in others. My approach to analyzing these sources engages with Ann Laura Stoler’s work on colonial archives, as she asks, “How can students of colonialisms so quickly and confidently turn to readings ‘against the grain’ without moving along their grain first?”129 As I consider many of my sources a product of colonial archives – both as literally born of the archives kept on the colonial projects in Canada, as well as their more figurative yet still very real relationship to colonialism’s persistent structures, ideologies, policies, governing bodies and so on – this project’s sources have been read both with and against the grain. All of the historical legacies made formal through their place in MSB, IAB/DIAND, and DNHW archives and publications are inseparable from less formal recipes, articles, newsletters, and emotional responses documented in photographs or journals authored by Indigenous and non-Indigenous researchers. Stoler writes: “Appreciating how much the personal was political has revamped the scope of our archival frames: housekeeping manuals, child-rearing handbooks, and medical guides,” for example, “share space with classified state papers, court proceedings, and commission reports as defining texts in colonialism’s cultures of documentation.”130 Moreover, she argues, reading these sources as “archive-as-subject,” or “not as sites of knowledge

129 Ann Laura Stoler, “Colonial Archives and the Arts of Governance,” Archival Science 2: 87-109, (2002): 100. 130 Stoler, “Colonial Archives and the Arts of Governance,” 100.

44 retrieval, but of knowledge production, as monuments of states as well as sites of ethnography,”131 encourages thinking of seemingly insignificant (often racialized and gendered) materials not only as legitimate sources but also as critical moments of culture being both documented and made. Reading sources along the archival grain encourages understanding “the circuits of knowledge production in which [colonialisms] operated and the racial commensurabilities on which they relied.”132 This presents an important framework for looking at sources produced as part of colonial structures. In working on this period and topic, so far largely overlooked by historians, part of this project involves looking at new sources from less-explored decades, with historical methodology and theoretical foundations informed by Indigenous research methods. This includes work by Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars, who argue for various interventions into ethnohistory and social history, including a centering of Indigenous people; the recognition of ‘texts’ as socially constructed, living, and not exclusively written or paper documents; the importance of oral history in scholarly research where archival and document-based sources are only part of the story; the role of audience when analyzing ‘texts’, as stories can be shaped to send particular messages or do specific work; and the significance of postcolonial theory in thinking through a history and legacy of colonialism in Canada that still shapes many aspects of the lives of Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples.133 Similar concerns guide my approach to what I foresee as a project on the emotional history of nutrition. I have documented how nutrition experts, predominantly non-Indigenous, entered what they referred to as ‘isolated’, ‘foreign’, and ‘remote’ spaces, where they paid

131 Stoler, “Colonial Archives and the Arts of Governance,” 87. 132 Stoler, “Colonial Archives and the Arts of Governance,” 100. 133 See Martin J. Cannon and Lina Sunseri, eds., Racism, Colonialism, and Indigeneity in Canada: A Reader (Don Mills, ON: Oxford University Press, 2011); Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples (London: Zed Books, 1999); Nancy Shoemaker, ed. Clearing a Path: Theorizing the Past in Native American Studies (New York: Routledge, 2002); Dale Turner, This is Not a Peace Pipe: Towards a Critical Indigenous Philosophy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006); Jennifer Brown and Elizabeth Vibert, eds. Reading Beyond Words: Contexts for Native History (Toronto: Broadview, 1996); Julie Cruikshank, The Social Life of Stories: Narratives and Knowledge in the Yukon Territory. (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2000).

45 much attention to gathering and interpreting data on what constituted or was consumed by bodies; some also attended to interpreting how they were received by their subjects. In these communities, nutritionists and their cadres of experts encountered ‘an alien race’ of people and scenarios they understood in part through emotional responses, both their own and of their study subjects. Individuals involved in recording such exchanges participated in culturally- informed readings, interpretations, and (mis)understandings of complex masking, secrecy, and expression of feelings inseparable from a history of colonial encounters, representations, and discourses. I argue, therefore, that they did so as members of ‘emotional communities’. Thinking about these sources in terms of how individuals and communities responded emotionally encourages centering people and their experiences, rather than dehumanizing them as study subjects or victims of history. Throughout this project, therefore, I seek to find a balance between repressive colonial policy and human agency as it relates to a history of nutrition in Indigenous communities in Canada in the 1960s through 1980s, which requires careful attention to how documentation of sensitive medical studies is included in my dissertation. In studying this topic, although rarely invoked here, I use the words ‘Aboriginal nutrition’ with some caution and hesitation. First, with concern for the individuals nutrition experts were studying and writing about, I have worked to be aware and respectful of the specific people whose histories I am documenting. I will use terms like ‘Indian’ and ‘Eskimo’ when they are used in document-based research analysis, but will refer specifically to First Nations and Inuit communities when possible. Consistent with the aims and principles of the National Aboriginal Health Organization, I use the term Aboriginal when appropriate, but most often Indigenous, referring to and inclusive of First Nations, Inuit, and Métis people, and where it is clear only segments of the population are represented, I will distinguish who I am referring to as specifically as possible.134 I do so also with recognition of the creation of boundaries

134 First Nations Centre, OCAP: Ownership, Control, Access, and Possession. Sanctioned by the First Nations Information Governance Committee, Assembly of First Nations (Ottawa: National Aboriginal Health Organization, 2007). “Under the Canadian Constitution Act, 1982, the term Aboriginal Peoples refers to First Nations, Inuit and Métis people living in Canada.

46 around essentialized groupings of people based on biological, and consequently legal, groupings, by government experts seeking to know and explain an imagined population of homogenous individuals to be able to cure what is asserted by nutritionists and medical professionals as a biological problem: malnutrition in ‘Indian’ and ‘Eskimo’ bodies. Here, not only do I call into question ‘Aboriginal’, but the combining of ‘Aboriginal’ and ‘nutrition’ into a field of legitimate science that aims to study biologically and legally defined people as wards of the Canadian state. When experts conducted research in the field of ‘Aboriginal nutrition’ during the mid- to late-twentieth century, like social scientists before and after them, they have often done so at the expense of respecting the very real people and their interests (their cultures, lifestyles, approaches to health, foodways, parenting methods, housing, and other material experiences linked to wellness). In my research and analysis of historical documents, I have worked mindful of the guiding principles outlined in the Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs Health Information Research Governance Committee (HIRGC) regarding the Regional Health Survey.135 Through this research, I hope to contribute to Indigenous history in North America, the emerging history of emotion, as well as food, medical, social, labour, and gender histories in Canada and North America. Recognizing the important work of Indigenous healthcare workers, activists, mothers, and community leaders contributes to the broader Canadian historiography, which tends to marginalize Indigenous people and relegate them to fur-trade era histories. I also hope to contribute to public policy on Indigenous peoples’ health and education. Making important and historically-rooted connections between food access and nutrition guidelines, which includes drawing out the disconnects and impossibilities of meeting standards irrelevant to people without access to certain foods, can help to find comprehensive solutions to Indigenous issues in Canada, specifically those centred on food (in)security. By considering the problems and conflicts of history through Indigenous research methods and theories of

However, common use of the term is not always inclusive of all three distinct people and much of the available research only focuses on particular segments of the Aboriginal population.” 135 Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs Health Information Research Governance Committee and Chiefs Task Force on Health. “Enigok 2010-11 Project: Discussing Ethics & Benefits of Research.” Powerpoint scholarly resource guidelines online. http://umanitoba.ca/research/ orec/media/Enigok2010-11_OCT_12th_St._Boniface2_l.pdf Accessed 12 May 2014.

47 emotion, nutritionists, nurses, physicians, and other healthcare experts can work to address how best to move forward to improve the lives of Indigenous peoples in ways that reflect Indigenous approaches to health and healing.

CHAPTER ONE

“IT IS UP TO THE MOTHERS”: CONSOLIDATING POSTWAR APPROACHES TO COLONIZING FOOD AND NUTRITION UNDER THE MSB

“It is up to the mothers to ensure that native children are provided with the firm base in their own culture needed to cope with the larger society.”136

This chapter will consider the early establishment of state-funded and -driven nutrition programs uniquely designed for Indigenous peoples and communities, beginning with the creation of the Medical Services Branch in 1962.137 It looks at nutrition studies and programs for Indigenous children and families, particularly those aimed to educate mothers how to best raise their families on Canada’s Food Rules. I am interested not only in the scientific information, but also in analyzing the discourse of these educational tools in relation to government nutrition programs, which were embedded with strains of both Victorian and postwar ideology. This chapter therefore explores changes to how medical services were delivered to Indigenous people in non-urban communities, which illustrates not only the increased attention the state was paying to Indigenous bodies understood as ‘in crises’, but also some very real implications for shifts in Indigenous-state relations. While statistically, First Nations, Métis, and Inuit people in Canada were more likely to become ill with diseases now considered rooted in poverty- related malnutrition, such as tuberculosis,138 and to which vulnerable individuals often succumbed, the state focus on embodiment of biologically determined ‘failure to thrive’ continued to deny the structural causes of malnutrition and poverty-related illness. As this history hinges on food, Chapter One includes discussion of Indigenous foodways, both

136 Canada, Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development, “Alberta Hosts First National Native Women’s Conference,” The Indian News 13, no. 12 (March 1971), 1. 137 Health Canada, “History of Providing Health Services to First Nations people and Inuit,” accessed May 12, 2015, http://www.hc-sc.gc.ca/ahc-asc/branch-dirgen/fnihb- dgspni/services-eng.php. “Medical Services Branch was formed in 1962 by merging Indian Health and Northern Health Services with other independent federal field services.” 138 See Lux, Medicine That Walks; Georgina Feldberg, Disease and Class: Tuberculosis and the Shaping of Modern North American Society (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1995); McCallum, Indigenous Women, Work, and History.

49 historically and as various communities and Nations were engaging with food and nutrition in the period. The mid-twentieth century witnessed the resurgence of a conservative domestic ideology in North America that centred on the ‘homemaker ideal,’ which Franca Iacovetta and Valerie Korinek argue “symbolized the stability and superiority of Western democratic families.” This image “reflected a misplaced or cultivated nostalgia for a bourgeois ideal that never entirely reflected most people’s lives, and a conservative reaction to women’s wartime gains.”139 Largely as a response to the perceived threat of such gains, which included increasing numbers of working mothers, related daycare lobbies, and higher divorce rates, the family and home became the locus of Cold War ideology.140 As Julie Guard articulates, “[f]ull-time motherhood and homemaking were ... construed as the foundation of a healthy society.” A “full-time homemaker was thus both a normative model for real women and a powerful cultural symbol of stability, security, and democracy.”141 In the mid-twentieth century, both immigrant and Indigenous women, who fell outside of the homemaker ideal and challenged western, middle-class constructions of family and gender, were “isolated for special attention” as “part of a wider campaign to reform Canadian women and elevate postwar family life.”142 With proper intervention, guidance, and surveillance, immigrant and Indigenous women, linked by the state for their problematic ethnic or cultural distinctiveness,143 could potentially become better mothers and elevate their families. As housewife and mother, a woman was also the “key person” in an immigrant or Indigenous family, “considered essential to modifying the social habits of family members.” Therefore, nutritionists and other contemporary experts put much energy into exposing Canada’s newest and oldest residents to supposed Canadian

139 Iacovetta and Korinek, “Jell-O Salads, One-Stop Shopping, and Maria the Homemaker,” 193-4. 140 See Magda Fahrni, Household Politics: Montreal Families and Postwar Reconstruction (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005). 141 Julie Guard, “Women Worth Watching,” 77. 142 Iacovetta and Korinek, “Jell-O Salads, One-Stop Shopping, and Maria the Homemaker,” 194. 143 See Heidi Bohaker and Franca Iacovetta, “Making Aboriginal People ‘Immigrants Too’: A Comparison of Citizenship Programs for Newcomers and Indigenous Peoples in Postwar Canada, 1940s–1960s,” The Canadian Historical Review 90, No. 3 (September 2009): 427-461.

50 customs through such outlets as adult English language, cooking, sewing, and similar ‘home management’ classes.144 Often living in isolated communities, some without running water, electricity, and western-style urban kitchens, and removed from the growing consumer culture in which urban Canadian mothers were more actively participating, it would seem that the antithesis to this ideal homemaker-mother and her family was the Indigenous mother.145 For example, a 1958 booklet published by Indian and Northern Health Services, The Pre-Schooler, one of many efforts to transform the bad mother into the ‘Clever Mother’, recommended lifestyle changes for Indigenous mothers who were presented as being in need of re-education.146 “In this book,” the authors write, “the mother will have a guide to follow in caring for her child so that she can give him the security he needs in a clean and happy home.” This, it follows, “will be his best protection against disease and will help him all through his life for this is the time when the foundations are laid for health and happiness.”147 Detailed suggestions for raising healthy, therefore happy children range from prescriptive measures of weight and height for age, the urgency of having children immunized, appropriate amounts of recreation and rest, and the

144 Iacovetta and Korinek, “Jell-O Salads, One-Stop Shopping, and Maria the Homemaker,” 194; see also The Indian News, 12, no. 1 (April 1969), 5. 145 See Joy Parr, Domestic Goods: The Material, the Moral, and the Economic in the Postwar Years (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999), 33. Parr argues that, while women were becoming participants in consumer culture, and were the primary shoppers for their families, despite similar heavy marketing of ‘modern’ appliances in the postwar decades throughout the U.S. and Canada, urban Canadian women were reluctant to transition to new machines, instead relying on tried and true models, such as wringer washers over automatics. This transition to electric appliances was even more delayed in non-urban areas: “Agencies in the western provinces offering advice on how to modernize farm homes shared these modest expectations. ...model kitchens... were designed around iceboxes, hand pumps by the sink, and wood stoves with hot water reservoirs, rather than mechanical refrigerators, water supplies under pressure, and modern ranges.” 146 Canada, Indian and Northern Health Services, The Pre-Schooler: From the Age of One to Six Years (Ottawa: Ottawa: Department of National Health and Welfare, 1958.) The booklet does not explicitly refer to Indigenous mothers as ‘bad’, but the assumption that such re- education was needed itself implies something needs fixing, and the focus is on the mother, charged with the health and happiness of her child. It does, however, refer to the ‘clever mother’, which an Indigenous mother can become if she strictly adheres to the program of uplift prescribed. 147 Canada, The Pre-Schooler, 2.

51 importance of encouraging a child to follow a rigid daily routine: “this means doing things on a time schedule so that as he grows he learns to fit into other groups of children at school and at play.”148 The language of the booklet crystallizes the assumption that Indigenous mothers were ignorant, and reinforces the colonial trope of Indigenous people as biologically lazy, thus needing an explanation of ‘routine’.149 As Kelm argues, in “stories told about health, disease, and cross-cultural interaction” from the encounter through colonial periods, the “causes of Aboriginal pathology ... were deeply gendered,” as “authors wrote specifically about the failings of men and women to live up to their ‘natural roles’ either as providers or caretakers.”150 Further, health education has historically viewed Indigenous peoples, “by nature, [as] unclean and diseased.”151 Most significantly, the bulk of this booklet centres on nutrition. ‘Nutrition’ guidelines included setting and following established meal times, central to structuring a child’s daily routine, and nutrition-related hygiene practices, like washing and toothbrushing, were done in preparation for or following breakfast, lunch, and dinner. These three meals were to be consumed on a rigid schedule based on Canada’s Food Rules.152 This and similar prescriptive texts carry an implicit message that ‘A Clever Mother’ who follows expert guidelines will have a healthy child, whereas Indigenous mothers relying on knowledge provided by those without professional credentials were inherently making their children sick.153 Mothers resisting this education were understood as ‘bad mothers’, who were content to let their children take ill and even die rather than assimilate into ‘modernity’ for the

148 Canada, The Pre-Schooler, 6. 149 See Harris, Making Native Space, 286-87, for discussion of the ‘lazy Indian’, a trope which since encounter has shaped European and Canadian educational and assimilative projects that sought to instill what E.P. Thompson has explained as ‘time-work discipline’ on ‘shiftless’ Indigenous people. See also E.P. Thompson, “Time, Work-Discipline and Industrial Capitalism,” in E.P. Thompson, Customs in Common, 97-184 (London: Merlin Press, 1991). 150 Mary Ellen Kelm, “Diagnosing the Discursive Indian: Medicine, Gender, and the ‘Dying race’,” Ethnohistory 52, no. 2 (Spring 2005), 384. 151 Kelm, Colonizing Bodies, 57. Emphasis in original. 152 Canada, The Pre-Schooler, 7-9. 153 For a discussion of child health in Canadian history, see Canadian Bulletin of Medical History / Bulletin canadien d’histoire de la medicine CBMH/BCHM 19 (2002).

52 sake of the child.154 This responsibility, moreover, involved more than nutrition and homemaking, and was embedded in state policy throughout the period. As Federal Citizenship Minister Robert Stanbury impressed in an address to the first National Native Women’s Conference, held in Edmonton in 1971, “It is up to the mothers to ensure that native children are provided with the firm base in their own culture needed to cope with the larger society.”155 Moreover, as evident through the popularity and success of Homemakers Organizations and Home Economics Courses in Indigenous communities, many mothers themselves embraced this responsibility.156 While expert literature was problematically prescriptive and critical of Indigenous mothers’ individual, community, or cultural knowledge of childrearing, it frequently spoke directly to the high level of Indigenous maternal- and more significantly infant-morbidity compared to non-Indigenous statistics during this period. For instance, into the mid-1940s, “the [national] death rate due to diseases seen as ‘peculiar to the first year of life’ was three times higher among the Aboriginal population than among non-Natives.”157 In 1965, infant mortality amongst First Nations was more than double that of ‘all Canadians’, while Inuit levels were more than four times the national rate.158 It is important to note, however, the distinction between populations; for example, in 1963, The Indian News reported that “the mortality rate

154 Molly Ladd-Taylor and Lauri Umansky, eds., “Introduction,” in ‘Bad’ Mothers: The Politics of Blame in Twentieth-Century America, 1-28 (New York: New York University Press, 1998), 3. The authors argue that ‘bad mothers’ tend to fall into three groups: those living outside of a ‘traditional’ nuclear family; those who ‘would or could not protect their children from harm’; and ‘those whose children went wrong.’ 155 “Alberta Hosts First National Native Women’s Conference,” The Indian News 13, no. 12 (March 1971), 1. 156 This is discussed in more detail in Chapter Two. See also Aroha Harris and Mary Jane Logan McCallum, ‘“Assaulting the Ears of Government”: The Work of the Maori Women’s Welfare League and the Indian Homemakers’ Clubs in the 1950s and 60s’,” in Carol Williams, ed, Indigenous Women and Work: From Labour to Activism, 225-239 (University of Illinois Press, 2012): 225. 157 Kelm, Colonizing Bodies, 6. 158 James B. Waldram, D. Ann Herring, and T. Kue Young, Aboriginal Health in Canada: Historical, Cultural, and Epidemiological Perspectives, 2nd Ed. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006), 76-77. Not until the early twenty-first century did “the First Nations rate (6.4/1,000 live births)” nearly converge “with the Canadian national rate (5.4/1,000 live births).”

53 for Indians in urban communities has been reduced in recent years through the provision of ante-natal and post-natal programs, well baby clinics, and immunization,” and the rate “is now not appreciably higher than the rates of non-Indians in similarly-situated communities.”159 The paper pointed specifically to the “high incidence of disease among groups in small outlying areas where living conditions are primitive and which are difficult to serve, that makes the overall mortality rate of Indians appear so high.”160 Consistent with the discourse on bad mothering, rather than considering structural factors, Medical Services Branch staff focused on what Indigenous mothers could be doing wrong to have such high levels of infant morbidity, and how they could improve their parenting skills. This involved conducting nutrition surveys and providing nutritional education, as nutrition and medical experts were making the link between malnutrition – from inseparable gauges of wellness including foodways, hygiene, and household cleanliness – and infant deaths. In postwar Canada, respiratory diseases, such as tuberculosis and broncho-pneumonia, were the leading cause of infant deaths in Indigenous communities. As tuberculosis in particular is a disease of poverty-induced malnutrition,161 the link between wellness and nutrition education seems linear. Kelm writes, “the erosion of the Aboriginal land and resource bases led to poor living conditions and ultimately to the deaths of Aboriginal children.”162 Yet, as Maureen Lux shows, such diseases continued to be contextualized as racial and cultural afflictions. Experts argued that “Native people,” as Lux writes, “would only gain the good health enjoyed by non-Native Canadians when they ceased being Native.”163 Only by assimilating, then, could Indigenous mothers save their children. By the 1960s, amidst persistent pressure on Indigenous mothers towards integration, was a perception by medical experts and non-Indigenous Canadians that First Nations and Inuit people suffered from an inability to understand the meaning of good health due to “cultural

159 Canada, Department of Citizenship and Immigration, Indian Affairs Branch, The Indian News, 6, no. 4 (June 1963), 2. 160 The Indian News, 6, no. 4 (June 1963), 2 161 Lux, Medicine That Walks,” ch. 5. 162 Kelm, Colonizing Bodies, 7. 163 Lux, Medicine That Walks, 224.

54 differences and education deficiencies.”164 There was, therefore, an increased and consolidated effort underway – led primarily by white, urban Canadians in professional positions with the Department of National Health and Welfare (DNHW) – to figure out how to best educate Indigenous peoples to care for themselves and their families, and to guide them in appropriate usage of health services, as they somehow tended to both over- and under-utilize available medical care.165 In 1962, DNHW formed the Medical Services Branch (MSB), which involved the amalgamation of seven federal health services, including Indian Health Services and Northern Health Services, under one branch.166 The MSB “was mandated to provide health services that fell outside of provincial health care jurisdictions, and its original focus was on public health priorities, delivered on-reserve.”167 The “declared mission” of the branch for much of its existence was “to assist Aboriginal people to attain a level of health comparable to that of other Canadians living in similar locations through direct services or other means.”168 During this period of state effort at providing ‘uplift’ programs for Indigenous peoples in Canada to ‘solve’ what was referred to as the ‘Indian problem’. The ‘problem’ according to the state was that Indigenous peoples lacked a host of skills proposed as necessary to adjust – essentially assimilate – into modern Canadian life.169 As Mary Ellen Kelm has argued, “in medical journals of the first half of the twentieth

164 Waldram, Herring, and Young, Aboriginal Health in Canada, 226. Here the authors refer to the 1969 Booz-Allen report, “a major review of Indian health services conducted by an international health service consultancy firm for MSB.” 165 Waldram, Herring, and Young, Aboriginal Health in Canada, 226. 166 Waldram, Herring, and Young, Aboriginal Health in Canada, 210-11. The five other departments under MSB at the time were Civil Aviation medicine, Civil Service Health, Immigration, Quarantine, and Sick Mariners’ Services. “Although no longer administratively distinct,” the authors write, “these original divisions remained identifiable as spheres of activity within the branch.” 167 McCallum, Indigenous Women, Work, and History, 120. 168 Waldram, Herring, and Young, Aboriginal Health in Canada, 214. 169 In postwar Canada, the ‘problem’ generally was how to assimilate Indigenous people into the urban capitalist economy, as increasing numbers of Indigenous people were leaving their communities for cities, largely through a placement program facilitated by DIA. However, with respect to food and nutrition, it focused on how Indigenous communities outside of urban centres continued to live too ‘traditionally’, thus outside of modern nutrition rules and related hygiene, housing, and sanitation practices. This is discussed in some detail throughout this

55 century, we see the beginning of a discourse of pathology in which the Indian problem was medicalized and the discursive Indian diagnosed, a trend with which we must contend today.”170 As seen in DNHW Annual Reports, Dr. Percy E. Moore was appointed the first Director of the MSB when it was formed on January 1, 1962.171 That Moore seamlessly continued in the role, which he also held before Indian Health Services was subsumed by the MSB, suggests the new Branch would not be breaking from previous theories and approaches with respect to the Indigenous peoples they served.172 According to the Report: In respect to registered Indian, Medical Services has continued to offer all the services formerly given by the Indian Health Service. Arrangements are made for treatment of indigent Indians by local physicians and hospitals at public expense on a fee-for-service basis wherever possible and, where not possible, Medical Services provides direct

thesis. See Canada, DIAND, The Indian in Transition: The Indian Today (Ottawa: Queen’s Printer, 1964). On Indigenous people’s (particularly women’s) experiences with state projects in urban centres, see McCallum, Indigenous Women, Work, and History; Joan Sangster, “Domesticating Girls: The Sexual Regulation of Aboriginal and Working-Class Girls in Twentieth-Century Canada,” in Contact Zones: Aboriginal and Settler Women in Canada’s Colonial Past, eds. Katie Pickles and Myra Rutherdale, 179-201 (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2005). This so-called ‘problem’ has much deeper and more sinister roots in early Canadian history, as Prime Minister Sir. John A. Macdonald created assimilationist policy to ‘solve’ it, essentially aimed to completely remove all traces of culture from Indigenous peoples in the country. This in turn was legislated by Duncan Campbell Scott (Deputy Superintendent of Indian Affairs from 1913-1932), who oversaw the assimilationist policy of the first half of the twentieth century, declaring that there was a “most complicated Indian problem.” See Milloy, A National Crime, for how this was conceived, enforced, and experienced by Indigenous families. 170 Kelm, “Diagnosing the Discursive Indian,” 373. 171 Canada, Department of National Health and Welfare Annual Report, for the Fiscal Year Ended March 31, 1963 (Ottawa, ON, Queen’s Printer, 1963), 79. http://iportal.usask.ca/docs/Dept_National_Health_Welfare_Annual_Reports/1962-1963.pdf 172 See Mosby, “Administering Colonial Science.” Without making it the focus of this chapter, it is important to raise the issue of Dr. Moore and his colleagues, including Dr. Pett, who only a decade or two earlier exploited the vulnerable position of Indigenous youth in Manitoba and other provinces to perform non-consensual medical and nutrition experiments. As others have demonstrated, DNHW staff not only performed a range of medical experiments on students in Residential Schools, but also conducted research by allowing already malnourished students and patient residents on Reserves to further starve, and withheld medical or dental treatments, in order to complete controlled studies on the effects of vitamins and other supplemented food products, amongst other atrocities. For similar discussion, see also Shewell, Enough to Keep them Alive; Milloy, A National Crime.

treatment services through federal hospitals and clinics, nursing stations, and health centres.173 Further, they indicated that, under the newly created MSB, “most Indians” were “included under the provincial hospital insurance schemes for hospital treatment.”174 In spite of the persistence of problematic intentions and staff appointments, an important shift regarding provision of nutrition education, as well as medical services, to Indigenous communities after 1962 was an increase in Indigenous staffing, and a particular area where this was being developed was through community liaisons between residents and regional nurses. Community Health Representatives (CHRs, also referred to as Community Health Workers) would have been community members identified as Indian or Eskimo with cultural and linguistic knowledge that enabled them to train and act as sort of intermediary members of northern healthcare teams. The position of CHR was initiated as part of the newly amalgamated MSB programming in 1962, “in an attempt… to increase the amount and effectiveness of health teaching done among the Indian and Eskimo people,” with a representative “qualified by lifetime knowledge of his community, as well as by training.”175 CHRs were public health workers trained to promote MSB health and nutrition services in their

173 Canada, Department of National Health and Welfare Annual Report… 1963, 79. 174 Canada, Department of National Health and Welfare Annual Report… 1963, 79. It is important to note that, whenever health and medical services were designated provincial purview and responsibility, this inherently works to refute the Federal government’s responsibility to First Nations peoples in Canada and denies treaty rights to medical provisions and care. In particular, it contests the regularly challenged Medicine Chest clause of Treaty Six (1876), which Maureen Lux writes “has been the subject of contention ever since: Aboriginal people insist that it was a promise to provide health care; the government has favoured a narrower interpretation that a medicine chest is to be provided, although it created a huge medical bureaucracy in the next decades.” See Lux, Medicine That Walks, 27. As discussed here in Chapter Six, RN Jean Goodwill similarly points to the very political nature of health care provision for Native people in Canada stemming from the signed treaties, particularly the Treaty Six “Medicine Chest Clause,” promising comprehensive and appropriate medical services to all Native people, comparable to what other Canadians could receive.174 The federal government has continually worked from the perspective that this is not the state’s understanding of the clause, with the goal of reduced spending at the centre of their contention. 175 Canada, The Community Health Worker in Indian and Eskimo Communities (Ottawa: Department of National Health and Welfare Medical Services Branch, 1970): 1.

57 home or nearby communities, and to assist in relating community culture and health concerns to other MSB staff, including predominantly non-Indigenous field nurses stationed in the communities.176 Mary Jane Logan McCallum’s extensive work on the history of CHRs shows the highly gendered division of labour, which was accompanied by a wage disparity, with women tasked with attending to maternal and child health and nutrition, while men were expected to oversee “buildings and sanitation, including home improvements, water supply, garbage disposal, privies, and wells.”177 The CHR program grew out of an era of community development projects that, as McCallum explains, was defined by the United Nations as “the process by which the efforts of the people themselves are united with those of Government authority to improve the economic, social and cultural conditions of communities, to integrate the communities into the life of the nations and to enable them to contribute fully to the national progress.”178 Community development programs in northern communities worked, in part, to “develop and fully utilize natural resources,” and in Manitoba, a “result of the program has been the establishment of fishing co-operatives to bolster the economy of northern reserves.”179 Community development workers underwent their own special training in Folk Schools where, for example, in 1960 in Kennetcook Nova Scotia, “Twenty-seven Indians from the Maritimes” took “a week’s leadership training course” led by the Nova Scotia Adult Education Division and IAB.180 The Folk School aimed to “develop potential leaders and to help the students to plan

176 McCallum, Indigenous Women, Work, and History, 120-121. 177 McCallum, Indigenous Women, Work, and History, 121, 144. McCallum reports that, in 1965, women were paid $185 for the first six months, $195 for the second six months, and $205 for their second year as a CHR. Men, meanwhile, made $235, $245, and $255 respectively. 178 McCallum, Indigenous Women, Work, and History, 122. See also Cora Voyageur and Brian Calliou, “Aboriginal Economic Development and the Struggle for Self-Government,” in Martin J. Cannon and Lina Sunseri, eds, Racism, Colonialism, and Indigeneity in Canada: A Reader (Don Mills, ON: Oxford University Press, 2011), 203-218. 179 Sharon Parker, “Community Programs on Indian Reserves in Manitoba’s North,” 1, Record Group (RG) 029, ACC: W84-85/458, Box 11, File 144-2-4 vol. 1 Nutrition Surveys – Reserves (1970-12-01 to 1971-12-31), Department of Health and Welfare (DHW), Library and Archives Canada (LAC), Winnipeg, MB. 180 The Indian News, 4, no. 2 (May 1960), 11.

58 community development on their own reserves.” In addition to an array of topics addressed was “planning a better home, with emphasis on nutrition.” 181 Similarly, a third Thunder Bay Indian Folk School in Ontario was being organized for spring 1968. The goal of these Folk Schools was “to give people an opportunity to learn more about each other, their communities, and the world in which they live.” The Thunder Bay school covered topics considered “of importance to the Indian people,” including “medical programs, unemployment, scarcity of teachers, barriers in communication between community people and the authorities, and other problems in human relations.”182 A Folk School was also held in 1968 in Georgian Bay, ON, but topics focused even more on self-improvement and awareness with a concern for self- over community-development.183 The CHR program that contributed to this effort differed from these Folk Schools, as it led directly into paid employment. It also diverged from other federal labour placement programs for Indigenous men and woman that relocated and integrated them into Canadian cities and society, as it worked from the community development model of ‘self-help’, thus “endeavoured to train an Indigenous labour force that would be ‘true to its people’.”184 After operating for only a year, The Indian News reported in the 1963 piece “Community Health Workers Popular in Manitoba Reserves”: “So successful has the training of Indians as Community Health Workers proved that a similar programme is now envisaged for the Eskimo community.”185 Similarly, DNHW celebrated the program in their 1963 Annual Report: “The new experiment in training Indian health workers has been gratifyingly successful,” as some CHRs had “already achieved quite surprising results by arousing their compatriots’ interest and involving them in effecting improvements in sanitation on their reserves.”186 Another substantial effort included a community in Ontario that “spontaneously opened negotiations with a local health unit for provision of public health services,” while simultaneously and

181 The Indian News, 4, no. 2 (May 1960), 11. 182 Victoria Becker, “Third Folk School Planned,” The Indian News, 10, no. 3 (November 1967), 4. 183 The Indian News, 11, no. 2, (May 1968), 8. 184 McCallum, Indigenous Women, Work, and History, 125. 185 The Indian News, 6, no. 4, (June 1963), 7. 186 Canada, Department of National Health and Welfare Annual Report...1963, 80.

59 independently organizing medical insurance coverage for their community.187 These types of self-improvement services that moved towards self-sufficiency were regularly applauded.188 According to a summer Home Economics student working in northern Manitoba communities in 1971, CHRs worked under an MSB program objective of “increas[ing] the amount and effectiveness of health teaching among Indians and Eskimos.”189 A piece in The Indian News on “New Community Health Workers” in 1964 reported, “Twenty-seven men and women from reserves in Ontario, Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta have completed a three months’ Community Health Worker Training Programme held at Fort Qu’Appelle.”190 This was identified as “the third training programme of its kind to be held in Canada.” A first session was “held in Norway House in 1962 and was attended by [twelve] Indians;191 the second was held in 1963 when eight Eskimos received training at Cambridge Bay, N.W.T.”192 Training for potential CHRs, “chosen for their leadership qualities,” was a three-part process, with orientation, formal courses, then ongoing training on-the-job that included attending refresher courses.193

187 Canada, Department of National Health and Welfare Annual Report…1963, 80. 188 See Canada, Department of National Health and Welfare Annual Report, for the Fiscal Year Ended March 31, 1964 (Ottawa, ON: Queen’s Printer, 1964), 95. http://iportal.usask.ca/docs/Dept_National_Health_Welfare_Annual_Reports/1963-1964.pdf As the MSB reported in 1964, “the Federal Government has never accepted the position that Indian are entitled to free medical services by Treaty rights”; however, the state did “recognize a moral obligation to see to it that no Indian suffers from lack of medical attention by reason of inability to pay for it.” While MSB was creating programs to integrate Indians and Eskimos into public health services, this interest centred largely on promoting self-sufficiency with the goal of transferring authority to provinces and individual Bands, and ultimately to minimize Federal responsibility from the management of Indigenous health provisions through various avenues of urban employment integration projects and community development initiatives on Reserves and northern communities. 189 Parker, “Community Programs on Indian Reserves in Manitoba’s North,” 1. 190 The Indian News, 7, no. 4 (December 1964), 5. 191 The Indian News, 6, no. 4, (June 1963), 7. The 1964 piece puts the number at 13, but the 1963 piece identifies just twelve candidates and does so by name: Hugh McKay, Waywayseecappo; W. Green, Beren’s River; S. Anderson, Norway House; P. Fiddler, Island Lake; M. Bee, God’s Lake; J. Spence, Split Lake; R. McKay, Cross Lake; Mrs. B. Wilson, The Pas; Mrs. D. Stranger, Peguis; Mrs. J. Courchene, Fort Alexander; John Henry, Roseau River; and Lawrence Chubb, the Pas. 192 The Indian News, 7, no. 4 (December 1964), 5. 193 The Indian News, 6, no. 4, (June 1963), 7.

Following a two-month orientation period spent on reserves, CHRs in training were instructed in six weeks of health education “and acquisition of teaching skills, including presentation of talks, and the use of visual aids.” All of the trainees took a St. John Ambulance first-aid course. At this stage, as McCallum details, women and men were divided into their gendered specialized roles.194 Of the 1964 group of trainees, The Indian News reported that three had been employed as MSB dental assistants, while the remaining twenty-four were full-time MSB employees who “work[ed] under the guidance of the field nurse in their home areas.”195 According to the Indian News piece, a public health nurse reported that, with the addition of CHRs in the community, “the people, Indian and non-Indian, thought the reserves were cleaner and tidier.” There was “a greater appreciation of the need to boil water for infants and to ‘do something about garbage’.”196 She concluded that “Indian people who were visited were unanimous in their approval of having one of their own people teaching health.” With the 1962 amalgamation of services, “nursing station services developed as the backbone of the MSB,”197 but field nurses, unlike CHRs, tended to rarely come from Indigenous communities.198 In 1963, an estimated fourteen percent of federally employed medical care staff who were providing care to Indigenous people were of Indigenous origin, which included the workers in the new CHR program.199 Many overworked MSB field nurses, who were not consulted on the implementation of the CHR program, and through it were tasked with additional responsibilities that included a supervisory role, added the program to their long list of labour grievances. According to McCallum, “MSB nurses were very clear about the subordinate position CHRs should have, not only in wage but also in status.”200 She writes: “A small but significant minority of Indigenous nurses” who were employed by the MSB “overcame considerable obstacles to attain nursing education and employment.” Further, they “did so in spite of educational policies

194 The Indian News, 6, no. 4, (June 1963), 7. 195 The Indian News, 7, no. 4 (December 1964), 5. 196 The Indian News, 6, no. 4, (June 1963), 7. 197 Waldram, Herring, and Young, Aboriginal Health in Canada, 198. 198 See McCallum, Indigenous Women, Work, and History, 166. See also Waldram, Herring, and Young, Aboriginal Health in Canada, 282-83. 199 The Indian News, 6, no. 4, (June 1963), 1. 200 McCallum, Indigenous Women, Work, and History, 154-55.

61 that prepared Indigenous women for domestic work and generally discouraged them from pursuing higher education.”201 In the 1960s, The Indian News often reported on young women from First Nations communities training to become nurses, applauding some for entering positions at hospitals in towns and urban centres across Canada. In 1962, they shared that, at The Vancouver Vocational Institute, roughly twenty Indian girls are trained as practical nurses each year.” In a photograph of two smiling women from Hazelton, BC, Beatrice Moore is noted as sitting bedside, “practicing the art of bandaging on Dorothy Smith,” who is reclining on a bed.202 Moore, 22, was reported as married with two young children, and both she and Smith, 19, worked at the Wrinch Memorial Hospital in Hazelton before beginning their training. Many nursing students were awarded scholarships to achieve their goals, including Barbara Ann Greyeyes, 19, from Muskeg Lake Band, SK, and Eleanor Virginia Paul, a third-year student nurse from the Eskasoni Band, NS, who were both awarded an DIAND Nursing Scholarship in 1968.203 Greyeyes, who had just entered a nursing program in Edmonton, was reported as recently graduating from high school at Fort Smith, NWT, while Paul, 23, had already completed a ‘Pre-Med’ year of education at St. Francis Xavier University, NS, before entering the School of Nursing.204 In 1963, nurse Elizabeth Matthews (Eskasoni) was a Nursing Sister with the Royal Canadian Air Force, after receiving an IAB scholarship in 1961 to support training at St. Rita’s Hospital School of Nursing in Sydney, NS.205 In 1966, numerous winners of nursing scholarships across Canada included Patricia Eileen Lickers, Onandaga of the Six Nations Grand River Band; Bibiane Courtois, from Montagnais du Lac St-Jean, PQ; Jocelyn Wilson, Cree, from The Pas, MB. In addition, Valerie Louise Delisle, an Iroquois of Caughnawaga, received a scholarship to enter Dietetics.206 Young women like Irene Thomson from Prince Albert, SK, entered nursing out of high school: “I would like to serve and help my own people one day. I know there are many

201 McCallum, Indigenous Women, Work, and History, 167. 202 The Indian News, 6, no. 2, (October 1962), 4. 203 The Indian News, 11, no. 2, (May 1968), 4. 204 The Indian News, 11, no. 2, (May 1968), 4. 205 The Indian News, 6, no. 4, (June 1963), 6. 206 The Indian News, 8 no. 4, (January 1966), 6.

Indian girls who feel the way I do.”207 In 1963, Thomson wrote, “I believe that through more education of our Indian people we could assist in maintaining better standards of health and living for our people.” On writing the piece, she put great faith in Indian health services, and was feeling enthusiastic about staring her nurse training, a career which she romanticized through a quote from Florence Nightingale on nursing as “the finest of the fine arts.”208 By the 1960s, Inuit community ‘settlements’, whose health services were previously provided primarily by mining companies and missionaries, were being brought under MSB governance through the nursing station model. Although the first nursing station was established in 1947 in Port Harrison in the Eastern Arctic, with another in Coppermine in the Western region, by the 1962 creation of the MSB, “twelve major Inuit settlements had nursing stations, the staff of which could service another fourteen smaller outposts, and dependency on the mission hospitals and ship patrols began to be phased out.”209 Nurses stationed in these settlements communicated using unclear radio signals with physicians in other locales, and “Medical evacuations by plane became more common, with patients often transported to the southern urban hospitals for more comprehensive treatment.” As in more southern regions, the state continued expansion of its nursing station model throughout the Arctic, and by the mid-1960s there were a total of twenty-five serving northern Inuit peoples.210 According to Waldram et al, there was not an apparent effort at recruiting Inuit nurses for the expanding nursing stations, “a trend that would come later.” However, they recount an incident at Sugluk, “where an Inuk nurse was the first hired when the nursing station opened there in 1960.” The woman was “not well accepted by the community, who preferred the services of the missionary who had been treating them for more than a decade, and who was ‘White’.” They explain that, regardless of her training, residents found it hard to accept the new nurse as “being qualified” due to her appearance: “she obviously did not look

207 Irene Thomson, “Wants to Serve Her People: Looks Forward to Nursing Career,” The Indian News, 6, no. 4, (June 1963), 8. 208 Thomson, “Wants to Serve Her People,” 8. 209 Waldram, Herring, and Young, Aboriginal Health in Canada, 205. 210 Waldram, Herring, and Young, Aboriginal Health in Canada, 206.

‘White’ like the other medical practitioners they had experienced.” 211 The matter of Indigenous staffing was, thus, sometimes overturned by community familiarity or expectations created through the colonization of Indigenous health. The amount of actual nutrition education and guidance that nurses and CHRs brought to a community seems to have depended on the gendered role of the CHR in a given community, as nurses, regularly working without physicians, were preoccupied with more formal medical matters. As male CHRs worked on sanitation issues, and young men like John Henry from Roseau River, MB, and Lawrence Chubb from The Pas, MB served many northern communities in Manitoba,212 issues gendered female or women’s purview would be left behind or turned to community homemaker leaders. Sharon Parker, the Home Economics summer student who reported on CHR activity on Manitoba Reserves in 1971, wrote: “Nutrition education could and should be a prime concern,” however, “although nutrition education and budgeting are included in the training session, little emphasis is placed on these areas.”213 Frequently, she lamented, “the existing attitude toward nutrition is one of indifference,” and “the majority of Indians who have lived for years on the same diet, see no need for change.” She also felt that residents’ opinions directed CHRs to largely exclude nutrition education in their program.214 One area Parker felt CHRs showed interest in incorporating additional nutritional education materials was regarding budgeting with reference to local food price data; however, like most MSB employees, Parker was one of many seasonal and transient workers who would leave before seeing if any changes were made.215

211 Waldram, Herring, and Young, Aboriginal Health in Canada, 206. 212 Trained in the earliest years of the CHR program, John Henry worked in Norway House as a dental assistant, while Lawrence Chubb was training in 1963 to do the same. See The Indian News, 6, no. 4, (June 1963), 2, 7. 213 Parker, “Community Programs on Indian Reserves in Manitoba’s North,” 2. 214 Parker, “Community Programs on Indian Reserves in Manitoba’s North,” 2. 215 Parker, “Community Programs on Indian Reserves in Manitoba’s North,” 2. Parker spent only a few days in each community she visited over July and August, 1971, as part of her position in the MSB Summer Student program. See Lynne Cole, Memorandum to the Regional Director, March 31, 1971, “Re: 1971 Summer Students Nutrition Program,” RG 029, ACC: W84- 85/458, Box 11, File 144-2-5 vol. 1 Recruiting Nutritionists (1968-01-01 to 1972-02-28), DHW, LAC, Winnipeg, MB.

National nutrition standards during the period, which governed state programs and studies as well as the community-level education local CHRs and nurses provided, were rigidly outlined in the Department of National Health and Welfare educational pamphlet, Good Eating With Canada’s Food Guide.216 These standards were similarly continually being developed and disseminated in other western countries, including England, which influenced much of Canada’s early nutrition standards, and then the United States, which had a more influential role in the development of more contemporary guidelines after the Second World War.217 Nutrition guidelines promoted ‘good eating’ through a scientifically calculated combination of five food groups: meat and fish; fruit; vegetables; bread and cereals; and, foremost, milk.218 Examples of foods for each group reflect western food choices, accessible only to those with adequate storage facilities219 and in close proximity to urban centres with the same, and emphasize fresh over packaged or frozen for cost effectiveness and better health.220 For instance, meat and fish contribute protein, iron, and vitamin D, which the guide asserts is especially important for expectant mothers. Serving samples should include ‘cheaper cuts’, which, “cooked with imagination ... can become family favorites.”221 Alongside what should be consumed, the guide outlined when it should be eaten and in what combination. A “pattern for a day’s meals” was

216 Canada, Department of National Health and Welfare, Good Eating With Canada’s Food Guide (Ottawa: Department of National Health and Welfare, 1967). 217 See Ian Mosby, Food Will Win the War: The Politics, Culture, and Science of Food on Canada’s Home Front (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2014), for discussion of international nutrition standards and their influence on the Canada Food Guide over the twentieth century. 218 Canada, Good Eating with Canada’s Food Guide, inside panel; Canada, “Good Food: Good Health!,” pamphlet, RG 029, ACC: W84-85/458, Box 11, File 144-2-4 vol. 1, Nutrition Surveys – Surveys (1972-01-01 to 1973-03-31), MSB, DHW, LAC, Winnipeg, MB. See Mosby, Food Will Win the War, 199-201 regarding the evolution in Canadian nutrition education and guidelines from British towards U.S. standards in the postwar period. 219 See Joy Parr, Domestic Goods: The Material, the Moral, and the Economic in the Postwar Years (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999). 220 Popular Canadian women’s magazines from the period, such as Chatelaine, reflect this assumption, and provide evidence of women both embracing and challenging these prescriptive standards. See Valerie Korinek, Roughing it in the Suburbs: Reading Chatelaine Magazine in the Fifties and Sixties (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000); also Iacovetta and Korinek, “Jell-O Salads, One-Stop Shopping, and Maria the Homemaker.” 221 Canada, Good Eating With Canada’s Food Guide, inside panel.

65 proposed based on three sittings a day, starting “the day with a good breakfast for all!” at seven in the morning.222 A good breakfast included “citrus fruit or fruit juice,” “whole grain cereal with milk,” “toast with butter or fortified margarine,” and most importantly milk for children. This should be followed by a lighter meal of ‘supper or lunch’, such as “cheese, egg, or other protein food, vegetable,” and dessert, again with milk as a recommended beverage, this time for all. The third meal, ‘dinner’, was to be consumed at noon or at six at night. This heaviest meal of the day was proposed to include “meat, fish, or poultry,” a vegetable, “fruit or fruit dessert,” and milk for children.223 Each individual category of food type was promoted for its vitamin and mineral contribution, and portion sizes were standardized based on their correspondence to adequate daily intake of nutrients. For instance, the primary food group, milk, which provides calcium, protein, riboflavin, and vitamin A was to be consumed age-dependent, with up to 4 cups a day for expectant and nursing mothers, as well as adolescents.224 This illustrated colour pamphlet serves as a prescriptive model for homemakers and educators, from elementary school to adult education classrooms, and its accessible published form reflects the increasing interest by the late 1960s in standardizing national nutrition. The specialized knowledge presented in these servings sought to impress upon its audience that nutrition was a science; moreover, it was impressed upon the conscientious mother, assumed in prescriptive nutrition education of the period to be the primary shopper and cook for the family, that she was expected to carefully follow the guidelines. These standards leave little, if any room for cultural variations, which Mosby illustrates in his book-length study of the early history of food and nutrition in Canada through to the postwar period. He provides examples of state propaganda that spread racialized images of poor food choices, presented through Chinese, Japanese, and other war-time enemies’ purportedly weak bodies.225 These depictions, which were used in advertising Canada’s approach to nutrition and food consumption, largely centred on ‘Canadian’s’ consumption and

222 Canada, Good Eating With Canada’s Food Guide, inside panel. 223 Canada, Good Eating With Canada’s Food Guide, inside panel. 224 Canada, Good Eating With Canada’s Food Guide, inside panel. 225 See Mosby, Food Will Win the War, 49.

66 appreciation of dairy milk, which many Indigenous people living outside of Canada’s urban centres in the postwar decades rarely consumed. As Milloy demonstrates, children in Residential Schools were often unaccustomed to “products made from cow’s milk,” and many “[did] not even like cheese and even though cheese [was] disguised in the preparation of such items as macaroni and cheese the youngsters [would] leave it on their plates.”226 Inuit communities living on a ‘traditional’ diet were also generally unfamiliar with dairy products.227 “Through health education and personal pressure,” Kelm argues, “health officials pushed First Nations to adopt European-style foods.” The “call for greater milk consumption,” she writes, “is an example of this intrusive tendency on the part of government health officials.”228 Milk has historically been an assimilative tool. Like soap and water – the objects of purification used by colonizers, missionaries, and moral reformists on the poor, racialized, and gendered bodies of the ‘uncivilized’ – milk served not only as a material object of social purity, but also provided symbolism and imagery for Victorian whites. While soap and water were advertised as highlighting immorality by linking physical cleanliness to moral virtues, invoking an imperial racial discourse in marketing the whitening power of cleaning products, Mariana Valverde shows how purity was also accessible by drinking ‘Pure Milk’.229 Dairy milk, which was often linked to “the whiteness of snow central to Canadian mythology,” served as a contrast to both tainted alcohol and the unsanitary water of the cities.230 This continued through to the postwar era with more specific ramifications for Indigenous people in Canada. In the 1943 North Pacific Planning Project that proposed ‘development’ of British Columbia’s northern coast, “non-Native consultants... recommended that Aboriginal communities be encouraged to keep cows since daily milk consumption was perceived to be the key to ensuring a well-balanced diet.” Yet, as Kelm argues of British Columbia, “First Nations

226 Milloy, A National Crime, 276. 227 See Pauktuutit, The Inuit Way: A Guide to Inuit Culture (Ottawa: Pauktuutit/Inuit Women’s Association of Canada, 1991); Otto Schaefer and Jean Steckle, Dietary Habits and Nutritional Base of Native Populations of the Northwest Territories (Yellowknife, NWT: Science Advisory Board of the Northwest Territories, 1980). 228 Kelm, Colonizing Bodies, 36. 229 Valverde, The Age of Light, Soap, and Water, 40. 230 Valverde, The Age of Light, Soap, and Water, 23.

67 have always treated cow’s milk with disdain.”231 Their reasons were both cultural, since cows were seen as stupid and would transfer this to babies who drank their milk, and also physiological, as 63.3 percent of a sampling of west coast Aboriginal people were lactose intolerant.232 In contrast to its privileged position amongst the then five food groups, for many Indigenous people milk was “Euro-canadian culinary imperialism” that “simply did not sit well in Aboriginal stomachs.”233 While this was gradually changing in the later twentieth century, milk and dairy consumption in many First Nations and Inuit communities was not quickly or seamlessly embraced. The standards set by Canada’s Food Guide also marginalize, or simply ignore, the foodways of First Nations, Métis, and Inuit peoples, which include a range of ‘country foods’, or regional and seasonal diets. The term country foods refers to an Indigenous diet of natural resources harvested regionally, and assumes cultural continuity from pre-encounter through the contemporary era. As Robert Bone writes, “by definition, country food is obtained from the northern wilderness by people who either eat it or share it with others.”234 It includes ‘big game’ meat, birds, fish and whales (along with their eggs or grease), smaller fur-bearing animals, along with the cultivation or collection of fruits, greens, tubers, berries, wild rice, and other foods available from the land. In his study for the Department of Indian and Northern Affairs, Bone asserts country foods are both high in nutritional value, and equally important in their contribution to maintaining cultural tradition through the act of hunting and sharing the wealth.235

231 Kelm, Colonizing Bodies, 36-37. 232 Kelm, Colonizing Bodies, 37. In a sampling of thirty healthy First Nations people. 233 Kelm, Colonizing Bodies, 37. 234 Robert M. Bone, Changes in Country Food Consumption: Report 3-85 (Ottawa: Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development, 1985), 3. A geographer on contract with the Department of Indian and Northern Affairs, Bone surveyed four centres in the Mackenzie Valley to assess the impact of the Norman Wells Pipeline Project on local Indigenous populations. This study is used here with caution, as the conclusions present an increase in cultural awareness, which serves to diminish the expressed concerns of local elders and chiefs speaking out against the Project. However, it also might suggest that the encroachment of colonizing interests coupled with vocal chiefs may have sparked heightened cultural awareness and an increase in cultural practices as a form of resistance or protest. 235 Bone, Changes in Country Food Consumption, 4.

Wild game and fish were, therefore, still heavily used in Indigenous communities in the 1960s through 1980s, not only by “[r]esidents of isolated areas,”236 but also those living in communities such as Split Lake and Pukatawagan, Manitoba.237 Mary Ellen Kelm’s work on Indigenous health and healing in British Columbia illustrates how “indigenous food sources remained central to the diet of many Aboriginal people well into the twentieth century.” In the 1960s, “Nisga’a people still [ate] many traditional foods, and elders estimate that indigenous foods comprised 80 percent of their diet.”238 At Ahousat, “marine resources,” ranging from salmon and clams to sea lion and sea-gull eggs, “formed the dietary core in 1969.” In the same year at more inland Anaham, “game rivaled fish as the most important food.”239 Inuit diets in the late twentieth century, which ranged from game to marine mammals, were supplemented by “whatever vegetable matter was available on land and sea,” such as berries, willow buds, herbs, and some roots.240 This included “predigested reindeer moss and other herbs from the stomachs of caribou, Arctic hare and ptarmigan,” as well as seaweed collected by women and children.241 According to Pauktuutit,242 in a guide compiled regarding Inuit culture, the

236 The Indian News, 6, no. 4, (June 1963). 237 Rosemary Trudeau and Pat Wolczuk, “Preliminary Report on Nutrition Survey 1967: Fort Alexander Indian Band and Split Lake Indian Band,” 4, RG 029, ACC: W84-85/458, Box 11, File 144-2-4 vol. 2 Nutrition Surveys [Nutrition Canada Protocol] (1967-06-01 to 1970-04-30), MSB, DHW, LAC, Winnipeg, MB. In 1967, trapped animals provided much protein intake in the community; Patricia Mills, “Food Price Data – Pukatawagan, Manitoba,” 2, which reports on residents relying on hunting and fishing for much of their diet. RG 029, ACC: W84-85/458, Box 11, File 144-2-4 vol. 1 Nutrition Surveys – Reserves (1970-12-01 to 1971-12-31), DHW, LAC, Winnipeg, MB. 238 Mary Ellen Kelm, Colonizing Bodies: Aboriginal Health and Healing in British Columbia, 1900-1950 (Vancouver: UBC Press, 1998), 25-26. 239 Kelm, Colonizing Bodies, 35-36. 240 Schaefer and Steckle, Dietary Habits and Nutritional Base, 2. 241 Schaefer and Steckle, Dietary Habits and Nutritional Base, 2. 242 Mona Gleason and Adele Perry, “Editors’ Introduction” to Patricia Jasen, “Race, Culture, and the Colonization of Childbirth in Northern Canada,” in Rethinking Canada: The Promise of Women’s History, 5th ed., Mona Gleason and Adele Perry, eds., 323-325 (Don Mills, ON: Oxford University Press, 2006), 324-325. Pauktuutit, the national non-profit Inuit Women’s Association of Canada, aims to “‘foster a greater awareness of the needs of Inuit women and to encourage their participation in community, regional and national concerns in relation to social, cultural and economic development’.” See Pauktuutit Inuit Women’s Association, www.pauktuutit.ca. Accessed May 4, 2014.

69 traditional Inuit diet “centered on the consumption of meat and fat from a variety of sources.”243 These included the meat of seals, whales, caribou, salmon, and whitefish, along with the blubber, oil, and fat where available. “The Inuit also depended to a lesser extent on arctic hare, ptarmigan, polar bear, arctic fox, musk oxen, and various other species of birds, mammals and fish.”244 As Pauktuutit suggest, the limited technology available for cooking foods encouraged consumption of raw, frozen, or aged foods, which “provided the Inuit with a healthy diet since the raw meat contained all the essential nutrients needed to maintain a healthy existence.”245 While this diet was increasingly supplemented with heavily processed and sugary foods, consumption of traditional or ‘country foods’ “continue[d] to be a nutritious and relatively cheap staple for most Inuit families” as of the 1991 study.246 Bone shows that in the 1980s, Indigenous food consumption in the northwest territories actually increased in some small northern communities, and “even though many store foods are extensively used by native families, country food still remains an important source of meat and fish.”247 Further, many of the “on-the-land” families he interviewed spent time in seasonal bush camps hunting for the community, where Indigenous foods were heavily consumed by families from Fort Simpson, Fort Norman, and Wrigley.248 Overall, through a short questionnaire with the final response rate of 99.8%, Bone found in 1985 that “for the majority of residents (52.5%), country food comprises an important role in their eating behaviour” (minimum 40% intake).249 Despite this continued incorporation of Indigenous foods into non- urban Indigenous diets in particular, the lack of access to and availability of fresh foods in local grocery stores made purchasing more affordable and novel ‘junk food’ items an option. This was combined with an overall increased access to western foods through community stores, including The Bay outlets located in many communities, small community markets run almost

243 Pauktuutit, The Inuit Way: A Guide to Inuit Culture (Ottawa: Pauktuutit/Inuit Women’s Association of Canada, 1991), 20. 244 Pauktuutit, The Inuit Way, 20. 245 Pauktuutit, The Inuit Way, 20. 246 Pauktuutit, The Inuit Way, 20. 247 Bone, Changes in Country Food Consumption, 4. 248 Bone, Changes in Country Food Consumption, 6. 249 Bone, Changes in Country Food Consumption, 8-9.

70 exclusively by non-Native residents, or more rare stores or programs organized as cooperatives.250 In the postwar decades, the bulk of west coast Indigenous diets included grains, sugars, oils, and canned goods purchased at markets in smaller centres, such as Tofino on Vancouver Island.251 Further inland across the Northwest Territories, northern health officials “expressed concern native customers buy too much confectionaries and soft drinks and not enough fresh fruits and vegetables.”252 Kelm demonstrates that this trend was also present at Anaham, where “refined and processed foods, such as bread, cookies, cereals, candies, soft drinks, sugar, and flour... accounted for 48 percent of the caloric intake for adults and between 40 and 60 percent for children.” She notes that this was “occasioned by and supported the stock-buying practices of local stores.”253 The consumption of sugary foods and drinks is noted throughout various MSB dieticians’ and their student researchers’ nutrition surveys, including summer student Sharon Parker’s report on her visit to God’s Narrows, MB, where the MSB nurse informed that “Four hundred dollars a day are spent on coke alone at the Bay store,” adding, “two tractor trains of Coke were ordered during the winter months.”254 By comparison, the larger community of Cross Lake was reported as spending approximately fifty dollars daily on pop and candy combined.255 MSB and previous DNHW efforts at improving Indigenous health and nutrition tended towards increasing western foodways through proper shopping habits, while reducing reliance on game meats and other country foods, specifically transitioning hunting or trapping from a

250 The Indian News, 8, no. 4 (January 1966), 2. See also Bone, Changes in Country Food Consumption, 28. 251 Kelm, Colonizing Bodies, 36. 252 Bone, Changes in Country Food Consumption, 28. 253 Kelm, Colonizing Bodies, 36. 254 Sharon Parker, Memorandum to the Regional Nutritionist, June 29, 1971, “Food Price Data Re: God’s Narrows, God’s River, Red Sucker,” 2, RG 029, ACC: W84-85/458, Box 11, File 144-2-4 1 Nutrition Surveys – Reserves, MSB, DHW, LAC, Winnipeg, MB. 255 Sharon Parker, Memorandum to the Regional Nutritionist, July 30, 1971, “Food Price Data - Cross Lake,” 1, RG 029, ACC: W84-85/458, Box 11, File 144-2-4 vol. 1 Nutrition Surveys – Reserves (1970-12-01 to 1971-12-31), DHW, LAC, Winnipeg, MB.

71 regular activity to one done for leisure and comradery.256 However, a clear downside of this move towards grocery store purchases was the lack of affordable and desirable fresh food options, while popular items were ‘junk food’ options that were, quite simply, cheaper, ready to eat, and more readily available. At times, they also would have been seen as safer. For instance, in St. Theresa’s Point in 1971, an MSB Summer Student conducting nutrition research was informed by the local CHR that community residents shared with him that they were reluctant to consume powdered milk that had been reconstituted with chlorinated water, as “they feel that the chlorine in the water supply causes diarrhea.”257 The community’s Band Manager, Welfare Officer, and Community Development Officer also “expressed concern over the reports of mercury contamination in the lakes,” and “indicated a desire to have the local water tested for mercury content.”258 Further, the legacy of scattered nutrition initiatives from the postwar decades to either eliminate Indigenous foodways or, alternately, increase country foods into dietary practices carries with it heavy consequences.259 The state continuously downplayed or even ignored the significance of Indigenous dietary staples and supplements to Indigenous communities in the

256 See The Indian News 1, no. 1 (August 1954), 4. The piece, “Northern Indians fight illness with aid of vegetable gardens,” applauds the Abroise Tete Noir Band in Alberta for establishing successful family gardens for all residents, which the News asserts helped members fight TB. The piece ends noting, “These bandsmen no longer depend on trapping, but they still enjoy a good hunt. Three or four times a year several of them band together and bring back a good supply of meat for their families.” 257 Sharon Parker, Memorandum to the Regional Nutritionist, August 16, 1971, “Food Price Data & Food Availability Report Re: St. Theresa – August 10, 1971,” 2, RG 029, ACC: W84- 85/458, Box 11, File 144-2-4 vol. 1 Nutrition Surveys – Reserves (1970-12-01 to 1971-12-31), MSB, DHW, LAC, Winnipeg, MB. 258 Parker, “Food Price Data & Food Availability Report Re: St. Theresa,” 2. 259 See Mosby, “Administering Colonial Science,” 156-157. Mosby writes that DIAND “officials went so far as to experiment with preventing some families from using Family Allowances to purchase flour – despite the fact that it had long been a key dietary staple – as part of a broader effort both to encourage them to increase their consumption of country food and to discourage families from returning to the local HBC post too often. In Great Whale River, the consequence of this policy during late 1949 and early 1950 was that many Inuit families were forced to go on their annual winter hunt with insufficient flour to last for the entire season. Within a few months, some went hungry and were forced to resort to eating their sled dogs and boiled seal skin.”

72 postwar decades, while attempting to impose the normalcy of the diet recommended in Canada’s Food Guide. With food choices that compare to offerings at large urban grocers in major urban centres unavailable or unaffordable in most First Nations and Inuit communities, these factors combined to create the state of Indigenous and northern food insecurity and related nutritional health that persists to this day. This crisis of food insecurity and how it was experienced at the local level, particularly in Manitoba, is the focus of the following chapter.

CHAPTER TWO

COLONIZING NUTRITION: ESTABLISHING NUTRITION DISCOURSE, FOOD SURVEYS, AND THE FIELD OF ‘ABORIGINAL NUTRITION’

“…analysis of these and their comparison with similar indicators of normal white Canadians will provide a basis for assessment of nutrition status of this Indian group.”260

This chapter explores how food insecurity became a crisis in many Indigenous communities, primarily through looking at nutrition studies conducted by student researchers in Manitoba. It considers how nutritionists perceived and thus studied their clients through analyzing data and interviews collected by university students from Winnipeg, who traveled to Manitoba First Nations communities to survey grocery prices and availability. I also look at the expert literature that framed their approach to studying, surveying, and educating Indigenous peoples, particularly mothers. In two separate initiatives led by the Medical Services Branch (MSB), small teams of women research assistants showed that cost, quality, consistency, and availability of foods were leaving some communities with limited healthy options, making nutrition goals defined and promoted by the MSB an impossibility for most community members.261 In 1967, two Home Economics Graduate students from the University of Manitoba, “employed under the Students Assistant Program” run by the Medical Services Branch of the Department of Health and Welfare, conducted a nutritional status survey of Fort Alexander and

260 Authors not named, “Nutrition Survey of Fort Alexander Indians,” 1, RG 029, ACC: W84-85/458, Box 11, File 144-2-4 vol. 2 Nutrition Surveys [Nutrition Canada Protocol] (1967-06- 01 to 1970-04-30), MSB, DHW, LAC, Winnipeg, MB. 261 There is very little information collected in the archives on who these women were, beyond their roles as project leaders or students. One window into personal details is provided by one of the students herself, Louisa Di Nicola (Macario). As she includes in her report back to supervisor Marion Thomson, “I guess you have noticed my new name, well I’m married now.” Louisa Di Nicola, Untitled Report to Marion Thomson, Zone Nutritionist, RG 029, ACC: W84- 85/458, Box 11, File 144-2-5 vol. 1 Recruiting Nutritionists (1968-01-01 to 1972-02-28), MSB, DHW, LAC, Winnipeg, MB.

Split Lake First Nations.262 The two students, Pat Wolczuk and Rosemary Trudeau, reported that they worked under the guidance of Marion Thomson, the MB Zone Nutritionist for MSB, while Donna Baxter and Dr. Shirley Weber from the University of Manitoba oversaw dietary levels and food costs. Dr. Elizabeth Smith, professor of nutrition at the University, oversaw clinical analysis of nutritional status.263 The women were tasked with conducting a food habit survey of residents, and aiding University staff “in their study of further assessment of nutritional status including clinical and anthropometric measures.”264 In their report, they shared details of the surveys conducted in the two communities, which were chosen for their location: Split Lake more northerly in the province, and Fort Alexander more southerly. Following nutrition survey standards from the period, the team planned a random sampling approach to visit residents from different areas of the community.265 The survey plan that guided the team, laid out in the document “Nutrition Survey of Fort Alexander Indians” but also applied to the Split Lake study, set a goal “to find as many indicators of nutrition status in Fort Alexander Indians as practicable.” Through this, the team hypothesized, “analysis of these and their comparison with similar indicators of normal white Canadians will provide a basis for assessment of nutrition status of this Indian group.”266 Accordingly, the team believed that “with these findings a program designed to improve the

262 M. Thomson, Memorandum to the Zone Director, Medical Services, Manitoba Zone, October 11, 1967, “Student Assistants Program, Summer, 1967,” 1, RG 029, ACC: W84-85/458, Box 11, File 144-2-4 vol. 2 Nutrition Surveys [Nutrition Canada Protocol] (1967-06-01 to 1970- 04-30), MSB, DHW, LAC, Winnipeg, MB. 263 Trudeau and Wolczuk, “Preliminary Report on Nutrition Survey 1967,” 5. 264 Trudeau and Wolczuk, “Preliminary Report on Nutrition Survey 1967,” 1. 265 These guidelines are laid out in the document, “Guide to Nutrition Education in Home Visiting,” which was “prepared by the Metropolitan Health Service of Greater Vancouver,” a copy of which was located in the Library and Archives File containing the reports and correspondence relating to the 1967 surveys. H.A. Procter, Memorandum to the Zone and Area Directors, Medical Services, August 21, 1968, “Guide to Nutrition Education in Home Visiting,” RG 029, ACC: W84-85/458, Box 11, File 144-2-4 vol. 2 Nutrition Surveys [Nutrition Canada Protocol] (1967-06-01 to 1970-04-30), MSB, DHW, LAC, Winnipeg, MB; Metropolitan Health Service of Greater Vancouver, “Guide to Nutrition Education in Home Visiting,” May 1967, RG 029, ACC: W84-85/458, Box 11, File 144-2-4 vol. 2 Nutrition Surveys [Nutrition Canada Protocol] (1967-06-01 to 1970-04-30), DHW, LAC, Winnipeg, MB. 266 Authors not named, “Nutrition Survey of Fort Alexander Indians,” 1. Emphasis added.

75 dietary intake and food habits of this group will be planned and put into action.”267 This plan seems to exemplify a pre-determined survey: in the minds of the research team, the community members were already diagnosed as requiring improvements to their diets and consumer habits before they had even been connected with, and the Indigenous subjects were, by virtue of their exclusion from the “normal white Canadians,” presumed abnormal or outside of the centre.268 A useful example of the methodology nutritionists and dieticians, along with their students, applied to surveying the nutritional status of Indigenous families is the Metropolitan Health Service of Greater Vancouver “Guide to Nutrition Education in Home Visiting.” This 1967 guide, a copy of which is located in the RG 029 MSB Nutrition Survey Files for Manitoba, advises nutrition experts to fully interrogate, diagnose, and uplift mothers, starting out by stating: “You can help almost any family you visit in some aspect of nutrition.”269 Essentially, like much nutrition literature from the period, the expert begins with the premise that every family is in need of some form of nutrition help, and every mother requires a degree of saving from either her ignorance or lack of confidence. Accordingly, nutrition educators are told of “some basic techniques in nutrition education that will help [them] do effective teaching.” First, they should attempt “to identify the type of mother in relation to the kind of help she can use,” with a three point list of mother “types”: those “already doing a good job, but are needing assurance”; those who “will welcome new information about food and need help in separating food facts from fallacies”; and of course there are those who simply “are not doing a satisfactory job.”270 The guide further advises “Building on the mother’s expressed interest,” including food budgeting, weight control, children’s health, and “Adapting various ethnic and religious food patterns to

267 Authors not named, “Nutrition Survey of Fort Alexander Indians,” 1. 268 See Bruce Curtis, The Politics of Population: State Formation, Statistics, and the Census of Canada, 1840–1875 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002) for discussion of surveying, which is addressed in more detail in chapter 3. 269 Metropolitan Health Service, “Guide to Nutrition Education in Home Visiting,” 1. 270 Metropolitan Health Service, “Guide to Nutrition Education in Home Visiting,” 1. Emphasis in original, but worth emphasizing because of its pathologizing effect.

76 available Canadian foods.”271 If the language was not clear enough elsewhere, the intent of cultural erasure or flattening in the service of an assimilative national nutrition standard is spelled out here. Nutrition educators are told to involve the family in this process, and assess their eating habits through observation and interrogation using a lengthy and intimate list of “Suggested Questions for Mothers.” The questions, which reflect other survey and study questions already discussed, attest to the pervasiveness of this model for nutrition education. For instance, educators should ask mothers about “important things they consider when buying food,” such as “cost, time of month, family likes and dislikes,” as well as “ethnic background [and] religion.” Other questions focus on family consumption of food groups, vitamins, and nutrients, such as milk, Vitamin C, cereals, meats, vegetables, and what types are purchased and eaten in a week. They are advised to ask: “Who cooks the meals? Do they enjoy cooking? Do they have some favourite recipes”; “Does the family sit down together for meals? Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner” and, more specifically, “Does the family eat Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner?” 272 Questions about who purchases food and details of a family’s groceries are also assessed: “Who is responsible for family food shopping? Mother, father, mother and father, older children, children and parents.” Also, how often does the family get groceries, where, how much is spent, and what else is purchased (examples provided include cigarettes, candy, toilet paper, or cleaning supplies).273 As with nutrition surveys, the educator is to assess “What kind of equipment and storage does the family have for food preparation?” with options of “range, oven, refrigerator, cool storage, small equipment” listed before another favourite question of nutritionist experts: “Do they have a vegetable garden?”274 After interrogation and assessment, educating mothers can begin, but educators are advised to proceed slowly: “Begin with something very simple and don’t try to teach everything in one easy lesson.” Educators should suggest reasonable “changes or additions,” which will be

271 Metropolitan Health Service, “Guide to Nutrition Education in Home Visiting,” 1. Emphasis in original. 272 Metropolitan Health Service, “Guide to Nutrition Education in Home Visiting,” 2. 273 Metropolitan Health Service, “Guide to Nutrition Education in Home Visiting,” 2. 274 Metropolitan Health Service, “Guide to Nutrition Education in Home Visiting,” 2.

“depend[ent] upon the intelligence, the motivation, cultural background, equipment, health problems, economic situation and the emotional implications.”275 How a nutrition educator could assess a busy mother’s ‘intelligence’ in one visit with her, while she is put on the spot with a lengthy list of personal questions that, clearly, have a right and wrong answer is somewhat baffling. However, it positions nutrition educators in a position of power and authority over mothers, who as indicated in the guide are always in need of some sort of nutrition help. Nutrition educators were also tasked with analysing all areas of women’s unpaid work in the home – including “General appearance of the house,” if “perishable food [is] left out in the open,” and whether children appear well-cared for “(cleanliness, clothes, hair)” – and of course, evaluating mothers’ and their children’s health through question and answer, combined with assessment of “physical characteristics: height, weight, rate of growth, obesity, underweight.”276 Of interest is the lack of suggestion for education and improvement techniques; however, like with most nutrition education and surveying, the methods of improvement – the “right answers” – are inherently present in the questions of assessment. The reasoning seems to be that if a mother simply reads Canada’s Food Guide, also mentioned in the “Guide to Nutrition Education in home Visiting,” she will know what she should be buying for and feeding her family and why; when her family should eat, where, and how much; how foods should be prepared and served; as well as which vitamins and nutrients she needs to provide for each family member at various life stages. Seemingly informed by these guidelines, and in addition to their rescue-based goals, the 1967 Home Economics research team identified a third aim in their project: to “test the methodology of conducting a nutrition survey and to determine its suitability for study of nutrition status in other Indian population groups.”277 It is of interest that a special nutrition survey would be seen as required and needing development for Indigenous peoples, who were understood by the research team as inherently different than other, specifically white, Canadians. Yet, the methodology used was not remarked on as different or unique to studying

275 Metropolitan Health Service, “Guide to Nutrition Education in Home Visiting,” 2. Emphasis in original. 276 Metropolitan Health Service, “Guide to Nutrition Education in Home Visiting,” 3. 277 Authors not named, “Nutrition Survey of Fort Alexander Indians,” 1.

Indigenous peoples beyond the initial racialized goals and presumptions. As with other nutritional status surveys from the period, the team were to conduct a three-day food inventory to document foods on-hand as well as those purchased in the period surveyed. This would be cross-checked against menus and food recall interviews that would be conducted by the team.278 The process of surveying involved school visits in Fort Alexander by the home economists “where anthropometric measures of height, weight, and tricep skinfold thickness and the clinical measure of buccal mucosa (a protein indicator conducted by “scraping gently the mucosa of the cheek”279) were taken.”280 In spite of the survey being an invasion of privacy involving bodily contact and assessment, no questions were raised in the research documents concerning consent or cultural awareness, though there is mention of responses only obtained from “co-operative families” and participation being “on a voluntary basis.”281 Upon arrival in Fort Alexander, the team immediately found that they had to modify their plan, as the reality of schedules, politics, and language barriers presented themselves, which ended up being their experience in both communities. In Fort Alexander, where the team visited at the end of the school year in June 1967, basic sampling techniques, where residents were being asked to complete questionnaires unassisted, were modified. Here, “for a more detailed record of the more vulnerable group vis. pre-schoolers, adolescent girls, pregnant women, and older folks,” the food history documentation was done by “family members capable of doing this accurately.”282 In an effort at easing the load, “school children in grades 7 & 8 were asked to volunteer to keep 3-day records.” The process was explained to their teachers, and the students “were given opportunity to work on records in class time as part of the health program.”283 In Split Lake, the team found that “three-day individual records were not feasible because the older people could not write and the younger ones were too busy or

278 Trudeau and Wolczuk, “Preliminary Report on Nutrition Survey 1967.” 279 Authors not named, “Nutrition Survey of Fort Alexander Indians,” 2. 280 Trudeau and Wolczuk, “Preliminary Report on Nutrition Survey 1967,” 2. 281 Trudeau and Wolczuk, “Preliminary Report on Nutrition Survey 1967,” 1-2. 282 Trudeau and Wolczuk, “Preliminary Report on Nutrition Survey 1967,” 1. 283 Trudeau and Wolczuk, “Preliminary Report on Nutrition Survey 1967,” 1.

79 could not be located.” In addition, they found it “difficult to keep track of pre-schoolers as they ate at various homes.”284 Ultimately, in both communities surveyed, the research team found that leaving the questionnaires with families to be completed created “difficulties,” which led to a “better method” of “visit[ing] the homes each day for four days.” As they explain in their report, on day two, “the urine sample bottles were brought”; on day three, samples were collected. “This provided an excellent opportunity to check menus and shopping lists,” because the team perceived that “people often forgot what they bought or ate or were not accurate in amounts recorded.”285 In Split Lake, where the researchers arrived in July, the team reported that inaccuracies in food recall were even more pronounced, as residents reported that they “forgot what they ate, what they bought, borrowed, and lent.”286 The Community Health Representative was generally only part of the first visit in Fort Alexander, “as all families had someone available who could speak English.”287 In Split Lake, the team writes, “It was necessary to use the community health worker for every home for all four visits for the first two weeks.” Afterwards, they found that “he was necessary on the first visit only at most homes for the people had become used to us and their English increased surprisingly.”288 That residents could suddenly and ‘surprisingly’ speak English might be understood as a tactic of resistance or self- preservation, in the face of frequent self-serving community health and nutrition surveys conducted by outsiders, with which residents would have been familiar or even endured in the past. That the research team saw this as sudden language acquisition is somewhat quizzical, and raises questions about their cultural awareness and training as they entered Indigenous communities to collect intimate details of strangers’ lives, eating habits, consumer choices, and bodies.289

284 Trudeau and Wolczuk, “Preliminary Report on Nutrition Survey 1967,” 3. 285 Trudeau and Wolczuk, “Preliminary Report on Nutrition Survey 1967,” 2. 286 Trudeau and Wolczuk, “Preliminary Report on Nutrition Survey 1967,” 3. 287 Trudeau and Wolczuk, “Preliminary Report on Nutrition Survey 1967,” 2. 288 Trudeau and Wolczuk, “Preliminary Report on Nutrition Survey 1967,” 3. 289 While I read this as a literal impression and observation by the researchers, Janis Thiessen read it as possible sarcasm, which would further illustrate the team’s lack of cultural

The team’s position as outsiders without connection to the community likely contributed to their plans for random sampling being thwarted by Fort Alexander residents. They quickly found efforts to connect with families on both sides of the river stalled when on “the eastern end of the north side of the river,” a section the students saw being of interest as “it is one of the poorer sections,” they found that “none of the families wished to participate.”290 As the university students explained, they saw the lack of cooperation as a result of a “religious split in the community,” and since the Community Health Representative, identified as Mrs. Courchene, was “of the opposite religious faction than these people,” they were resistant to the project.291 Further, they claimed, “Mrs. Courchene seemed to prejudice the sampling by directing us to more favourable homes, however, we did manage to visit some others.”292 In the end, thirty-three of the 125 occupied homes in Fort Alexander were surveyed, compared to Split Lake, where “All but six of the occupied homes were surveyed.”293 Thompson praised the “enthusiastic” and “determined” students for having “obtained the co-operation of the people in giving information about food habits and consumption.”294 Of particular interest in this and similar surveys is not simply the survey plan itself, but more specifically the history of peoples surveyed that comes through in data sets, observations, and reports more often found in archival files than in published papers. The hand-written report by Pat Wolczuk, “Food Consumption of a Sample of Indian Families Residing on Two Selected Manitoba Reserves,” provides a window into the daily lives of First Nations families in Manitoba in the 1960s. In spite of the assumption that food consumption and nutrition guidelines were not being met by residents, the students found that residents were actually consuming what were considered to be “fair” amounts of milk and vegetables, with “good”

awareness training. Janis Thiessen, personal correspondence through feedback on this dissertation project. April 24, 2020. 290 Trudeau and Wolczuk, “Preliminary Report on Nutrition Survey 1967,” 1-2. 291 Trudeau and Wolczuk, “Preliminary Report on Nutrition Survey 1967,” 2. 292 One wonders if this a reaction from the team of university students to a racialized Indigenous woman being ‘difficult’ by claiming authority. 293 Trudeau and Wolczuk, “Preliminary Report on Nutrition Survey 1967,” 1; 3. 294 Thomson, “Student Assistants Program, Summer, 1967,” 1.

81 intake of meat and eggs in both communities.295 Fresh vegetables were noted as “available in the area stores but were not purchased.”296 Fruit and “whole grains” intakes were considered “poor” in both communities, and intake of vegetables was seen as a site for improvement, but it is important to consider availability of foods, for which the students were quick to place responsibility onto residents rather than local stores.297 Further, as later and more comprehensive surveys demonstrated, exorbitant food costs posed an unquestionable barrier to most residents in nearly every Indigenous and northern community in Manitoba studied. Though filtered through the lens of a Winnipeg-based nutrition student reporting through employment with the MSB, Wolczuk presents food intake data that speaks not only to what was and was not being consumed within the parameters of measure indicated by food groups guidelines, but also what was not being formally accounted for and yet regularly consumed in the diets of those surveyed. For instance, it is only through their written reports, based on conversations rather than documenting food choices against the prescribed food group options, that Wolczuk and Trudeau reveal how much of a role Indigenous or country foods play in the lives of Split Lake residents in particular. They write that a “lack of fresh meat is somewhat compensated by fish and rabbit in summer,” noting in parentheses that “fishing could be increased.” Further, in winter months, community members reported that “diet consists primarily of animal protein, the meat of trapped animals.” 298 Based on their surveying and notes, nutrition students treated hunting as something that should be limited to a seasonal, leisurely, social, and supplemental pursuit, while trapping was particularly discouraged during the period, as it kept men out of their home communities

295 Pat Wolczuk, “Food Consumption of a Sample of Indian Families Residing on Two Selected Manitoba Reserves,” 39, RG 029, ACC: W84-85/458, Box 11, File 144-2-4 vol. 2 Nutrition Surveys [Nutrition Canada Protocol] (1967-06-01 to 1970-04-30), MSB, DHW, LAC, Winnipeg, MB. 296 Wolczuk, “Food Consumption of a Sample of Indian Families Residing on Two Selected Manitoba Reserves,” 10. 297 Wolczuk, “Food Consumption of a Sample of Indian Families Residing on Two Selected Manitoba Reserves,” 39. 298 Trudeau and Wolczuk, “Preliminary Report on Nutrition Survey 1967,” 4. The 1971 MSB summer students also remarked that, for many Split Lake residents, hunting and fishing supplemented groceries whenever possible. See Mills, “Split Lake & York Landing,” 2.

82 for extended periods, which presumably prevented full participation in the economy and paid labour force. The importance of country foods, nutritionally and culturally, as well as their value economically were not yet recognized by MSB and other nutritionists, as DIA in the 1960s sought to integrate Indigenous peoples into the economy and remove traditional practices as anything more than leisurely or supplemental pursuits. Nutrition students thus focused on promoting their western training, suggesting in their report how “cooking methods and nutrition hints could be introduced by the community health worker or the nurses,” with the example of “how to make bannock with raisins or cheese.”299 In 1971, as part of community outreach and assessment, a small team of Home Economics Student Research Assistants from the University of Manitoba was again hired to collect “food price data” in the province over the summer months.300 This larger survey included much more extensive research into food costs, food availability, and influences of local stores and transportation on local diets in several First Nations communities. Students Patricia Mills and Sharon Parker worked under supervision of Lynne Cole, Regional Nutritionist for MSB, thus conducted a much more extensive survey project with a wider and more diverse base of participants and over a much larger geographical area. They traveled to First Nations communities across the province, ranging in size, population, and ‘isolation’ from each other and Winnipeg. These included the communities of Berens River, Bloodvein, Brochet, Cross Lake, Granville, God’s River, God’s Narrows, Little Grand Rapids, Lynn Lake, Nelson House, Oxford House, Pauingassi, Pukatawagan, Red Sucker, St. Theresa [Point] [sic], Shamattawa, South Indian Lake, Split Lake, and York Landing. In Cole’s drafted student job description for the 1971 Summer Students Nutrition Program, two positions were posted as available to, first, “assess the general nutrition status in a community (one in the north, one in the mid-north) by visiting the area, contacting health education staff and others working there.”301 Considering the

299 Trudeau and Wolczuk, “Preliminary Report on Nutrition Survey 1967,” 5. 300 Patricia H. Mills, “Transportation Influences Food Costs and Availability in Manitoba’s North,” 1, RG 029, ACC: W84-85/458, Box 11, File 144-2-4 vol. 1 Nutrition Surveys – Reserves (1970-12-01 to 1971-12-31), MSB, DHW, LAC, Winnipeg, MB. 301 Lynne Cole, “Re: 1971 Summer Students Nutrition Program,” 1.

83 number of locations visited, it appears the scope of the project increased greatly over the initially projected site visits. Before leaving Winnipeg, the students started their survey by collecting food prices in Winnipeg, which they did over three days in May, at three stores that they felt represented a cross section of metropolitan food prices in the city. This included “two chain stores and one budget store,” the location of which “varied from centre town to midtown and suburbs.”302 When visiting survey communities over the summer months, the students were tasked with “home visiting, evaluation of foods or nutrition educational programs, materials, or resources there, gathering data on foods available and prices,” enabling them to “provid[e] a community profile.”303 Second, students were asked to “compile comparative data on food prices, food availability, and basic food costs to families living in the north and in the mid-north,” and third, “to evaluate the above materials with the Regional Nutritionist, and develop and catalogue nutrition teaching aids for use in these two areas.”304 The project was slated to take place from the end of May 1971 through July, with “approximately 7 weeks outside of Winnipeg in 2 to 3 week periods.” Students were to be trained through orientation sessions in Winnipeg, at a Community Health Worker Program in Brandon, and were involved in Program planning before they traveled around Manitoba to carry out “Nutrition Assessment in designated communities.”305 Cole also provided a “Rough Outline” for students to conduct their Community Nutrition Profiles, which presented a list of Contact Staff that included Nursing, Medical Officer, Dental, School Principal, Chief and/or Council, Community Health Worker, Case, or Social Worker, Indian Agent, Welfare or Health Council, and I.A.B. Homemaker.306 In spite of their heavy representation in student reports to come, community store managers were not listed as Contacts on the planning document.

302 Mills, “Transportation Influences Food Costs,” 2. Mills noted in her report “that the two chain stores were in the midst of a price war at the tie, and this perhaps had an effect on our results.” 303 Cole, “Re: 1971 Summer Students Nutrition Program,” 1. 304 Cole, “Re: 1971 Summer Students Nutrition Program,” 1. 305 Cole, “Re: 1971 Summer Students Nutrition Program,” 2. 306 Cole, “Re: 1971 Summer Students Nutrition Program,” Appended Document “Rough Outline,” 1.

The “Rough Outline” also provides a numbered list with the “Guideline as to Information Wanted,” with lettered points that included: “Estimated incidence of nutritional deficiencies major health problem?)”; “Type and distribution of vitamin and Fe supplements,” specifically regarding preschool- and school-aged children, pregnant women, and foods provided in schools; a general survey of school lunches if provided, as well as what sort of nutrition education was being offered in schools; and whether the community offered “Active Community Programs,” such as Homemaker or craft or 4H clubs, or Public Health Programs.307 The students were required to report on the adequacy and distribution of “Food Allowance (social assistance),” and estimate the percentage of residents receiving assistance or food vouchers, and include assessment of whether “budgeting or money management advice [was] given to recipients by anyone.”308 Like the 1967 students, Cole’s team was expected to follow the three home visit plan for nutrition surveying, where they were to observe food habits, but in addition, students were asked to specifically gain the “Opinions of Indians and white residents, on [the] general situation” and obtain “cost data from stores.”309 Cole’s recommendations for students under the section “Guideline as to Approach” advises, “Visit the Chief first, to explain why you have come, what you are doing and how long you will stay,” then return “again after calculating the food costs, discuss the results with him and see if he suggests meeting with others (like the health or welfare committee or other councilors).” If he does not, “visit these other contacts through the nurse or Community Health Worker.”310 It appears problematic that a Chief would not be contacted and advised on such a study in his/her community in advance, particularly one that aims to intimately study the people in his community, their diets and the foods available to them, and the health and nutrition services available. That students seem to be getting advice to attempt to gain access to local leaders through the Chief, and if this fails, to go around the Chief and use MSB avenues to get a meeting with them, speaks to the ongoing problem of mistrust and sense of intrusion

307 Cole, Appended Document “Rough Outline,” 1. 308 Cole, Appended Document “Rough Outline,” 1. 309 Cole, Appended Document “Rough Outline,” 2. 310 Cole, Appended Document “Rough Outline,” 3.

85 by MSB and DIAND into Indigenous communities.311 Introducing themselves to the Chief, and being introduced to community members by visiting residents through “accompany[ing] the nurse of Community Health Worker on their home visits,” are important steps not always taken in nutrition surveys during the period; however, that Cole concludes her “Guidelines as to Approach” with “Observations, problems or possible solutions should be discussed in the area before you leave, being careful not to give people the impression you are writing a report on them or interfering in their business,” reveals a more insidious project at work.312 Essentially, it appears from this and similar studies that, in addition to efforts at nutritional status regulation, there was concern that community food allowance or social assistance was being reported by Bands as insufficient. Instead of attempting to increase payments, MSB nutrition educators put blame on poor spending habits of Indigenous mothers. MSB employees and their students were, therefore, tasked with pushing for better budgeting skills instead of advocating for increased support.313 As Patricia Mills writes in her report to the Medical Services Branch, “data was collected at 16 Indian Reservations in the northern region of the Province.” In another more formal report, she adds that the data would “be used by the Treasury Board of Canada in adjusting the northern allowance.”314 Specifically, “Each student was to visit specified reserves and collect price information at the Hudson’s Bay Company Store, and any other enterprise on the reserve.”315 The most important part of the students’ job for Mills was “talking to various people, not only about the prices, but also – food availability regarding the existence and use of

311 See, for example, Morris Isaac, “Introducing Fort Hope,” The Indian News 12, no. 1 (April 1969), 5, concerning Chief Louis Waswa’s concerns about DIAND interfering in his community without consulting with the people first, which is discussed in more detail later in this chapter. 312 Cole, Appended Document “Rough Outline,” 3, emphasis added. 313 For a useful discussion of Indigenous people and state administration of social assistance, relief, welfare, and rations in Canada, see Shewell, ‘Enough to Keep Them Alive’. 314 Patricia H. Mills, “Collection of Northern Food Prices by Summer Students,” 1, RG 029, ACC: W84-85/458, Box 11, File 144-2-5 vol. 1 Recruiting Nutritionists (1968-01-01 to 1972- 02-28), MSB, DHW, LAC, Winnipeg, MB. 315 Mills, “Transportation Influences Food Costs,” 1. Many communities in the period had a local Bay store, as well as a smaller competing store that was independently owned and where prices were considerably higher .

86 natural foods in the area (fishing, hunting, berry picking, etc.).”316 Students used the nutrition pamphlet, “Good Food: Good Health!” to calculate the “minimum schedule of food costs” based on the “minimum daily requirements of an adult, child, and infant.”317 A small team of summer students completing nutrition internships in August 1968 also mentioned using the “Good Food: Good Health!” pamphlet as a point of reference and guidance. The three Misericordia General Hospital dietetic interns, Sharon Spence, Marilyn Jackson, and Louisa Macario, visited Peguis and Roseau River, again led by MSB employee Marion Thomson (Zone Nutritionist).318 As Spence documented in her hand-written report on “Food Costs of the Koostatak General Store,” price data “was derived from a quick survey of the [store]. The quantities required per person are derived from ‘Good Food: Good Health,’ so as to provide adequate nutrition, at a minimum cost.”319 Pre-dating Health Canada’s more recent move to create the publication, Eating Well with Canada's Food Guide - First Nations, Inuit and Métis,320 the Department of National Health and Welfare printed the small “Good Food: Good Health!” pamphlet in 1967.321 “Good Food: Good Health!”, modelled on Canada’s Food Guide and printed in full-colour with illustrations throughout, laid out the then five food groups and presented optimal eating and shopping specifically for an Indigenous consumer. The six-panel pamphlet features illustrations of Indigenous-looking family members of different ages in playful, physical contact in proximity to

316 Mills, “Collection of Northern Food Prices by Summer Students,” 1. 317 Mills, “Transportation Influences Food Costs,” 1. 318 M. Thomson, Memorandum to the Zone Director, Dr. M.J. DeKoven, Manitoba Zone, August 27, 1968, “Public Health Experience for Dietetic Interns,” RG 029, ACC: W84-85/458, Box 11, File 144-2-5 vol. 1 Recruiting Nutritionists (1968-01-01 to 1972-02-28), MSB, DHW, LAC, Winnipeg, MB. 319 Sharon Spence, “Food Costs of the Koostatak General Store,” RG 029, ACC: W84- 85/458, Box 11, File 144-2-5 vol. 1 Recruiting Nutritionists (1968-01-01 to 1972-02-28), MSB, DHW, LAC, Winnipeg, MB. See Table I at the end of this chapter for a sampling of Spence’s data. 320 See “Eating Well with Canada's Food Guide - First Nations, Inuit and Métis,” Health Canada, https://www.canada.ca/en/health-canada/services/food-nutrition/canada-food- guide/eating-well-with-canada-food-guide-first-nations-inuit-metis.html, accessed August 14, 2018. 321 Canada, “Good Food: Good Health!,” pamphlet, RG 029, ACC: W84-85/458, Box 11, File 144-2-4 vol. 1 Nutrition Surveys – Surveys (1972-01-01 to 1973-03-31), MSB, DHW, LAC, Winnipeg, MB.

87 food. One image, for example, depicts a woman in an apron serving a plate of prepared food to a young woman or girl, while a man smiling nearby holds a happy looking young child.322 Other illustrated images, aimed at incorporating Indigenous foodways and some more readily accessible community store offerings, provide visual guidelines to promote “eat[ing] foods from each group every day,” such as a transparent paper grocery bag filled with suggested purchases, such as powdered milk, fresh carrots, a goose, a fish, eggs, and an apple.323 These accompany two charts: “Babies Under 18 Months Need these Foods,” and “Here is a chart to help you shop wisely for your family.”324 Each lays out food recommendations with detailed choices and serving sizes from the five food groups, with guidelines for how much family members from each age group need every week. The pamphlet encourages, “Take this folder to the store when you buy your supplies! Some foods like flour, sugar, dried beans, etc., are cheaper when you buy a month’s supply at one time … ask the man at the store.”325 As Home Economics summer students revealed in both the 1967 and 1971 surveys, the “man at the store” was also part of the problem with creating a state of food insecurity on Reserves. Commenting on the Bay stores present in many northern communities in 1971, Patricia Mills writes, “Each store varies from the next in relation to products stocked on the shelves. Many residents in these communities complain that variability is very dependent on the store manager himself.”326 Martin Defalco and Willie Dunn’s documentary, The Other Side of the Ledger, argues that this was the situation in most HBC-operated northern stores. At forty-three minutes in, they show images of the HBC store in Shamattawa, MB (which the 1971 Home Economics team also surveyed) and explain how the company holds a “virtual monopoly” in northern communities and continued to set the prices of goods sold, “and the prices are high. Many items cost double what they do in the south.”327 Then HBC Divisional Manager for

322 Canada, “Good Food: Good Health!,” pamphlet inside spread 2. 323 Canada, “Good Food: Good Health!,” pamphlet inside spread 1. 324 Canada, “Good Food: Good Health!,” pamphlet inside spread 1-2. 325 Canada, “Good Food: Good Health!,” pamphlet inside spread 1. Punctuation as in original. 326 Mills, “Collection of Northern Food Prices by Summer Students,” 5. 327 Martin Defalco and Willie Dunn, directors, The Other Side of the Ledger: An Indian View of the Hudson’s Bay Company (Ottawa: National Film Board of Canada, 1972). The documentary,

Regional Stores, Robert Cook, asserted that the price markups were standard across all stores, but blamed freight charges on disparities. Since the stores are mostly “owned and operated by a giant corporation,” Mills found this situation “illogical.” While “it would seem reasonable that a consistent pattern of control and operation would exist across the north,” she observed, “this does not seem to be the case.”328 In sum, she writes that “Products most frequently absent from store shelves are those which many southern residents take for granted”; for instance, the price of poor-quality cuts of meats was often double that of prices in Winnipeg. Consequently, “one would seemingly be paying for a sirloin steak, but actually purchasing ground chuck.”329 Sharon Parker attributes these problems to the inflated role a store manager plays in his community: “I think Bay Managers could be pressured or urged to order more fresh fruit, vegetables and dairy products because very often food availability varies according to the individual manager’s policy.”330 Of her visit to Nelson House in 1971, she writes, “according to residents there, the Bay store has improved remarkably since the arrival of the new manager,” and “for the first time in years (?) they regularly receive fresh produce.” She argues that “If one manager can order fresh produce there is no reason for another in the same locality failing to do so.”331 Mills similarly points to management at the Bay stores as a central figure in problems of food prices being high and highly variable, and food availability being inconsistent. She writes: “These problems could perhaps be eliminated or at least improved. By sending copies of each report to the Hudson Bay Co. management.”332 Local store managers and their outlets were inspected at least on occasion, as documented in Pukatawagan in July 1971: “The general condition of the Bay was excellent,” Mills shares in her report on visiting the community.

narrated by then NIB president George Manuel, marked national celebrations of the HBC on its 300th anniversary. 328 Mills, “Collection of Northern Food Prices by Summer Students,” 5. 329 Mills, “Collection of Northern Food Prices by Summer Students,” 5. 330 Sharon Parker, “Evaluation of Summer Employment – Students in Nutrition – 1971,” 3, RG 029, ACC: W84-85/458, Box 11, File 144-2-5 vol. 1 Recruiting Nutritionists (1968-01-01 to 1972-02-28), MSB, DHW, LAC, Winnipeg, MB. 331 Parker, “Evaluation of Summer Employment,” 3. 332 Patricia Mills, “Evaluation of Summer Employment – Students in Nutrition – 1971,” 3, RG 029, ACC: W84-85/458, Box 11, File 144-2-5 vol. 1 Recruiting Nutritionists (1968-01-01 to 1972-02-28), MSB, DHW, LAC, Winnipeg, MB.

However, she adds, “upon talking to the Community Development officer the next day,” she was informed “that disorder usually prevails in the store and that an inspection by the Bay manager’s superiors was due shortly, thus causing a change in habits.”333 In her Summer Employment Questionnaire, Mills further suggests a follow-up “conference in which an exchange of ideas and possible remedies could be discussed by concerned parties.”334 While details provided were scarce in comparison, Wolczuk and Trudeau noted in their 1967 survey report that, “In Split Lake, the problem seems to be availability. The store does not have a regular stock of fresh fruits and vegetables or fresh meat,” which was attributed to “air freight services [which] is [sic] poor and there are no refrigeration facilities.”335 The 1971 summer students survey of foods available in local stores often involved meeting with store managers and community members about possible factors in high and variable prices or price fluctuations. As Mills reported, store managers regularly identified “freight charges, means of transportation and the difficulties involved in transportation” as factors in variable pricing at grocery stores.336 Various means of transportation included train, air freight, boat, and tractor train, and could change depending on time of year and type of goods shipped (for instance, tractor train was the most frequently used during winter months). A more expensive option, air freight, was often used in many communities to supply fresh produce and other perishables, but “many storekeepers in the north report that products arrive frozen during the winter months due to delays in air traffic.”337 In addition, as at present, community access presents limitations to means of transport, since not all communities were (or are today338) equipped with airstrips or rail access, and watercraft was the only and most

333 Patricia Mills, Memorandum to the Regional Nutritionist, July 22, 1971, “Food Price Data – Pukatawagan, Manitoba,” 1, RG 029, ACC: W84-85/458, Box 11, File 144-2-4 vol. 1 Nutrition Surveys – Reserves (1970-12-01 to 1971-12-31), MSB, DHW, LAC, Winnipeg, MB. 334 Mills, “Evaluation of Summer Employment,” 3. 335 Trudeau and Wolczuk, “Preliminary Report on Nutrition Survey 1967,” 5. 336 Mills, “Transportation Influences Food Costs,” 3. 337 Mills, “Transportation Influences Food Costs,” 3. 338 See Conclusion of this thesis.

90 expensive shipping option. Mills shares that one pilot who operated a watercraft told her “his small four-seater plane was worth $45,000. with an additional $8,000. for the floats alone.”339 Managers of local stores saw freight charges and shipping complications as cause for eliminating certain foods or offering them only ‘on demand’. As Parker reports of her August 1971 visit to St. Theresa, the local Bay store “was low in stock.” There was no fresh fruit, vegetables, milk, or produce, and a limited supply of canned vegetables, but the store offered a good selection of meats, frozen vegetables, canned fruits, and ‘convenience foods’.340 The manager explained to her “that only limited quantities of groceries can be ordered at a time, due to spoilage.” He only ordered fresh milk up to a maximum of twelve quarts, and shared that “fresh milk is ordered on demand only.” All of his groceries were brought from Winnipeg mostly by air freight, and infrequently by tractor trains.341 By comparison, Parker visited the other smaller St. Theresa store, The Free Trader, which offered a “limited selection of canned goods and fresh fruit, and fresh meat,” however, “No fresh vegetables are ever ordered.” Regarding freight costs specifically, the owner explained that “the store carries no flour as freight charges on heavy goods such as flour are too high.”342 Parker’s summary of her July 1971 visit to Cross Lake revealed a very different shipping set-up and, therefore, grocery offerings. She explains that the Cross Lake Bay store is the largest visited so far, and it was “well organized and offered an excellent selection of fresh fruit, vegetables, meat and canned goods.”343 The variety of fresh produce available in the Cross Lake location – fresh fruit “of good quality” including grapes, peaches, and grapefruit, while vegetables “consisted of tomatoes, corn on the cob, lettuce, cabbage, turnips, parsnips,

339 Mills, “Transportation Influences Food Costs,” 4. Punctuation as in original. 340 Sharon Parker, Memorandum to the Regional Nutritionist, August 16, 1971, “Food Price Data & Food Availability Report Re: St. Theresa – August 10, 1971,” 1, RG 029, ACC: W84- 85/458, Box 11, File 144-2-4 vol. 1 Nutrition Surveys – Reserves (1970-12-01 to 1971-12-31), MSB, DHW, LAC, Winnipeg, MB. 341 Parker, “Food Price Data & Food Availability Report Re: St. Theresa,” 1. 342 Parker, “Food Price Data & Food Availability Report Re: St. Theresa,” 2. 343 Sharon Parker, Memorandum to the Regional Nutritionist, July 30, 1971, “Food Price Data - Cross Lake,” 1, RG 029, ACC: W84-85/458, Box 11, File 144-2-4 vol. 1 Nutrition Surveys – Reserves (1970-12-01 to 1971-12-31), MSB, DHW, LAC, Winnipeg, MB.

91 radishes, celery, carrots and cucumbers” – was shipped from The Pas rather than Winnipeg.344 The dairy supply – “approximately 500 pounds of butter; one hundred quarts of milk a week” – arrived from Thompson, while meat was freighted from Wabowden by air.345 Like other smaller stores, Cross Lake’s small private grocer kept limited offerings on shelves behind the counter, with no fresh vegetables and limited other groceries.346 At the Pukatawagan Bay store, Mills found that fresh milk was not available, which the manager reported was due to lack of demand.347 Instead, he offered small quantity packages of powdered milk, which Mills lamented would “of course… hinder the budget wise homemaker who buys in quantity to save on her shopping dollar.” Regarding prices, Mills spoke with the local Community Development Officer’s wife, “who apparently is very budget conscious,” and she shared that “price fluctuation at the Bay was extreme, changing from week to week with no apparent reason.”348 She explained that one week she bought dish detergent for $0.69 then saw the same item priced at $1.09 just a week later. In Mills’ estimation, the store carried a reasonable selection of canned goods, with fruits “available in most types and vegetables lacked only in a few of the more uncommon varieties,” while fresh produce “was the most limited commodity in the store.” She noted that “potatoes, onions and lettuce were the only signs of fresh vegetables,” while apples were the only fruits she could find. The store manager, again, attributed this to lack of customer interest, reporting that “fresh vegetables go to waste on the shelves.” 349 Milk was also difficult to purchase in Lynn Lake, where the local Bay store and a private store, Central Meat & Groceries, both otherwise had goods available in sizes and varieties comparable to any of Winnipeg’s chain supermarkets.350 According to the community’s DIAND office secretary, “a homemaker herself,” fresh milk was a concern, as it was available but “most

344 Parker, “Food Price Data - Cross Lake,” 1. 345 Parker, “Food Price Data - Cross Lake,” 1. 346 Parker, “Food Price Data - Cross Lake,” 2. 347 Mills, “Food Price Data – Pukatawagan, Manitoba,” 1. 348 Mills, “Food Price Data – Pukatawagan, Manitoba,” 1. 349 Mills, “Food Price Data – Pukatawagan, Manitoba,” 1. 350 Patricia Mills, Memorandum to the Regional Nutritionist, July 12, 1971, “Food Survey – Lynn Lake,” 1, RG 029, ACC: W84-85/458, Box 11, File 144-2-4 vol. 1 Nutrition Surveys – Reserves (1970-12-01 to 1971-12-31), MSB, DHW, LAC, Winnipeg, MB.

92 often during the summer months, was found to be sour” due to shipping issues. The secretary reported, however, that “many of the homemakers alleviated the problem by freezing their milk during the year and buying new shipments as soon as they arrived at Lynn Lake.”351 While the South Indian Lake Bay store sold fresh milk at $0.59 a quart, as well as fresh butter, the manager did not carry margarine, as it would not sell.352 Other communities, like Little Grand Rapids, show how not only price points, but also products available, were inconsistent in comparison to offerings in other locales. As was the case for the Bay store, which was located on the opposite side of the river from the Reserve, lack of a cooler accounted for some foods being unavailable, such as fresh milk, while other items like eggs and cheese were stored on shelves amongst cans and packaged foods. The competing store, MacRae’s Post, which was operated by a Mennonite Mission and situated on the same side of the river as the majority of the residents, had supplies flown in on a plane owned by the store manager.353 MacRae’s was seen as having a location advantage, which could indicate more residents shopped there, but it is unclear which store was more affordable. The Bay, in spite of its limitations, was reported as having a better selection of most foods,

351 Mills, “Food Survey – Lynn Lake,” 1, 352 Sharon Parker, Memorandum to the Regional Nutritionist, July 9, 1971, “South Indian Lake re Food Price Survey and Food Availability, July 5th, 1971,” 1, RG 029, ACC: W84-85/458, Box 11, File 144-2-4 vol. 1 Nutrition Surveys – Reserves (1970-12-01 to 1971-12-31), MSB, DHW, LAC, Winnipeg, MB. 353 Lynne Cole, Memorandum to the Regional Director, July 27, 1971, “Food Price Data – Little Grand Rapids,” 1, RG 029, ACC: W84-85/458, Box 11, File 144-2-4 vol. 1 Nutrition Surveys – Reserves (1970-12-01 to 1971-12-31), MSB, DHW, LAC, Winnipeg, MB. According to the Mennonite Heritage Centre Archives (MHCA) in Winnipeg, one retail store in Pauingassi, the Pauingassi Trading Post, was “founded in 1970 by Christian Investors in Education, Inc.” According to the Manitoba Archival Information Network, this organization started in 1965, and grew out of a Mennonite men’s organization from Bethel Mennonite Church. The group’s largest project was the 1970 purchase of the Pauingassi Trading Post. MHCA reports that in 1980, the trading post was sold “to 13 of its members. Eventually it was sold to the local tribal council. Sometime during the 1990s it had a fire and closed.” Mennonite Church, Mennonite Heritage Centre Archives, “Pauingassi Trading Post” fonds, accessed April 28, 2020, http://www.mennonitechurch.ca/programs/archives/holdings/organizations/PauingassiTrading Post_fonds.htm. These fonds deal with the period from 1980-1989, so the collection documents its operations later than the period discussed here. See also Manitoba Archival Information Network, Christian Investors in Education, accessed April 28, 2020, https://main.lib.umanitoba.ca/christian-investors-in-education-fonds.

93 including a wide range of fresh produce options, while MacRae’s offered a more limited supply: “no canned baby foods, powdered milk, cheese, margarine, or dry cereals other than the variety pak [sic] was available.” Sharon Spence’s earlier survey of the Koostatak General Store, which served residents of Fisher River and Peguis in 1968, shows a range of grocery items were available for those able to get there.354 As with MacRae’s and the Bay in Little Grand Rapids, and Koostatak General Store, the location of a store within or near a community also had an impact on what people could purchase, as well as what they could, or would, pay for food. Price variances and discrepancies, then, not only presented themselves in terms of affordability, but involved other barriers that prevented or made difficult access to foods. Unlike the Free Trader store in St. Theresa Point, where prices were missing and items were stored behind the counter355 (which operated similarly to the private Cross Lake grocer, and K and M Marketing Store in Nelson House, which housed limited food offerings on shelves or in freezers behind the counter),356 prices at the Cross Lake Bay store were clearly displayed on easily accessible grocery items. Yet, with all of its clearly marked and neatly displayed grocery offerings, the Cross Lake Band Manager explained to Parker that The Bay store “raises prices on staples when the welfare is distributed.”357 St. Theresa Point’s CHR also reported that their community’s Bay store “raises prices on goods when welfare checks are distributed,” and that “the community was dissatisfied with the Bay prices but were ‘forced’ to shop at the Bay as the free trader’s prices are even higher.”358 Parker also reported that the Cross Lake Band began two community garden projects in 1970, and community members were able to purchase vegetables at a lower price than that offered by The Bay store.359 The project was expected to

354 Spence, “Food Costs of the Koostatak General Store.” See Table I: Sample of Food Prices at Koostatak General Store, Koostatak Manitoba, 1968, at the end of this chapter for details. 355 Parker, “Food Price Data & Food Availability Report Re: St. Theresa,” 2. 356 Sharon Parker, Memorandum to the Regional Nutritionist, July 22, 1971, “Food Price Data & Food Availability Re: Nelson House,” 1-2, RG 029, ACC: W84-85/458, Box 11, File 144-2-4 vol. 1 Nutrition Surveys – Reserves (1970-12-01 to 1971-12-31), MSB, DHW, LAC, Winnipeg, MB. 357 Parker, “Food Price Data - Cross Lake,” 3. 358 Parker, “Food Price Data & Food Availability Report Re: St. Theresa,” 2. 359 Parker, “Food Price Data - Cross Lake,” 3. This forms part of a larger discussion in the following chapter on how communities handled issues of food insecurity.

94 continue the following year, which seemingly reflects a demand for more affordable and accessible nutritious food offerings, and demonstrates that community members were not passively accepting their circumstances. In addition, the Band Manager indicated that a road connecting the community to Wabowden might be constructed within two to three years, “permitting the residents to shop outside the community.”360 In addition to their attention to food availability and pricing, the 1971 food and transportation cost analyses survey showed how mothers, who were perceived as providing inadequate nutrition to their children, were circumvented by Field and Public Health Nurses, nutritionists in communities, and DIAND influence in schools. For example, in the “Rough Outline” list of guidelines for the survey project, students were asked to gather information on “Type and distribution of vitamin and Fe supplements,” specifically regarding preschool and school-aged children, prenatal women, and school programs.361 As Patricia Mills summarized, the students collected details of “vitamin supplement distribution, as well as programs on nutrition education.” She reported that at Nelson House and Oxford House, “a system of vitamin supplement distribution was in operation,” specifically the monthly ‘Well Baby Clinics’ held in the communities “provide a means of distributing vitaminized biscuits by Indian Affairs.” She notes, however, that these were “not compulsory and distribution is left up to the discretion of the individual teacher.”362 This was also addressed in reports on individual communities. In her report on Nelson House, Sharon Parker writes that school-age children “all receive chewable multi-vitamins ferrsol [sic] at the baby clinics,” and at school, “vitamin biscuits distributed by Indian Affairs.” The Kindergarten teacher explained that grades one and two all received the biscuits,” however, “she said that the other grades may or may not have gotten the biscuits as the distribution was left up to the teachers’ discretion.”363 “Prenatals,” she writes, “receive prenavite tablets, iron supplements and ferrous gluconate. If the mother is very anemic, she receives extra muscular iron twice a week.”

360 Parker, “Food Price Data - Cross Lake,” 3. 361 Cole, “Appended Document “Rough Outline,” 1. 362 Mills, “Collection of Northern Food Prices by Summer Students,” 2. 363 Parker, “Food Price Data & Food Availability Re: Nelson House,” 2.

In South Indian Lake, Parker reported that school-aged children were “administered chewable multi-vitamins supplement at school by the teachers. Infants receive iron and vitamin supplement from the nurses.”364 In Brochet, children were receiving multi-vitamins in school, but Parker noted, “nurses are mainly concerned with preschoolers and infants. All infants are given iron supplements.”365 In addition, some communities and schools ran lunch services and other programs to feed and supplement the diets of children. For example, Nelson House ran a school lunch program that had been in operation since 1970, where fifty-four children who were all bused in from other communities were participants.366 Unable to secure parent volunteers to help run the program, a school teacher and a member of the school committee ran the program for a small stipend of $17.50 weekly. Lunches consisted of hot soup, “either chicken noodle or beef noodle” from dry soup mixes, bread and margarine, powdered milk, crackers, and vitamin biscuits. Fundraising bingos and film screenings raised funds for the school committee to purchase the bread, margarine, and crackers, while soup, powdered milk, and vitamin biscuits were provided by DIAND.367 Brochet at the time was noted as not having such a program in place, as all of the school children ate lunches at home; however, whether other communities surveyed in 1971 had lunch programs at school is unclear. 368 Similarly, as mentioned, it was concern over mothers not administering nutritional foods and proper vitamin supplements that brought three summer dietetic interns from Misericordia General Hospital in Winnipeg, MB, to Peguis, Fisher River, and Roseau River First Nations in August 1968. Focused specifically on iron and iron-rich foods, the small team, led by Zone Nutritionist Marion Thomson, “planned a display of foods rich in iron for the pediatric clinic at Roseau River,” where “interns took turns explaining the display to mothers and older

364 Parker, “South Indian Lake re Food Price Survey,” 2. 365 Sharon Parker, Memorandum to the Regional Nutritionist, June 21, 1971, “Report: Brochet Food Price Data and Food Availability,” 2, RG 029, ACC: W84-85/458, Box 11, File 144- 2-4 vol. 1 Nutrition Surveys – Reserves (1970-12-01 to 1971-12-31), MSB, DHW, LAC, Winnipeg, MB. 366 Parker, “Food Price Data & Food Availability Re: Nelson House,” 3. 367 Parker, “Food Price Data & Food Availability Re: Nelson House,” 3. 368 Parker, “Report: Brochet Food Price Data and Food Availability,” 2.

96 children.”369 Intern Sharon Spence explained the display and its reception by local women: “actual foods in front of [the mothers] on the table were what they looked at and next was the picture models”; however, they “took little notice of the graph version of Fe requirements.”370 Intern Marilyn Jackson found that “the older children were especially interested in reading pamphlets that were provided at the clinic we attended and were also willing to listen to what we had to say about iron and foods containing this nutrient.” Moreover, she notes that the children’s ‘attitude’ led to a discussion after the team left the clinic “on the value of teaching these children various aspects of menu planning and getting them to plan a series of meals providing the required nutrients and using the foods that they were accustomed to eating.”371 Jackson felt confident that her proposed program “could be of great value,” but mostly saw it as “a really great experience for all of the internes [sic] in the city to be involved.”372 The summer interns also revealed significant details of what they saw of material life in Indigenous communities in this period. In her self-appointed role as anthropologist, Jackson ventured into sticky territory when she used the opportunity of visiting “two reserves,” one in southern Manitoba and one in the north, “to observe Indian health and nutrition” and “to make comparisons between the two groups.” She reported that the interns “found this very useful” as “the northern Indians did not appear to be as poor as those in the south and that their life was more sophisticated.” While it’s not entirely clear what this might have meant to Jackson, she seems to have read level of participation in community development programs and initiatives as an indication of ‘sophistication’. Focusing on housing, and the work assigned to male CHRs in particular, Jackson evaluated each community’s level of success based on her brief impression of housing, running water, and sanitation.373 As Spence revealed, the interns had limited contact with community residents: “It was too bad that we were not able to speak

369 Thomson, “Public Health Experience for Dietetic Interns,” 1. 370 Sharon Spence, “Report on Public Health Week – August 12-16,” Submitted to Marion Thomson, Zone Nutritionist, RG 029, ACC: W84-85/458, Box 11, File 144-2-5 vol. 1 Recruiting Nutritionists (1968-01-01 to 1972-02-28), MSB, DHW, LAC, Winnipeg, MB. 371 Marilyn Jackson, “Dietetic Interneship [sic] Phase II: Public Health Experience, August 1968,” 1-2. RG 029, ACC: W84-85/458, Box 11, File 144-2-5 vol. 1 Recruiting Nutritionists (1968- 01-01 to 1972-02-28), MSB, DHW, LAC, Winnipeg, MB. 372 Jackson, “Dietetic Interneship [sic] Phase II,” 2. 373 Jackson, “Dietetic Interneship [sic] Phase II,” 1.

97 to some Indians and ask them pertinent questions.”374 Jackson, however, did meet with some families in Peguis,375 and in concluding her report to Thomson she wrote, “I really feel that this week was a truly valuable experience in that it made us all aware that there are still people in the country who are not living at the same standard as we are,” and “that a great deal needs to be done to help these people to better their standard of living.” She adds that the experience “brought the fact that there are actually many Indians in our country to our minds and gave us a great deal to think about,” even “cultivating” in the interns “an interest in the ‘Indian problem’ in Canada.”376 Through their limited interactions with Indigenous people in the communities, students from Winnipeg were forced to reckon, at least briefly, with many of the preconceived notions they brought to communities surveyed. And yet, not surprisingly, they continued to write through the language of the assigned reading materials that informed their travels to First Nations communities. Intern Louisa Macario helpfully reported back to Thomson on the assigned readings, which included the article “No Longer Captain,” by P. E. Moore, and also “The Need for Social Anthropological Outlook in Community Nutrition Programs,” by Ethel Martens.377 That these two MSB employees were the guiding voices of the new generation of nutritionists-in-training is not surprising. Further, Martens’ argument for compelling a community ‘in need of’ a nutrition program to “be motivated to make changes in their way of life,” which should not be “imposed upon the community,” but “rather integrated into the cultures through acceptable activities,” reflects her confusing and conflicting rhetoric in training new CHRs during the same period.378

374 Spence, “Report on Public Health Week – August 12-16,” 1. 375 See discussion later in this chapter regarding visiting with an elderly couple in Peguis and the issues of transportation to the Koostatak General Store up the hill from the couple’s family home. Jackson, “Dietetic Interneship [sic] Phase II,” 8. 376 Jackson, “Dietetic Interneship [sic] Phase II,” 2-3. 377 P.E. Moore, “No Longer Captain: A History of Tuberculosis and its Control Amongst Canadian Indians,” CMAJ/JAMC 84 no. 18 (May 6, 1961): 1012–1016; Ethel G. Martens, “The Need for Social Anthropological Outlook in Community Nutrition Programs,” Canadian Nutrition Notes 22, No. 10 (1966). 378 Louisa Di Nicola (Macario), Untitled Report to Marion Thomson, Zone Nutritionist, 5. RG 029, ACC: W84-85/458, Box 11, File 144-2-5 vol. 1 Recruiting Nutritionists (1968-01-01 to

In many cases, the perspectives of teams of interns and students present a picture of dire economic circumstances, largely stemming from high food costs in northern communities. Through their research, the 1971 student researchers calculated that “a family of six (two adults, three children and one infant) could live on a minimum budget of $28.52 per week – an adult requiring $5.55, child a minimum of $4.53, and an infant $3.83.”379 Based on these numbers, and calculated comparisons between store food prices in Winnipeg and those on First Nations, the team found that prices in northern Manitoba ranged from 19.5 to 120 per cent higher, “respectively, at The Pas and God’s River,” two of the locations chosen for the preliminary survey.380 Parker corroborates this figure, adding in her report that “food costs for a family of six range from $33.92 a week at The Pas to $62.84 a week at God’s River while the Winnipeg equivalent costs $28.52 a week.”381 Mills writes of the price variability that it was “great from one location to another,” and “showed no particular pattern according to distance from Winnipeg, or even extent of isolation.”382 A critical issue both students reported on in 1971 was the inconsistent rate of social assistance in the communities surveyed, as well as how it was paid and managed, from one community to another. Sharon Parker was confused, as “the Welfare Section of the Dept. of Indian Affairs and Northern Development have set welfare regulations,” and, as she understood

1972-02-28), MSB, DHW, LAC, Winnipeg, MB. For more details on Martens’ work with CHRs and the MSB, see McCallum, Indigenous Women, Work, and History. 379 Mills, “Transportation Influences Food Costs,” 2. 380 Mills, “Transportation Influences Food Costs,” 2. It should be noted that the list of percentages documented in Table III at the end of this chapter relies on the data from Canada, “Summary of Comparative Weekly Food Costs, Manitoba Region 1971,” RG 029, ACC: W84- 85/458, Box 11, File 144-2-4 vol. 1 Nutrition Surveys – Surveys (1972-01-01 to 1973-03-31), MSB, DHW, LAC, Winnipeg, MB. The Pas is indicated as being 18.93 percent higher than Winnipeg. Data for the Summary is interpreted using the “Good Food, Good Health!” pamphlet referenced in this chapter. Another document comparing costs in Manitoba communities, which was housed in the same RG 029 File, used the document “Healthful Eating” as a reference point for estimating costs. Because the research team regularly used and referenced the “Good Food” pamphlet, these are the numbers I have used here. 381 Sharon Parker, “Community Programs on Indian Reserves in Manitoba’s North,” 2. 382 Mills, “Transportation Influences Food Costs,” 2. For more details on specific food items available and their costs, see Tables I and II at the end of this chapter, and Table III for examples of cost percentages in northern communities compared to Winnipeg.

99 it, “welfare recipients are to receive the standard province welfare rates plus an additional increment of 25% should ‘a recipient reside in a remote area of the Province’.”383 The students, however, found this inconsistently handled, and in some case, “only permanent welfare recipients receive the additional 25% while temporary recipients do without.”384 Alternately, they found that “no set regulations are strictly adhered to and social assistance varies depending upon locality, funds available to band and the policy of an individual band’s welfare administrator.”385 Because of these discrepancies, coupled with inflated food costs, Parker reported that “cases arise such as the one in which a family of 13 receives $250.00 a month for food in a locality where prices are 70% higher than Winnipeg.” Assessing the actual minimum required for a family using the local food price data collected, “it was calculated that in actuality, the family requires approximately $440.00 a month for food.”386 These findings are consistent with Hugh Shewell’s argument that the state has used social assistance to undermine Indigenous cultures to fulfill assimilation or integration mandates, with Indigenous nutrition and food consumption in relation to disease and mortality rates historically at the centre of standardized rates and, at times, rations.387 Concerns over food prices compared to social assistance payments, which varied greatly, are detailed in several of the student reports on individual communities surveyed. “Welfare rates were found to be inadequate,” Parker reported for Cross Lake.388 She calculated that costs at the local Bay store were fifty-seven percent higher than in Winnipeg, and that an adult would need a minimum of $35.52 a month for groceries based on the “Good Food: Good Health!” pamphlet. With adults receiving only $28.60 a month in social assistance, even the

383 Parker, “Community Programs on Indian Reserves in Manitoba’s North,” 2. 384 Parker, “Community Programs on Indian Reserves in Manitoba’s North,” 2. This was the case at Cross Lake, where Parker reported that “an adult on welfare, other than permanent recipients, receives the standard rate of $28.60 per month. Permanent welfare recipients receive the standard rate plus 25%.” Parker, “Food Prices – Cross Lake,” 3. 385 Parker, “Community Programs on Indian Reserves in Manitoba’s North,” 2. 386 Parker, “Community Programs on Indian Reserves in Manitoba’s North,” 2. 387 Shewell, ‘Enough to Keep them Alive’. Especially useful is Shewell’s elaborate discussion of Indian Health Services administrators and their negotiations of relief and rations for Indigenous communities based on nutrition studies and programs. For a different analysis of these experts and their work, see Mosby, “Administering Colonial Science.” 388 Parker, “Food Prices – Cross Lake,” 3.

100 added twenty-five percent for permanent recipients just makes the minimum.389 Parker also reported that Nelson House food allowance recipients received inadequate assistance “in relation to food costs at the local stores.” She explained that a family of eight receives $200.00 monthly for both food and clothing allowance, and based on her calculations, food alone would exceed this by $52.00.390 Other communities, including Oxford House and Brochet, self- reported that the amount of assistance paid to Band members was insufficient compared with food costs. Parker also raises an interesting comparison between two communities, pointing out that “God’s River prices are 30% higher than God’s Narrows prices yet both communities receive the same welfare rate.”391 After considering this in detail, and reporting on the practical impossibility of making ends meet, students still asserted that better management of money would be the answer, not increasing assistance or allowance. This is evident in Parker’s hand-written responses to a completed summer student questionnaire, where she repeatedly argues the importance of budgeting. She writes, “I think the main concern in the north is not that the residents are not receiving sufficient social assistance, but that they do not know how to spend what they do have.” She asserts that budgeting “should be emphasized more so than it is,” as good budgeting, using good nutrition as an example of how to best spend family money, leads to spending less on groceries by making “the right food choices.”392 In spite of the clear numerical data, Parker blamed spending on “confectionaries and soft drinks” for an assisted family’s financial strain, lamenting that “a good percentage of a family’s food allowance inevitably goes toward the purchase of ‘empty calories’.”393

389 Parker, “Food Prices – Cross Lake,” 3. 390 Parker, “Food Price Data & Food Availability Re: Nelson House,” 5. 391 Parker, “Food Price Data Re: God’s Narrows, God’s River, Red Sucker,” 3. 392 Parker, “Evaluation of Summer Employment,” 5. 393 Parker, “Community Programs on Indian Reserves in Manitoba’s North,” 2. The response of Parker and others conducting such surveys mirrors similar efforts at ‘moral reform’ and ‘social uplift’ aimed at educating working class and immigrant communities in Canada on middle-class ideals since confederation. This speaks to the persistence of middle- and upper- class discourses on improvement as something achieved by choice rather than driven by circumstance. On moral reform and critiques of working-class and newcomer men and women, see for example: Lara Campbell, Respectable Citizens: Gender, Family, and Unemployment in

101

One of the goals the 1971 research team was tasked with is creating an educational nutrition pamphlet based on their data. Called “The Choice is Yours,” the pamphlet aimed, through comparison of two shopping lists and the nutritional value of each item, “to demonstrate to residents of the reserve how their food dollar could be stretched, considering food value at the same time.”394 “The Choice is Yours” is a small, four-panel pamphlet published by the Medical Services Branch of Health and Welfare, and designed by the Manitoba Department of Health’s Health Education unit.395 The cover features an illustrated open-palmed hand, facing upwards, beside a can of sliced carrots overlapping a transparent fresh carrot, which appears to have carrot slices inside of it. The images appear on a black background, with the title on the cover. The copy kept in Library and Archives Canada’s Nutrition Surveys files is black and white, and includes a hand-written note above the image, “Cross Lake Prices July 27/71.” On the inside, as Mills’ report explained, is a spread titled, “What Do You Get for your Money,” above columns with grocery lists. The left-side features prepared and packaged foods, including evaporated milk (6/16oz.), tinned raspberries or strawberries, bread, cookies, soda biscuits, corn flakes, canned ham, bacon, butter, jam, and sugar (10 lb.).396 The right-hand side shows a list comparative options that emphasizes fresh or more nutritionally sound food choices, including powdered skim milk, evaporated milk (3/16 oz. instead of six), vitaminized apple juice, onions, dates, tinned peaches, flour, rolled oats, pork livers, cheddar cheese, eggs, a series of cooking fat options (including butter again, but also less expensive margarine and

Ontario's Great Depression (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009); Gleason, Normalizing the Ideal; Iacovetta, Gatekeepers; Margaret Jane Hillyard Little, No Car, No Radio, No Liquor Permit: The Moral Regulation of Single Mothers in Ontario, 1920-1997 (Don Mills, ON.: Oxford University Press, 1998); Parr, Domestic Goods and The Gender of Breadwinners: Women, Men, and Change in Two Industrial Towns, 1880-1950 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990); Sangster, Regulating Girls and Women and Earning Respect: The Lives of Working Women in Small Town Ontario, 1920-1960 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995); Strange and Loo, Making Good; Strong-Boag, Fostering Nation? ; Valverde, The Age of Light Soap and Water. 394 Mills, “Transportation Influences Food Costs,” 1-2. 395 Canada, Medical Services Branch, “The Choice is Yours” pamphlet (Ottawa: Department of National Health and Welfare, 1971). RG 029, ACC: W84-85/458, Box 11, File 144- 2-4 1 Nutrition Surveys – Reserves, MSB, DHW, LAC, Winnipeg, MB. 396 Canada, “The Choice is Yours,” pamphlet inside spread.

102 lard), and sugar (four pounds instead of ten).397 Below each of the comparative grocery lists is a corresponding box relating food value for the list, with the left-side list coming up short in most nutritional values (calories, protein, Calcium, Iron, and vitamins A and C), where the right-hand list is presented as nutritionally complete. Hand-written prices for Cross Lake as indicated on the LAC file’s cover, taken from data presumably collected at the well-stocked Bay store detailed in Parker’s report, show a total of $21.84 for the left column, while the right would cost only $16.12. It should be noted, as well, that three items – tinned raspberries, tinned strawberries, and bacon – were not included in the left-side column with more processed and packaged foods, while the right-side price list is completed, indicating an even greater price disparity between the two grocery list choices. This practical advice on what to purchase also features a back cover list of “Words to the Wise”: “Learn what foods are best for your family,” “Make a shopping list,” “Fancy packages and packages with gifts cost more,” “Use powdered milk, uncooked cereal and margarine for savings,” “Grow a garden if possible,” “Do your own baking,” “Use wild meat, fish, berries, and greens,” and “Remember: candy, pop, and sugar are not needed for health.”398 As the Guide for nutrition educators, the Canada’s Food Guide, and the various nutritionists and dieticians involved in nutrition surveys of the period emphasized, making and adhering to shopping lists are an important part of being a ‘good mother’. While suggestions to do a cost comparison and practice indigenous foodways might be good reminders for those looking make the most economical and nutritious purchases, implying consumers are unable to understand concepts of value for money or lack awareness of products being more or less healthful ignores the very meaning of the word “choice.” A table is included at the end of this chapter with details of Cross Lake food costs in 1971. As with much educational literature from the period produced by the Medical Services Branch for Indigenous people and communities, practical advice quickly turns patronizing, as suggestions on ways to shop better for health and finances read as demeaning. Moreover, disregarding the cultural and social aspects of consumer behaviours that at times were revealed

397 Canada, “The Choice is Yours,” pamphlet inside spread. 398 Canada, “The Choice is Yours,” pamphlet back.

103 in food cost reports, the pamphlet neglects to deal with the state of food insecurity in the communities surveyed. Instead, it focuses on practical advice that seems to have been compiled separately from, rather than emerged out of, the data collection process in Manitoba communities. In most ways, it mirrors the “Good Food: Good Health!” pamphlet the students were advised to use as a point of reference. While the data collected illuminates a desperate state of food insecurity already solidly established by 1970, it also shows how, in spite of an emphasis on food costs being exponentially higher in northern Manitoba communities than in Winnipeg, students and the nutrition experts guiding their research were tasked with reporting on quantitative rather than qualitative findings. Armed with lists of grocery items, food options, community contacts, and other narrowly conceived questions that generated similarly refined answers, student researchers and their supervisors worked to fit Indigenous mothers and their families into a neatly defined “type.”399 While stores were selling the items on student survey lists, and people had food in their homes that did not meet nutrition standards, it is not that well documented what people actually had in their homes to present a clearer picture of the material conditions. Reliance on strict routines and leading questions pathologized Indigenous women, and continued to deny the structural causes of malnutrition and poverty-related illness through upholding a colonial model of health research and provision. By the 1980s, The Bay began to address some concerns of health officials, “establishing the Nutrition Upgrading Program in 1978,” which provided “information to assist residents in native communities to choose economical and nutritious foods.”400 Local retailers thus participated in nutritional uplift programs, following the lead of MSB, whose medical and nutrition ‘experts’ had already recognized dramatic dietary shifts in the postwar decades.401 Such programs attempted to manage malnutrition and food insecurity in northern communities based on a colonial model, which sought to reform and discipline diet.402 There was, therefore,

399 See Metropolitan Health Service, “Guide to Nutrition Education in Home Visiting,” 1. As discussed, the document provides nutrition educators with a list of the three types of mothers they will encounter, each of which will be in need of their help. 400 Bone, Changes in Country Food Consumption, 28. 401 See The Indian News 2, no. 2 (1956): 1. 402 Consistent with this approach, men and boys were encouraged to labour as agriculturalists, while women and girls were taught domestic duties such as how to feed a

104 not only a perceived health crisis, but a legitimate increase in health problems in some communities due in large part to a shifting diet and the challenges imposed by the limited and expensive selections provided by northern grocery stores. Although this was recognized earlier in the postwar decades by IAB medical and nutrition experts who neglected to improve the situation – instead, taking advantage of it for research purposes – in the 1960s and 1970s, the crisis of food security in northern communities continued to be documented and queried quantitatively as if it were something born anew each decade. As DNHW launched a new program aimed at uplifting national health through a sweeping nutrition survey and subsequent reforms to Canada’s Food Guide and related literature, Indigenous people in Canada were studied and surveyed separately from non-Native Canadians without recognition of the material conditions highlighted in food disparity research conducted by fellow MSB employees. As the following chapter shows, many communities worked through the decades to find alternative models and opportunities to secure safe, affordable, and nutritious food for their families and their neighbours, and some found success through gardening, agriculture, food cooperatives, and other initiatives.

family. See Sarah Carter, Aboriginal People and Colonizers of Western Canada to 1900 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999); Milloy, A National Crime; Carter, Lost Harvests: Prairie Indian Reserve Farmers and Government Policy (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1990).

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Table I: Sample of Food Prices at Koostatak General Store, Koostatak Manitoba, 1968403

Product Quantity Price $

Juice - Orange 48 oz 0.50 Juice – Apple 48 oz 0.45 Juice – Tomato 20 oz 0.22 Cornflakes Cereal 8 oz 0.29 12 oz 0.39 Rice Krispie[s] Cereal 12 oz 0.53 Red River Cereal 3 lb 0.52 Bread - 0.24 Pablum 8 oz 0.38 Baby Food (type not specified) 5 oz 0.15 Milk, Evaporated 16 oz 0.20 Milk, fresh (Homo) 1 qt 0.33 Pancake Flour 3 lb 0.83 Tea (loose) 1 lb 1.45 Miracle Whip 16 oz 0.58 Flour 50 lb 4.75 Macaroni 16 oz 0.24 Brown Sugar 5 lb 0.70 Lipton’s Soup Mix 2 pkg 0.35 Soft Drinks (type not specified)* - 0.12 Cigarettes - 0.65 Jam 24 oz 0.75 Pork & Beans, canned 14 oz 0.19 28 oz 0.38 Peas, canned 14 oz 0.27 Apricots, canned 14 oz 0.29 Plums, canned 14 oz 0.25 Canned soup, tomato 10 oz 0.17 Raisins 1 lb 0.32 Lard 1 lb 0.25 Margarine (Parkay) 1 lb 0.40 (Solo) 1 lb 0.32

403 Sharon Spence, “Food Costs of the Koostatak General Store.” This is a sample of the larger data set compiled by Sharon Spence during her Summer Dietetic Internship with MSB, August 12-15, 1968 in Peguis, where residents seem to have been leaving their community and purchasing groceries from the Koostatak General Store. Prices would have been in Canadian Dollars, and while they don’t paint a complete picture of relative or comparative food prices, they are better contextualized when referenced against Table II: Sample of Food Prices at Two Cross Lake Grocery Stores, Cross Lake Manitoba, 1971.

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Butter 1 lb 0.75 Hamburger 1 lb 0.80 Bacon 1 lb 0.65 Baloni [sic] 1 lb 0.45 Eggs (quality and size not specified) 1 dozen 0.45 Cheese (type not specified) Bulk by the pound 0.80 Chix (frozen) 1 lb 0.58 * Baby food type not specified in “Food Costs” list, but Spence continues on the following page to provide a sample of a shopping list using the “Good Food: Good Health!” pamphlet, which indicates she priced out “strained pure meats” for baby food in a 5 oz serving at .15/serving.404

404 Spence, “Food Costs of the Koostatak General Store,” 3.

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Table II: Sample of Food Prices at Two Cross Lake Grocery Stores, Cross Lake Manitoba, 1971405

Cross Lake Cross Lake Product Quantity Bay Store Private Store Price $ Price $ Applesauce, canned (Scotian Gold) 14 oz 0.26 - (Bright’s) 14 oz - 0.26 Fruit Cocktail, canned (Calenda) 14 oz 0.43 0.45 Pineapple, canned (Libby’s) 14 oz 0.53 - Apples, fresh 1 lb 0.36 * Bananas, fresh 2 pieces 0.49 - Oranges, fresh 1 lb 0.34 * Grapes, fresh 1 lb 0.71 - Peaches, fresh 1 lb 0.49 - Plums, fresh 1 lb 0.53 - Prunes, dry (Sugaripe) 1 lb 0.55 - Dates, dry (Martin’s) 2 lb 0.85 - Raisins (Sugaripe) 2 lb 0.95 - Raisins (Sugaripe) 1 lb - 0.45 Currants (Dot West) 16 oz 0.49 0.45 Berries, frozen - - Milk, fresh 1 qt 0.50 - Milk, canned (Pacific) 15 oz 3/0.82 0.25 ea (Carnation) 15 oz 3/0.82 - Milk, powdered (Carnation) 1 lb 0.65 - 3 lb 1.50 - Tea, loose (Bay) ½ lb 0.60 0.90 Tea Bags (Bay) 12 oz 0.79 - Coffee, instant (Maxwell) 6 oz 1.59 - Coffee, beans - - Bottle Drinks - - Kool-Aid - - Canned Drinks 7/0.99 - 0.25 ea 0.25 ea Tang Drink Crystals 3.5 oz 2/0.49 -

405 Sharon Parker, “Food Prices – Cross Lake.” This is a sample from a much larger survey of the Cross Lake Hudson’s Bay Company Store and the private, locally-owned store. Brands priced are included in parentheses when available. Data was collected by MSB Summer Nutrition Student Sharon Parker from July 27-28, 1971, and Cross Lake prices were calculated at 56.9% higher than Winnipeg prices for a minimum level of nutritional intake based on the “Good Food: Good Health!” guide. Compared to other communities, Cross Lake’s prices were below the average disparity, with communities like Split Lake, Shamattawa, and St. Theresa Point falling in the mid- to high- eighty percent range compared to Winnipeg prices. See Table III: Sample of Comparative Food Costs in Manitoba Communities, 1971. “Summary of Comparative Weekly Food Costs, Manitoba Region 1971.”

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Sun-Up 11 oz 0.75 - Juices, frozen - - Grape juice (Welch’s) 24 oz 0.79 - Orange juice (Libby’s) 19 oz 0.41 - (Standby) 48 oz 0.73 - Pineapple juice (Del Monte) 48 oz 0.63 - Tomato juice (Bright’s) 19 oz 2/0.59 - (Libby’s) 48 oz 0.62 - Dried Peas (Vu-Pak) 1 lb 2/0.45 - Dried Beans (Vu-Pak) 2 lb 0.72 - Green Beans, canned (Aylmer) 14 oz 0.29 - Kidney Beans, canned (Libby’s) 14 oz 0.32 - Pork & Beans, canned (Aylmer) 19 oz 0.39 0.35 (Libby’s) 19 oz 0.38 - Beets, canned (Aylmer) 19 oz 0.35 - Carrots, canned (York) 14 oz 2/0.63 - Tomatoes, canned (Aylmer) 19 oz 0.41 0.45 Carrots, fresh 1 lb 0.34 - Tomatoes 1 tube 0.63 - Lettuce 1 head 0.47 - Cucumbers Each 0.35 - Turnips 2 lb 0.49 - Celery 1 heart 0.85 - Bread 16 oz 0.35 0.35 Flour (Robin Hood) 25 lb 3.15 3.15 Macaroni (Constant) 1 lb - 0.30 3 lb 0.79 - Rolled Oats (Quaker) 3 lb - 0.75 5 lb 1.09 - Pablum 1 lb 0.30 - Kraft Dinner (Kraft) 7 ¼ oz 4/0.95 0.25 Canned Stew (Puritan) 1.5 lb 0.77 0.55 Canned Soup, Mushroom (Campbell’s) 10 oz 0.27 - Canned Soup, Vegetable (Campbell’s) 10 oz 4/0.85 0.27 Chicken Noodle Soup Mix (Lipton) 4.5 oz 0.31 0.28 Pancake Mix (Aunt Jemima) 1 lb 0.35 0.35 Corn Flakes Cereal (Kellogg’s) 12 oz 0.49 0.75 Rice Krispies Cereal (Kellogg’s) 12 oz 0.62 0.75 All Bran - - Baby Food, Meat (Heinz) 4 ¾ oz 5/0.76 0.16 Baby Food, Vegetable (Heinz) 4 ¾ oz 5/0.76 0.16 Baby Food, Jell-O Powder (Heinz) 3 oz 2/0.27 0.20 Bacon 1 lb 0.85 0.75 Picnic Ham 1 lb 0.66 - Hamburger 1 lb 0.95 - Pork Chops 1 lb 1.05 -

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Spork, Canned meat (Burn’s) 12 oz 0.67 - Klik, Canned meat (Canada Packers) 12 oz 0.69 0.67 Corned Beef, canned (El Rancho) 12 oz 0.97 0.72 Processed Cheese (Velveeta) 1 lb 0.99 - (Kraft) 8 oz 0.50 - Cheddar Cheese 1.5 lb 0.63 - Eggs Grade A, small 1 dozen 0.35 - Eggs Grade A, large 1 dozen - 0.60 Salmon, canned (Cloverleaf) 15 oz 1.05 - Margarine (good Luck) 1 lb 0.47 - Lard (Burns) 1 lb - 0.25 (Tenderflake) 20 lb 5.75 - Butter 1 lb 0.85 0.85 Sugar 2 lb 0.45 0.45 5 lb 0.93 0.90 10 lb 1.85 - Peanut Butter (Squirrel) 16 oz 0.69 - (York) 16 oz 0.72 - Raspberry Jam (York) 24 oz 0.97 - Strawberry Jam (York) 24 oz 0.89 0.85 * Sold for .10 a piece at the Cross Lake Private Store.

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Table III: Sample of Comparative Food Costs in Manitoba Communities, 1971406

Percentage above Location Winnipeg Food Costs The Pas 18.93 Lynn Lake 40.53 Berens River 47 Cross Lake 56.9 Norway House 59.29 Oxford House 69.5 Bloodvein 76.5 Split Lake 89.16 Garden Hill 100.8 God’s River 120.3

406 Canada, “Summary of Comparative Weekly Food Costs, Manitoba Region 1971.” This table presents a sampling of the communities included in the larger report, but helps illustrate the disparity in pricing between First Nations communities in Manitoba and Winnipeg’s average. Food costs were calculated to represent the minimum amount of food a family of six would need to purchase to follow a nutritionally adequate diet based on Good Eating with Canada’s Food Guide and the “Good Food: Good Health!” pamphlet. Prices included in the Summary document for Minimum Level of weekly costs include Winnipeg at $28.53, while Berens River in the lower range was at $41.93, Oxford House in the mid-range was $48.35, Split Lake at the higher end was $53.95, and God’s River at the extreme high was $62.84. The Pas was the least percentage of disparity, while God’s River was the greatest.

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CHAPTER THREE

FINDING ALTERNATIVES: THE GENDERED EXPERIENCE OF ADDRESSING FOOD INSECURITY IN INDIGENOUS COMMUNITIES

“…her husband was so pleased with the vegetables that next year he is planning to have his own garden.”407

As the previous chapter details, food insecurity was both deeply entrenched and increasingly damaging in many Indigenous communities in the 1960s and ‘70s. Frequent surveys of food costs in northern stores, particularly in Manitoba, showed grocery options precluded the possibility of families accessing safe, nutritious, affordable, and stable food sources as prices were often fifty to over one hundred percent higher than those in Winnipeg stores.408 Moreover, items promoted by nutrition experts – whose wisdom was being disseminated in communities through nurses, CHRs, and a range of pamphlets on nutrition and lifestyle – were rarely available, expired, or improperly stored for safe consumption.409 This chapter looks at the gendered experiences of addressing food security and food-related self-sufficiency projects. It considers community and individual responses to inflated food costs and lack of access to affordable, healthy, fresh, and/or traditional foods from the 1960s through early 1980s, with some discussion of a longer history when programs and ideologies grew out of earlier

407 J. Lawn and J. Steckle, Handbook of Nutrition Education Methods Used Successfully in Indian and Inuit Communities (Ottawa: Department of National Health and Welfare, Medical Service Branch, 1985), 29. 408 See “Table III: Sample of Comparative Food Costs in Manitoba Communities, 1971” in previous chapter. This table presents only a sampling of the communities included in the larger report, but helps illustrate the disparity in pricing between First Nations communities in Manitoba and Winnipeg’s average. Food costs were calculated to represent the minimum amount of food a family of six would need to purchase to follow a nutritionally adequate diet based on Good Eating with Canada’s Food Guide and the “Good Food: Good Health!” pamphlet. Prices included in the Summary document for Minimum Level of weekly costs include Winnipeg at $28.53, while Berens River in the lower range was at $41.93, Oxford House in the mid-range was $48.35, Split Lake at the higher end was $53.95, and God’s River at the extreme high was $62.84. The Pas was the least percentage of disparity, while God’s River was the greatest. 409 See previous footnote, as well as previous chapter for detailed discussion of food insecurity.

112 experiences. Issues concerning food security were being handled in various ways throughout Indigenous communities in the prairie provinces. These included gardening, agriculture, food cooperatives, and other initiatives that educated and united families, such as homemakers clubs. One of the most frequently promoted self-sufficiency projects was, and continues to be, kitchen and community gardens. The role of community gardens in improving nutritional status was well-established in Canadian nutrition discourse, and was evident in the many studies and surveys done on Indigenous peoples and their communities in the mid- to late-twentieth century. Gardening was also something communities themselves turned to for food, but whether the idea was community-initiated or proposed by outside influences is not always clear. For example, Medical Services Branch (MSB) summer nutrition student, Sharon Parker, reported that the Cross Lake, MB, Band began two community garden projects in 1970, and community members were able to purchase vegetables at a lower price than that offered by The Bay store.410 The project was expected to continue the following year, which seemingly reflects a demand for more affordable and accessible nutritious food offerings, and demonstrates that community members were not passively accepting their circumstances. While some communities were finding success with community gardens, like Cross Lake, others were just beginning to tend to community garden projects, such as Pukatawagan, MB, where hunting and fishing were also noted as “greatly contribut[ing] to the diets of the residents.”411 The MSB’s 1967 nutrition survey team, detailed in the previous chapter, reported that in Fort Alexander, where “diets seemed especially lacking in fresh fruits and vegetables… perhaps availability could be increased by encouraging gardening.”412 They continued, arguing the same

410 Parker, “Food Price Data - Cross Lake,” 3. 411 Mills, “Food Price Data – Pukatawagan, Manitoba,” 2. 412 Trudeau and Wolczuk, “Preliminary Report on Nutrition Survey 1967,” 3. From the previous chapter: “In 1967, two Home Economics Graduate students from the University of Manitoba, ‘employed under the Students Assistant Program’ run by the Medical Services Branch of the Department of Health and Welfare, conducted a nutritional status survey of Fort Alexander and Split Lake First Nations.” The students, Pat Wolczuk and Rosemary Trudeau, “reported that they worked under the guidance of Marion Thomson, the MB Zone Dietician for Medical Services Branch, while Donna Baxter and Dr. Shirley Weber from the University of Manitoba oversaw dietary levels and food costs.”

113 of Split Lake, but adding a vague note that “There were gardens in the community before.”413 The mention of previous gardens in Split lake invites further questions, as nutrition educators’ promotion of vegetable gardening was becoming more common in the period and had recently been taken up by Community Health Representatives intent on generating the culture of self- sufficiency desired by the MSB. Moreover, when the 1971 summer students visited the community, Pat Mills noted that the community development officer reported there were approximately ten families with gardens, where they were specifically growing potatoes.414 This was also the case in Oxford House, where ten gardens were reported in the community, with families growing turnips, carrots, and again, potatoes as the dominant crop. The CHR reported that “the growing season is very short and only root crops are adaptable,” raising a critical point, which seems to have been regularly overlooked by nutrition experts from Winnipeg or other urban centres who pressed for residents to garden.415 In addition to Manitoba, both small gardens and larger-scale agriculture across the country supplemented diets that included various quantities of food from hunting, fishing, and purchased groceries in Indigenous communities. In British Columbia, Mary Ellen Kelm shows that some Indigenous women “grew vegetables, such as beets, potatoes, corn, cabbage, onions, turnips, [and] lettuce,” while others practiced agriculture, including occasional dairying to provide both food and income.416 As early as 1954, The Indian News reported on the development of vegetable gardens linked to improved health and nutrition in Indigenous communities across Canada, particularly the prairies. In an article, “Northern Indians fight illness with aid of vegetable gardens,” The Indian News celebrated a “successful mixed farming project” started in 1950 by the Abroise Tete Noir Band in Alberta. Focusing on good nutrition as a means of fighting tuberculosis, the paper applauded the Band for adopting a “healthy, varied

413 Trudeau and Wolczuk, “Preliminary Report on Nutrition Survey 1967,” 4. 414 Patricia Mills, Memorandum to the Regional Nutritionist, July, 1971, “Split Lake & York Landing – Collection of Food Price Data,” 2, RG 029, ACC: W84-85/458, Box 11, File 144-2-4 vol. 1 Nutrition Surveys – Reserves (1970-12-01 to 1971-12-31), MSB, DHW, LAC, Winnipeg, MB. 415 Patricia Mills, Memorandum to the Regional Nutritionist, June 29, 1971, “Report – Oxford House,” 2, RG 029, ACC: W84-85/458, Box 11, File 144-2-4 vol. 1 Nutrition Surveys – Reserves (1970-12-01 to 1971-12-31), MSB, DHW, LAC, Winnipeg, MB. 416 Kelm, Colonizing Bodies, 36.

114 diet” by gardening, hence eliminating the disease entirely in the community.417 The success of the Band as agriculturalists was also measured materially, with some families becoming “self- supporting from their farming efforts [while] others are working steadily toward this goal.”418 Identified in the piece as “bandsmen,” their gendered work is presented as taking them from dependence on trapping to businessmen who have purchased and ‘privately own’ their modern farm equipment.419 In 1956, The Indian News elaborated with a more expansive discussion on Indigenous gardens and agriculture, “Northern Diet Improves as Some bands Begin Growing Vegetables.” Claiming that “the diet of centuries is being altered in Canada’s northern territories,” they asserted that “enterprising Indians are turning to agriculture to supplement the supply of fish, game and trading post goods that have been their only food through generations of following game trails.” By “choosing to follow agriculture,” the paper reported, “a number of bands and individual Indians are assuring themselves of a good supply of food, and also making profits through selling their surplus to the mining and industrial establishments that are entering the north.”420 The Indian News highlighted the successful communities of Hay River, Resolution, and Rocher River, Northwest Territories; God’s River (Shamattawa Band) and The Pas, Manitoba; Boyer River and Child’s Lake, Alberta; and James Bay and Moose Fort in Ontario. A year later, the paper reported on young “Indian boys and girls” who were members of 4-H Garden Clubs, and who had been “highly commended for the fine produce shown in Achievement Day exhibits at Cumberland House, Pemican [sic] Portage, Buffalo narrows and La Roche” in “Saskatchewan’s north country.”421 Even children were taking up the call to garden, and were applauded for demonstrating “beyond doubt that good quality vegetables can be grown in the north if an effort is made.” The piece concludes: “Fresh vegetables will do much to improve dietary conditions for Indians living in northern areas.”422

417 The Indian News 1, no. 1 (August 1954), 4. 418 The Indian News 1, no. 1 (August 1954), 4. 419 The Indian News 1, no. 1 (August 1954), 4. 420 The Indian News 2, no. 2 (May 1956), 1. 421 The Indian News 2, no. 3 (March 1957), 10. 422 The Indian News 2, no. 3 (March 1957), 10.

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During this period, agricultural practices in some Indigenous communities, ranging in size and product, are documented throughout the western provinces. In the 1950s through 1970s, larger-scale Indigenous operations were cultivating wheat, oats, barley, flax and alfalfa, while family gardens, also popular, were producing potatoes, turnips, and carrots.423 Some larger operations were also producing potatoes, such as Cowessess, SK, where in 1969, a six- family cooperative farm produced 360 tonnes of Red Norland and White Netted Gems.424 As reported in The Indian News, “George Delorme, Co-operative President and members Victor, Lloyd and Jeremy Sparvey, Norman LaRat and Norman Delorme kept the fields well cultivated and properly watered” while “Mrs. Audrey LaRat, secretary of the co-operative, kept an accurate account of everyone’s work hours.”425 The Cowessess Cooperative was formed with “assistance and encouragement” from the Mormon Church of Christ of Latter Day Saints, the Prairie Farmers Rehabilitation Association, and the Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development (DIAND). Elder Blaine Cook, “a Mormon missionary and experienced potato farmer” from Idaho, supervised the project, and Lethbridge Stake of the Church donated a potato planter to the Cooperative, while Edward Shimbashi, “church member and president of the Alberta Potato Growers’ Association, instructed the group in the building of their own storage cellar and in the grading and preparation of the potatoes for market.”426 Another successful operation, the Muskoday Band Farm, was applauded in the 1967 Indian News piece, “Saskatchewan Farm Serves as Model.”427 Chief Andrew Bear, who shared that the farm had been operating since 1962 under a Board of Directors, was also “employed as the Farm Manager.” The paper encouraged other potential farmers by detailing the start-up procedure: “The Band borrowed $20,000… by way of a Revolving Fund Loan to purchase farm equipment.” DIAND provided “a conditional grant of $10,000 to purchase 50 head of cattle and one bull, with the stipulation or promise that if they kept up the payments of the Revolving

423 The Indian News 2, no. 2 (May 1956), 5. 424 “Cowessess Reserve Project Success in First Year,” The Indian News 12, no. 9 (Dec 1969), 1. 425 “Cowessess Reserve Project Success in First Year,” 1. 426 “Cowessess Reserve Project Success in First Year,” 7. 427 “Saskatchewan Farm Serves as Model,” The Indian News 10, no. 2 (August 1967), 6, 8.

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Funds Loan they would not have to pay back the $10,000 they received for cattle.”428 The Band had already paid the loan out in full by 1965, and the farm continued to operate with cultivated farmland for growing wheat, oats, and barley, pasture land that had, in part, been broken and seeded, as well as “200 head of cattle in the Band herd.”429 The Chief reported that “the reason the farm was started was to give employment to Band Members and to teach interested people proper farming methods.”430 Highlighting the success of these projects reinforced the DIAND’s attempt to encourage agriculture on reserve lands as both a means of dietary an economic self-provision. As The Indian News, the state’s public voice on Indigenous affairs and programs, encouraged in 1969, “Federal Farm Loans [are] Available to Indians.” This bold, illustrated, front-page piece in the paper informed readers that, “Although the Farm Credit Act was amended more than six months ago to permit Indians to obtain farm loans, few have done so.”431 The piece concludes that the reason so few have taken advantage of this opportunity is a lack of awareness that farm loans had become available, and thus proceeds to promote the program and explain the application procedure. It explains, “The Farm Credit Act supplies long-term credit to Canadians on the security of their land, livestock and equipment.” Such loans “are available to Indian farmers living on reserves who have the ability to operate a farm and who have secure[d] the right to use and occupation of sufficient farmland to establish a sound farm business.” The repayment contract is explained, saying that “an Indian farmer must repay his loan in equal, annual or semi-annual payments over an agreed number of years,” warning that “adequate care of livestock and equipment is a must, as well as the use of proper farming methods.” If a farmer fails to repay his loan on time, or neglect to operate his farm as agreed, readers are warned, “he is required to relinquish the right to use the land to the Minister of Indian Affairs and Northern Development.”432 Further, speaking to possible concerns over forfeiture, The Indian News notes that “the Corporation gives every consideration to the reason why a

428 “Saskatchewan Farm Serves as Model,” 6. 429 “Saskatchewan Farm Serves as Model,” 6, 8. 430 “Saskatchewan Farm Serves as Model,” 6. 431 “Federal Farm Loans Available to Indians,” The Indian News, 12, no. 4 (July 1969), 1. 432 “Federal Farm Loans Available to Indians,” 1.

117 borrower might not have met his payments,” and of course the lenders are ready to provide guidance and counselling “to help borrowers in the successful operation of their farms.”433 While Farm Credit Loans were presented as an obvious opportunity that Indigenous farmers should be taking advantage of in 1969, the threat of relinquishment to DIAND could instill fear of familiar historical consequences of a similar program from less than a century earlier; therefore, a lack of trust might have also factored into the reluctance reported on as more neutral lack of awareness by The Indian News. Similar to the slow or reluctant responses of Indigenous people to the opportunities supposedly opened up by Farm Credit Act loans, the Home Economics summer students observed in northern Manitoba that community responses to the purported rewards of growing vegetable gardens were lukewarm, as gardens were “used in a minority of the reserves,” despite Community Health Representatives and the state actively encouraging community garden development. As MSB Summer Student Patricia Mills writes, “Community Health Workers report failure due to lack of interest or initiative on the part of residents of the community.”434 The suggestion that residents collectively, or individual women in their yards, should take up gardening in their communities was repeated extensively by various nutrition educators, summer students, MSB and DNHW literature, and CHRs. For example, the 1967 Canada’s Food Guide pamphlet suggested, “WHY NOT… Enjoy fresh vegetables in season; have a garden,” the “Guide to Nutrition Education in Home Visiting” that same year included on its list of questions for mothers, “Do they have a vegetable garden?” and the 1971 MSB shopping advice pamphlet, “The Choice is Yours,” shared under “Words to the Wise,” “Grow a Garden if possible.”435 Although some communities adopted gardening into their foodways with enthusiasm, others resisted this prescriptive outsider wisdom, which was also an added burden for already busy women. In many ways, the aims of DIAND in 1969 mirror the efforts the Lost Harvests era projects detailed by Sarah Carter, which encouraged and even imposed agriculture on Reserve

433 “Federal Farm Loans Available to Indians,” 1. 434 Mills, “Collection of Northern Food Prices by Summer Students,” 5. 435 Canada, Good Eating with Canada’s Food Guide (Ottawa: DNHW, 1967), inside panel; Canada, “Good Food: Good Health!,” pamphlet; Metropolitan Health Service of Greater Vancouver, “Guide to Nutrition Education in Home Visiting,” 2; Canada, “The Choice is Yours,” pamphlet back panel.

118 lands while ensuring their absolute failure.436 As Carter details, programs like the Home Farm Experiment in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century prairie west were part of an assimilationist agenda to encourage the settlement of Indigenous peoples onto assigned Reserve lands. Enforced by discriminatory policies of control and surveillance such as the notorious pass system, and in spite of the efforts and desire by some Bands to practice and succeed at agricultural projects, the government program ensured starvation. By the 1890s, instead of thriving as the imagined wards portrayed in Hayter Reed’s false “fancy picture of the situation,” which paraded about at the World’s Fair in Chicago or in the House of Commons in Ottawa, residents in many communities were “utterly destitute,” such as Thunderchild’s Reserve near Battleford where people were “obliged to eat leaves to keep them from hunger.”437 Even stories that promoted agriculture in The Indian News could reveal the problems and complicated history that influenced Indigenous participation. A 1966 article by File Hills Band member, writer, and activist Eleanor Brass – who was at the time an Information Officer in-training for the Department of Agriculture, and identified as the daughter of a small-scale farmer and market-garden operator – weighs the opportunities and difficulties for Indigenous farmers.438 She shares that at File Hills Colony, “some of the women took to poultry raising. Mrs. Helen Ironquil bought three hundred chicks from the hatchery.” She explains that the

436 See Sarah Carter, Lost Harvests: Prairie Indian Reserve Farmers and Government Policy (Montreal; Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1990); Carter, Aboriginal People and Colonizers of Western Canada to 1900 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999). 437 Carter, Lost Harvests, 231-232. 438 Eleanor Brass, “Discovery in Agriculture,” The Indian News 9, no. 1 (April 1966), 5. See also Maureen Lux, Medicine That Walks, 134; 229-30. She concludes with Brass’ recollections of life in File Hills Colony and as an Indigenous child, whose father was “one of the first people in the district to own a motor car,” then as a woman, who “endured the profoundly racist attitudes in Western Canadian society, in which the colour line was nearly impossible to breach. (229)” Lux writes that Brass was “one of the first children born at the File Hills Colony, which was intended to display to Canadians and the world the social and agricultural successes of Indian Affairs policy.” Fed up with “paternalism and repressive policies,” Brass and her husband Hector “left the reserve,” and “helped organize the Association of Saskatchewan Indians, which joined with the Union of Saskatchewan Indians to press for revisions to the Indian Act, among other things.” Lux writes: “Through her work as a writer and activist until the 1970s, she tried to pull back the veil of isolation that she called the ‘buckskin curtain’. (230)”

119 woman “raised about two thirds of them,” having “improvised brooders with kerosene lanterns and did very well with what she had to work with.”439 Another resident, Mrs. Lambers Stonechild, similarly purchased chicks later that same year, “and raised over half of them, but they were late for laying in the following spring.” Her article, aimed at promoting agriculture in a new era, also presents community women’s histories and their means of providing food (and possibly income) for their families. While not a complete success, the women, through their ingenuity, were able to raise poultry without specialist advice or assistance. As another example of individual industriousness and triumph, Brass shares some details of her own father’s farming experience on File Hills: Fred Dieter “grew small fruits, strawberries, raspberries, gooseberries, currants, black, red, and white cherries and a small market garden as well as grain farming.”440 She recognizes, though, that “when an Indian starts making progress on the reserve, the department steps in to manage his affairs; this immediately discourages him.” Moreover, “the Indian cannot buy equipment to work his farm. He doesn’t usually have the capital and he hasn’t been able to get credit.” Some of the other impediments to farming and gardening she identifies include water supply, which she writes is a “problem on many reserves. There are a few dugouts and wells but not adequate for the community.” Hence, the numerous references by nutritionists and CHRs concerning their promotion of community and kitchen gardens on northern Manitoba First Nations communities is all the more problematic, since a lack of running water creates immediate obstacles for even the ambitious gardener. Brass, however, focuses on opportunities instead of obstacles, promoting various avenues potential farmers might consider, including raising animals. Referring to the Indian Act and its historical limitations, she writes: “Cattle have been raised on reserves in the past in large numbers, but this was discouraged through the old permit system,” explaining that a permit was a “small document stating the holder had permission to sell a cow, a horse or a stated amount of grain,” and was granted by the Indian Agent. “When a farmer saw his animal was ready for market and the prices good,” she elaborates, “he was very often refused the permit and would eventually

439 Brass, “Discovery in Agriculture,” 5. 440 Brass, “Discovery in Agriculture,” 5.

120 sell his animal at a loss.”441 Brass, however, also reminds that “Times are changing” and with them, the permit system has been done away with, thus “cattle and sheep raising could possibly be encouraged with the help of community pastures.”442 In addition to the frustrating history of farming on Reserves that Brass laments, and in spite of some charming individual recollections she shares of Files Hills residents practicing small-scale farming, many Indigenous people in the prairie west would have been schooled in agriculture, ranging from vegetable gardens and dairying to large-scale grain farming, through Residential and Day School curriculum.443 While they may have been well trained to take up the call to farm, such practices learned in a forced and often abusive environment, and associated with stripping family and community culture to replace it with non-Indigenous ways and foods, might have been undesirable. In 1955, The Indian News reported on the utility of western- structured home economics courses at Residential Schools, where the “system of training for family life” included cooking, and soon to be implemented were a small barn “for one milch [sic] cow and her calf, and a chicken coop,” as well as a vegetable plot.”444 In 1957, the paper proclaimed that “Portage la Prairie Students are Happy,” celebrating the “busy program” for boys and girls at the Residential School. In a piece accompanied by a captioned photo spread, they explain that children have “other exciting and interesting things” to do in addition to learning basic curriculum. An image shows an older boy milking a large cow above the caption, “boys help with barn chores,” while the piece explains that “4H Clubs have the school farm to practice on, with 16 fine cows to milk and eggs to gather from 150 hens.445 Residential Schools, then, had long been training children and youth in gardening and agriculture as part of the state’s assimilationist programs. While these two stories were from the late 1950s, students of the generation depicted would be the adults DIA encouraged to farm in the 1960s and 70s.

441 Brass, “Discovery in Agriculture,” 5. 442 Brass, “Discovery in Agriculture,” 5. 443 Brass herself shares painful childhood experiences from File Hills School, where she and her peers endured “a lot of abuse and torture” while quarantined at school for the winter months due to concerns of disease transmission. See Lux, Medicine That Walks, 134. See also Eleanor Brass, I Walk in Two Worlds (Calgary: Glenbow Museum, 1987), 21-22. 444 The Indian News, 1, no. 3 (April 1955), 1. 445 “Portage la Prairie Students are Happy,” The Indian News, 2, no. 3 (March 1957), 12.

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Moreover, despite The Indian News’ glowing report, Residential School was not a happy place or positive experience for most students, which is only recently common knowledge in Canada.446 Perhaps it’s not surprising, then, that so few Indigenous farmers took advantage of the available loans when the Farm Credit Act was amended, or that northern residents were reluctant to grow their own vegetables when advised to do so by the Community Health Representative or through prescriptive nutrition pamphlets distributed in communities. Cowessess is an interesting example, as it seems no coincidence it would be applauded for success after its initial foray into farming. Cowessess was an early success under the Home Farm program in the 1880s, but after years of residents struggling with ever-pressing restrictions on their work and movement, the project ended with one of the most successful Indigenous farmers in the prairies, Louis O’Soup, compelled to leave his Reserve and transfer his band membership to Pine Creek, MB where he made a living hunting.447 While the Cowessess Cooperative of the 1960s was funded and facilitated through support from local churches and DIAND, and in ways was organized like the home farms of the century prior, in the newer model the Indigenous family members were running the organization. Moreover, their success was seen as a model for other Bands, without the same restrictive policies their predecessors endured (such as the permit and pass systems that made conditions impossible for farmers like O’Soup). Instead of ignoring the projects and facilitating their demise, the late 1960s was an era of reinvigorated and reimagined efforts aimed to solve ‘the Indian problem’ created from past mistakes, such as the late-nineteenth century Reserve agriculture disasters. Yet, with the recent memory of these earlier farming projects, combined with the contemporary experience of so many other empty promises and deceitful acts, perhaps distrusting those who have repeatedly betrayed Indigenous people and communities seemed a safer choice.

446 The Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) has effectively put Residential Schools and colonization at the fore of discussion on Canada’s history with Indigenous peoples. See Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, “TRC Calls to Action,” NCTR, accessed January 8, 2020, http://nctr.ca/assets/reports/Final%20Reports/Executive_ Summary_English_Web.pdf; also Milloy, A National Crime. 447 Carter, Lost Harvests, 231.

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Following a slightly different model, in addition to various types and sizes of grain and vegetable production in the west, other Indigenous farmers, like those in Swan Lake and Peguis, MB, were practicing animal husbandry on the prairies. In 1972, Ebenezer Sutherland was one of fourteen farmers on Peguis who, four years prior, received funding to start up their operations from an Indian Affairs Revolving Fund, not unlike the Muskoday Band Farm.448 As The Indian News reported, “It’s difficult to be a farmer when you’re of Indian Ancestry. You don’t own the land. Title is registered with the band rather than with individuals – so you can’t get a mortgage on the land.” In addition, “normal financing is virtually impossible to come by. The Indian wanting to farm, generally has no money with which to start, and his traditions are rooted in farming as are the white man’s.”449 However, at Peguis, Chief Eddie Thompson and his Council were applauded for advocating for and “bringing agriculture to [the] Reserve” by “allocating land to farmers, and by providing encouragement.”450 A similar situation in Swan Lake, a few hours’ drive southwest of Peguis, was also in place at the time. As of 1972, roughly half of the Reserve lands were under cultivation, with seven band members working as full-time farmers.451 The Band Council was in the process of forming a cooperative and taking over a livestock operation with 49 cattle and pasture land for them to roam. Plans for a feedlot were underway, as well as expansion into hog, fish, and wild rice farming. The Indian News reported that the Swan Lake cooperative board was advised by two white men and a white farmer who previously “farmed much of the band property,” now farmed by the band as past contracts with white farmers expired.452 Chief Richard Cameron himself started a hog operation the year prior, “building a $10,000 modern hog barn,” and he and the band council were working to “create employment on the reserve for all members of the band.” An interesting distinction between Swan Lake and other communities is that it had, at the time, no church, restaurant, or store run by white people, which The Indian News asserted helped to encourage residents to “deal in a competitive atmosphere” by “having to

448 “Peguis Farming Provides Excellent Example of Indian Initiative in Manitoba, Reveals Problems Faced by Native Farmers,” The Indian News, 15, no. 2 (July 1972), 7. 449 “Peguis Farming Provides Excellent Example,” 7. 450 “Peguis Farming Provides Excellent Example,” 7. 451 The Indian News, 14, no. 11 (1972), 7. 452 The Indian News, 14, no. 11 (1972), 7.

123 patronize the white towns in the vicinity.”453 As indicated by praise for Swan Lake from then

Manitoba Indian Brotherhood President, Dave Courchene, these types of initiatives were considered important for First Nations “to become self-governing and self-supporting,” particularly since the community was to become completely self-governing that same year.454 In Kenora, ON, the same year, the Man-O-Min Co-operative began “transforming an age-old tradition into an economically viable business enterprise” as they “began harvesting and marketing their Quiet Water Wild Rice.”455 The Co-op, whose name is an “acronym for Manitoba-Ontario-Minnesota created by Basil Green of Shoal Lake,”(manomin is also the Ojibwe word for wild rice) was formed by chiefs from Sabaskong, Eagle Lake, Wabigoon, Rat Portage, Shoal Lake, and other Ojibway reserves,” with the goal of “bring[ing] harvesters better prices and giv[ing] Indians more control over processing and marketing wild rice.”456 In 1974, The Indian News reported that the “Indian-owned Anishinabeg Man-O-Min Co-operative of Kenora” was so successful that, not only had they already paid back $50,000 of their Indian Economic Development Fund loan, but had also “signed an agreement … with General Mills Canada Ltd. which will be providing marketing expertise on a non-profit basis.” According to Thomas Vennum, General Mills’ interest grew from a desire “to improve its image with minority groups,” so they “offered to sell the rice on a nonprofit basis through supermarkets, as part of a self-help program,” which also “meant crossing the international border to find an American market.”457 The company’s ‘Betty Crocker kitchen’ even created recipes featuring wild rice during this period as part of ‘promotional efforts’. The Man-O-Min co-op, with two-thousand members and representing twenty-three area Bands, was able to increase their rate-of-pay for rice pickers “from approximately 25 cents a pound a year ago to 65 cents a pound,” with the expectation of harvesting “140,000 pounds

453 The Indian News, 14, no. 11 (1972), 7. 454 The Indian News, 14, no. 11 (1972), 7. April 8, 1972 was the date of Swan Lake’s self- governance. 455 “A successful season for Man-o-Min Co-op,” The Indian News, 17, no. 1 (1974), 3. 456 Thomas Vennum Jr., Wild Rice and the Ojibway People, (Minnesota State Historical Society Press: 1988), 246-247. 457 Vennum Jr., Wild Rice and the Ojibway People, 246.

124 of marketable rice for the coming year.”458 Vennum writes that Joe Shebagegit, “a director of the Man-O-Min venture,” said “with pride, ‘For the first time, Indians had something to say about the price of rice’.”459 However, the co-op quickly found itself driven out due to state interference with the rice fields, as the Lake of the Woods Water Control Board flooded the land in 1974 and 1975, “claiming the need for increased hydroelectric power.” This revealed resentment from the Ontario government that the co-op was working with American firm General Mills instead of seeking provincial assistance. In addition, growth was hindered as pickers were unable to secure adequate canoes for transport, which Vennum explains had previously been borrowed from ‘white buyers’ who were “mostly store owners near reserves” who extended store credit in exchange for rice.460 Thus, pickers were also feeling threatened by the loss of store credit and accepted the lower prices offered by store owners and white buyers, eschewing the high premiums paid by Man-O-Min to ensure their own economic stability in their communities. Other wild rice harvesting and processing companies presented different opportunities for entrepreneurial opportunities, including Shoal Lake Wild Rice and Nett Lake Band’s on- again, off-again attempts at stabilizing their business, which was regularly disrupted due to myriad issues. Vennum explains that one significant setback for the company was from public opinion on land usage that competed with Indigenous economic development: “Some felt the lakeshore site was inappropriate and that a plant there would ruin the beauty of Nett Lake as well as usurp the only area on the shore available for a park.”461 This seems largely due, again, to the local, Indigenous enterprise partnering with an American company. In this case Peavey from Minneapolis, MN, had arranged to pay the Nett Lake Band one thousand dollars annually to lease the land, and also employ local labourers to harvest, package, and market the rice, “and share the profits with the reservation.”462 Opposition and dissension from the community led to Peavey “withdraw[ing] all interest in the wild rice business,” and “left reservation opinion

458 “A successful season for Man-o-Min Co-op,” 3. 459 Vennum Jr., Wild Rice and the Ojibway People, 247. 460 Vennum Jr., Wild Rice and the Ojibway People, 247. 461 Vennum Jr., Wild Rice and the Ojibway People, 245-246. 462 Vennum Jr., Wild Rice and the Ojibway People, 245.

125 about equally divided, with many feeling that Nett Lake had bungled a good economic opportunity.”463 When the Band tried again in 1970, a year after Peavey withdrew, they did so as a paddy rice experimental operation, with funds from the Upper Great Lakes Regional Commission and the Iron Range Resources and Rehabilitation Commission.464 Vennum describes the rapid rise and fall of the operation: Fifty acres east of the lake were set aside with plans for paddy construction the first year and production the second. The Reservation Business Committee was to assume control of the established project. After $117,000 had been spent, the first year’s harvest yielded only 151 pounds of rice, processed by King Brothers on the reservation – at a cost of nearly $1,000 a pound.465 In the end, “Packaging and marketing plans never materialized, and the rice went unsold.” Similar initiatives in communities like Fisher River, MB, where DIAND attempted to turn lands east of Lake Winnipeg into rice paddies, seemed set up to fail. In this example, Vennum explains, “most of the funding went not to the Fisher River Ojibway but to research grants for a botanist and management instructor, all of which the community resented,” and while the government provided ‘glowing reports’ about the success of the project and its trainees, not much rice was actually harvested. He quotes an unnamed Fisher River resident: Look at that. When an Indian does something good, they single it out. What they mean is that, by golly, these bastards could really do it… To train Indians to grow wild rice is stupid. What we need is not training, but money for our own operations.466

Vennum confirms the reception of Indigenous communities to “consultants and university authorities provided by the government” as one of suspicion, and in this case ‘outrage’ as the Band learned the state provided their researcher with thirty-thousand dollars to produce two bags of wild rice. As a band member exclaimed, “My God! At least we wouldn’t spend $15,000 on a bag of rice.”467 As with the agricultural operations in the prairies, the Kenora-area cooperative was run by a male-dominated managerial team, advised by a Board represented in The Indian News

463 Vennum Jr., Wild Rice and the Ojibway People, 246. 464 Vennum Jr., Wild Rice and the Ojibway People, 247. 465 Vennum Jr., Wild Rice and the Ojibway People, 247. 466 Vennum Jr., Wild Rice and the Ojibway People, 248. 467 Vennum Jr., Wild Rice and the Ojibway People, 248-249.

126 piece by Director Bert Yerxa, and in Vennum’s study by director Joe Shebagegit. The piece ran under a photograph of the cooperative management handing a cheque for loan repayment to the Indian Affairs Minister, Judd Buchanan, and makes clear the gendered division of power within the cooperative through the lineup of male faces, suits, and handshakes. The relationship of the cooperative to the pickers themselves is not explained, as pickers are noted as being paid for their services, so whether they are also cooperative members or represented through positions on the company’s board of directors, and whether they are also predominantly male, is not clear. An image in Native Foods and Nutrition depicts a male picker, harvesting rice with large clippers from a canoe.468 In Vennum’s Wild Rice and the Ojibway People, an image depicting Nett Lake women, in cotton dresses and aprons, “selling home- finished wild rice,” is dated 1947, and indicates that “Ojibway have long counted on such direct marketing for supplemental income.”469 While community women were active in the process of preparing and selling rice in the mid-twentieth century, whether they continued to play a role in the wild rice economy as business expanded beyond less formalized picking and preparation is less clear, but seems overshadowed in historical records that focus on the work of Indigenous men. As with many self-sufficiency economic projects aimed at agricultural enterprise, men were most often the recipients celebrated in The Indian News and other DIAND and MSB publications. Other self-sufficiency projects on the late-1960s and 1970s were regularly applauded by MSB and DIAND, and appear regularly in the publication, The Indian News. For example, in 1969, the paper reported on a “modern co-operative store ... helping to solve many shopping problems” a Cree community in Saskatchewan faced. “The store,” they explained, “is patterned after modern supermarkets and operates on a self-serve basis with a checkout counter.” Also, it carried a “full line of grocery items as well as clothing and hardware.” That this was noteworthy, and needed detailed clarification, indicates its distinction from small local stores and Bay outlets, to which many non-urban Indian News readers would have been

468 Canada, Department of National Health and Welfare, Medical Services Branch, Native Foods and Nutrition Rev. Ed. (Ottawa, ON: Minister of Supply and Services Canada, 1995), 86. The image is credited to DIAND. 469 Vennum Jr., Wild Rice and the Ojibway People, 252.

127 accustomed.470 Other communities adopted various cooperative schemes, including Lynn Lake, MB, residents who had started “an entirely voluntary organization with a limited membership of 205.”471 Having been in operation for eighteen months when surveyed by MSB summer student Pat Mills in 1971, the organization had plans for expansion that included a warehouse that would enable them to add to their supply of exclusively canned goods, as they wished to also have fresh meat available to members. Mills reported, after meeting with the Cooperative General Manager and a Director, that “a homemaker saves between 30 to 35% on her food dollar by dealing with the co-op,” and some larger families with ten children could save 45% on their food dollar, compared with Lynn Lake’s store grocery prices. Another example of options available to consumers in First Nations communities was also present in Lynn Lake, where the Bay store prices were approximately forty per cent higher than Winnipeg prices, while the independent Central Meat and Groceries was calculated substantially higher on nearly all goods available.472 Demonstrating an alternative model for consumers, the local owner explained that he is open six, rather than the Bay’s five, days a week; he also provides free delivery of goods to all customers. Although local women complained of the inflated prices, the owner asserted that these factors “cost the customer more in the way of her shopping dollar.”473 In Split Lake, in addition to the local Bay store, there was a small, privately owned store “located in one room of an Indian residents [sic] home.”474 Prices were higher than the Bay’s, and stock consisted mainly of confectionaries, and Mills reported that the store was “mainly used when confection goods are sought,” with “even standard priced goods” being expensive (for example, chocolate bars were priced at .15 where the standard at the time was .10).475 Other communities, such as York Landing, lacked a store entirely. As Mills documented in her food cost survey report, the community “is located approximately 8 miles from Split Lake by water.” After deciding not to visit, with no store there

470 The Indian News, 8, no. 4 (January 1966), 2. 471 Mills, “Food Survey – Lynn Lake,” 2. 472 Mills, “Food Survey – Lynn Lake,” 1, 473 Mills, “Food Survey – Lynn Lake,” 1. 474 Mills, “Split Lake & York Landing,” 2. 475 Mills, “Split Lake & York Landing,” 2.

128 to survey, Mills spoke with the nurse at Split Lake who explained that York Landing residents visited her community weekly to shop at the local Bay store.476 Other communities in this situation where the closest store for some residents was off- reserve included Peguis in 1968, which was serviced by the Koostatak General Store located near Fisher River, and a four dollar by-bus round trip for Peguis residents.477 Speaking with one elderly couple, she heard that travel to the store is too expensive, so the woman, “who is quite old and certainly cannot walk the distance involved,” consequently “finds it difficult to get the food they require.”478 Spence learned from the resident that “a short time ago there was a milkman who used to come into town and deliver milk, fresh meat and produce to her door and she says that she was a regular customer who really appreciated the service.” She shared that the man left his position, and his replacement “does not come for door to door but rather just comes into the centre of town and the people go to him.” This presents other barriers, as “she has trouble carrying the items she buys to her home which is at the top of a hill,” and is also challenged by caring for an unwell husband, “whom she does not like to leave in case he should need her.”479 In some communities, such as those visited by the Home Economics summer students, food security was further challenged by lack of electrical power. According to Wolczuk and Trudeau, in 1967, Split Lake was without electrical power, “therefore, the people must shop frequently.”480 This was no longer the case by 1971, when Mills found Split Lake’s Bay store to be “average” with a freezer on site, though no refrigerator for butter, a small supply of which was kept frozen, or the limited selection of cheeses, which were instead stored on shelves.481 As Mills explained in her report on Northern Food Prices, Shamattawa, located “120 miles south of York Landing on the Bay,” had “no facilities for electricity” in 1971, resulting in a lack of meat and other refrigerated products for the community.482 Lynne Cole, the Manitoba Regional

476 Mills, “Split Lake & York Landing,” 3. 477 Jackson, “Dietetic Interneship [sic] Phase II,” 8. 478 Jackson, “Dietetic Interneship [sic] Phase II,” 8. 479 Jackson, “Dietetic Interneship [sic] Phase II,” 8. 480 Trudeau and Wolczuk, “Preliminary Report on Nutrition Survey 1967,” 4. 481 Mills, “Split Lake & York Landing – Collection of Food Price Data,” 1-2. 482 Mills, “Collection of Northern Food Prices by Summer Students,” 5.

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Nutritionist overseeing the MSB nutrition students, reported on Pauingassi, “about 20 miles up the river” from Little Grand Rapids, having limited food supply due to a lack of hydro power in the community.483 Similarly, Granville, south of Lynn Lake, was also without power; however, the local store manager had an “underground cellar which is used for refrigeration in the winter months.”484 In other communities such as Brochet, where nurses reported observing “that large amounts of flour, rolled oats and potatoes are sold in the store,” invisible barriers may have been placed between residents and grocery items as MSB staff stationed in the community performed surveillance that stigmatized food choices.485 Another example of barriers is the role of community store managers and staff, which reveals a gendered division of labour in community stores. As indicated, Bay managers were male, as were most of the owners of private stores on Reserves. When predominantly male store managers are making decisions on food pricing and availability for mostly female consumers, this presents a complicated power imbalance between men, often from other communities, and local women, largely mothers and grandmothers. Even the Fairford Supermarket, which opened in the Manitoba community 120 miles northwest of Winnipeg in 1974, was soon to be run by Angus Woodford, who “left his job in Winnipeg to return to the reserve and become a management trainee.”486 While presenting a consumer alternative to ubiquitous HBC northern stores, or to independent grocers run by outsiders, stores like Fairford’s also created opportunities for employment in the community. Praised by The Indian News for being “Manitoba’s first Indian-owned supermarket,” and described as “an enterprise which combines lower prices with business profits,” the ‘rather small’ “30 by 110 foot building housing about $35,000 worth of stock” sold wares ranging from “clothing and hardware to fresh fruits and meats.” The self-sufficiency project, which the paper called “noteworthy because of the breakthrough it represents in Indian Band economic development,” presents an

483 Lynne Cole, Memorandum to the Regional Director, July 27, 1971, “Food Price Data – Little Grand Rapids,” 1, RG 029, ACC: W84-85/458, Box 11, File 144-2-4 vol. 1 Nutrition Surveys – Reserves (1970-12-01 to 1971-12-31), MSB, DHW, LAC, Winnipeg, MB. 484 Mills, “Collection of Northern Food Prices by Summer Students,” 5. 485 Parker, “Report: Brochet Food Price Data and Food Availability,” 2. 486 “Fairford’s Supermarket keeps profits on reserve,” The Indian News, 16, no. 9 (1974), 3.

130 important example of how communities organized to challenge high prices and open possibilities for affordable and accessible food. The project started when “the people of the reserve wanted to have their own store,” so much so that they “were prepared to marshall [sic] their own resource and seek financial assistance from government and private sources to obtain one.”487 The Indian News reported that “about 150 of the reserves [sic] 762 residents shop at the store each day” and choose from “supplies that are brought in twice a week from Winnipeg by the Band’s own driver and a three-ton truck.” In addition to more affordable and higher quality products, the store’s profits were to remain in the community, which the article suggests motivated Woodford’s return. Descriptions of other staff and consumers are not presented in the article, so a clear picture of the gendered divisions of labour and consumer are not available. However, that the paper highlights a male manager-in-training could be read to indicate this was the expected breakdown of roles, which was consistent with other stores at the time. Only a few years later, The Indian News highlighted another approach to running a successful, Indigenous-owned grocery store. The “neat and tidy grocery store” was established in 1973 in the “populous” Eskasoni First Nation, NS, by lifelong husband and wife residents, Charlie and Pauline Morris.488 The operation began in 1968 as “a small canteen” and “take-out food business,” which they expanded into the new store and lunch counter, offering “mainly groceries, along with the coffee shop and lunch counter.” The article reports that “Mr. Morris does his own book-keeping, and in addition to himself and his wife, the store and lunch counter keep two others busy as part-time employees.”489 An accompanying image depicts “Pauline and Charlie Morris,” working at the counter, with Pauline working the cash register and a young child beside her watching. While family-run operations are not unusual and provide space for different gendered power relations, as in this family’s experience (presented in the style of older Indian News ‘success story’ pieces to demonstrate the possibilities for Indigenous peoples in Canada to become self-sufficient entrepreneurs), the model was rarely documented as part of the experience of First Nations communities in Manitoba during this period.

487 “Fairford’s Supermarket keeps profits on reserve,” 3. 488 “A Husband & Wife Team To Be Proud Of,” The Indian News, 18, no. 1 (1977), 3A. 489 “A Husband & Wife Team To Be Proud Of,” 3A.

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An example that interrupts the male-dominated management model, when most Manitoba community stores visited in the 1971 nutrition survey were run by men, is of the Bloodvein Enterprises Store, which was privately owned by a Pine Falls man but “operated by a local woman” on Bloodvein First Nation.490 While staff aside from management are not referred to as male or female,491 one further indication of the gendered division of labour appears in Parker’s report on surveying Brochet, MB, where she noted of her visit on a day the Bay store was closed, “A group of ladies was cleaning the store at the time.”492 Through this, we are informed of the local women’s opinions of the community Bay store: “According to both the [CHR (male)] and ladies cleaning the store, the selection of meat is always limited and the quality often poor.”493 This gendered division of labour that positions males in power as leaders, with women in subordinate or assisting roles, was also regularly present in First Nations Band Councils and Co-operatives during this period. In Swan Lake, MB, for example, alongside a group of male council members led by a male Chief, Bernice Mousseau was the band secretary.494 Similarly, as noted of the successful Cowessess agricultural operation, a group of male family members worked in leadership roles, as president and cooperative members, and carried out duties on the land, while Mrs. Audrey LeRat served as the organization’s secretary.495 Further, many Chiefs were male during this period, with one exception being Chief Jean Folster of Norway House, MB.496

490 Lynne Cole, Memorandum to the Regional Director, July 27, 1971, “Food Prices – Berens River,” 1, RG 029, ACC: W84-85/458, Box 11, File 144-2-4 vol. 1 Nutrition Surveys – Reserves (1970-12-01 to 1971-12-31), MSB, DHW, LAC, Winnipeg, MB. 491 In a photograph taken by Dr. Otto Schaefer in 1971 of the Fort Bay HBC Supermarket, two women are shown behind a display counter while two individuals in outerwear, presumably customers, pass by the camera. Otto Schaefer, HBC Fort Bay Supermarket 1971, ERA, University of Alberta Libraries, accessed July 6, 2018, https://doi.org/10.7939/R31J97C1D. Another image shows “Children at the Bay in Baker Lake,” printed accompanying Henry Isluanik, “Nutrition in the North: A Look at What Inuit Eat” Inuktitut: Nutrition (Ottawa: Indian and Northern Affairs, 1978): 26. 492 Parker, “Report: Brochet Food Price Data and Food Availability,” 1. 493 Parker, “Report: Brochet Food Price Data and Food Availability,” 2. 494 The Indian News, 14, no. 11 (1972), 7. 495 “Cowessess Reserve Project Success in First Year,” 1. 496 Folster was elected Chief of Norway House in 1971 where she served for four years, having defeated three male candidates. She was one of only a few women working amongst

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In addition, the gendered division of male and female CHRs and their respective roles and wages were also present amongst other MSB staff, particularly nutritionists and nurses working in Indigenous communities. In published and archival documents from the period, MSB doctors were often male, but not stationed in First Nations communities, where medical services were provided primarily by the Field Nurse. Physicians at the time, according to their letters to the Regional Nutritionist or Dietician in Manitoba, were regularly stationed in urban offices, separated from women working in the field. The nutrition educators, nutritionists or dieticians, and summer survey students are all identified as women, with the hierarchy of employers overseeing employees moving upwards through a gendered chain of command: nutrition summer students who were female reported to nutritionists and dieticians who were female, who reported to physicians who were male. Not unlike the CHRs, there was an expectation of separate and unequal training and education, qualifications, work performed, and of course wages, as women filled roles in which they regularly reported to male program supervisors. Through a highly gendered breakdown of roles encouraged by DIAND, educators, and other experts working in Indigenous communities in the 1960s and ‘70s, while men were most often the ones encouraged to farm and govern, women and girls were guided to learn domestic duties, specifically how to feed a family and care for a home. It was a long-standing practice in Residential Schools to educate children in the western normative model of gender roles, which many non-Indigenous Canadians saw as convoluted and lacking in Indigenous communities

the predominantly male Manitoba Indian Brotherhood, and was the lone female Manitoba Chief signatory on Wahbung: Our Tomorrows, the document created in response to the Canadian Government’s 1969 White Paper on Indian Policy. See The Indian News, 14, no. 7 (1971), 4-5; Angela Graham, “Memorable Manitobans: Jean Folster (1922-1994),” Manitoba Historical Society, accessed July 7, 2018, http://www.mhs.mb.ca/docs/people/folster_j.shtml; McCallum, Indigenous Women, Work, and History, 175-176. As The Indian News reported in 1958, Elise Knott was Canada’s sole female chief, elected into her third term as leader of the Mississaugas of Mud Lake and serving as one of seventy women on councils. In the same year, Norway House had five women on its council, which was the highest number historically in the country. “Elect Mrs. Knott Third Time as Chief, Now 70 Women Serve Band Councils,” The Indian News 2, no. 2 (October 1958), 4.

133 throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.497 Homemaker and adult Home Economics programs introduced the same types of training programs used in schools into community centres and other public venues in Indigenous communities, which aimed to elevate Indigenous mothers towards the western homemaker ideal.498 These programs were not new by the 1960s, as Homemakers Organizations for Indigenous women in Canada were first founded in 1937.499 They had, however, become increasingly well-attended and received by at least some community women who themselves were becoming Homemaker leaders in their communities, and traveling to Homemaker workshops and conferences in other communities across Canada. According to a piece in The Indian News, programs were already popular a decade earlier, as in 1954 the first issue of the paper reported, “Homemakers Clubs hold three regional conventions this year,” highlighting the amount of “good work” the women’s organizations were doing to “make life on reserves better and happier.”500 Conventions were held in Eskasoni, Nova Scotia, for organizations in Quebec and the Maritimes; in Duck Lake, Saskatchewan for prairies clubs; and Tyendinaga Reserve for those organizations working in Ontario.501

497 See Milloy, A National Crime; Sarah Carter, The Importance of Being Monogamous: Marriage and Nation Building in Western Canada to 1915 (Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 2008). 498 In her MA Thesis on Saskatchewan Homemakers’ Clubs, Jennifer Milne argues the organizations, which served the interest of rural women, weren’t solely interested in traditional domesticity advice or exchanging recipes, but were actually “quietly political and feminist.” See Milne, “Cultivating Domesticity: The Homemakers’ Clubs of Saskatchewan, 1911-61,” MA Thesis, University of Saskatchewan, 2004, 8. Milne’s Thesis is not interested in the work of the many Indian Homemakers Clubs operating at the same time, and barely pays nod to them. In a paragraph, she discusses the 1968 provincial convention, where “a resolution called for better integration of ‘Indians into mainstream society through education and the eradication of racism’.” She does note that they did not operate with the rural farm women’s organizations, who in the late 1950s and 60s were occasionally interested in First Nations issues as part of historical studies. She writes, “it is clear that their historical understanding of the pre-contact period was based on the romanticised images of the noble warrior and the maiden woman but it also reveals the fact that mainstream society could easily – and guiltlessly – discuss pre- contact First Nations because that context did not address the problems facing Indian people in contemporary society, nor did it confront the issues relating to the relationship between the two peoples.” See Milne, “Cultivating Domesticity,” 61-62. 499 The Indian News, 1, no. 1 (August 1954), 3. 500 The Indian News, 1, no. 1 (August 1954), 3. 501 The Indian News, 1, no. 1 (August 1954), 3.

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According to the 1961 Indian News piece, “Better Meals for All as a Result of Course”: “Indians of Saskatchewan’s Cote Reserve No. 1 [were] benefitting from a home economics course which Cote women attended every Wednesday in the basement of the day school.”502 Through a program sponsored by IAB, the women were reported as “preparing better meals for their families and their children are going off to school with more nutritious lunches.” The club’s unique set-up, which was organized to “approximate conditions of most homes on the reserve,” included utensils commonly found in most homes; “cooking and baking were done on a wood stove which was set up in the school’s basement”; and “meals were prepared with produce available to members of the band using foodstuffs which band members could reasonably be expected to purchase.”503 The Cote women, led by Homemakers’ Club President Maria Shingoose, “assumed primary responsibility for conducting the sessions,” and were most interested in cooking and baking, and “studied nutrition and paid special attention to Canada’s Food Rules, suggestions for buying food supplies and the planning and preparation of meals.” Some examples of the foods prepared include: “meat dishes, breads, biscuits, rolls, cookies, raisin squares, tarts, doughnuts and rhubarb jelly. In the accompanying photograph, Club Treasurer, Irene Cote, is pictured with members, Yvonne Shingoose, Florence Shingoose, Maude Cote, and Barbara Kakaway, “preparing delicious cookies.”504 Little work has been done to explore the history of Indigenous Women’s Homemakers Clubs in Canada, which are one of the few self-sufficiency projects the IAB/DIAND and MSB promoted to empower Indigenous women. As McCallum and Harris argue in their comparative study of the formations of both the Indian Homemakers’ Clubs and the Maori Women’s Welfare League, the respective departments of Indian Affairs in Canada and Maori Affairs in New Zealand “relied upon the Indigenous women participants to further state goals,” specifically of assimilation, integration, and citizenship within Indigenous communities, urging the women to apply themselves, in the spirit of self-help, to the important role of providing

502 The Indian News, 5, no. 2, (December 1961), 6. 503 The Indian News, 5, no. 2, (December 1961), 6. 504 The Indian News, 5, no. 2, (December 1961), 6.

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happy and integrated, yet culturally distinct, home environments that produced citizens of the modern world.505 They explain that their “collaborative trans-Indigenous research also recognizes the women’s interactions and negotiations with the state as distinctly Indigenous”: “While materially and practically tied to the state’s policies of integration, the women involved consistently prefaced their womanhood and their citizenship with their Indigeneity.”506 They assert that Indigenous women involved in these projects “organized activities and discussion that reflected the priorities of the groups themselves including their concerns about the state,” and “used the organizations to enter the public sphere and engage with what they saw as the most important and relevant Indigenous political and community issues of the mid–twentieth century.”507 By the 1960s, some programs had been in place for decades. In 1950, for example, a Home Economics program was introduced to St. Theresa Point in Manitoba. It “was started at the St. Theresa Point School,” and intended to “help the older girls in the school, who would soon be married, as well as other women on the reserve.”508 In 1966, the “isolated community” of “approximately eight hundred Cree Indians, who are part of the Island Lake Band,” was without road access and “accessible during the summer by float plane and boat,” or by tractor train or ski plane in winter months.509 The school was staffed by the Sisters of Charity, and it was decided that it would be “only natural” for Sister Grenier, who had much experience in residential schools and “having worked with the Indian people for so long,” to “step into this position” and “gear the program to the needs of the adults on the reserve.” Emphasis on food and diet through the program educated residents on what they should be eating and purchasing from the local Bay store, and the manager, W. Cable, reported in 1966 that “the demand for bakery bread has diminished since many of the women now bake their own bread.” Further, “greater variety of fresh fruit is now being purchased,” and Cable “failed to note any

505 Aroha Harris and Mary Jane Logan McCallum, ‘“Assaulting the Ears of Government”: The Work of the Maori Women’s Welfare League and the Indian Homemakers’ Clubs in the 1950s and 60s’,” in Carol Williams, ed, Indigenous Women and Work: From Labour to Activism, 225-239 (University of Illinois Press, 2012): 225. 506 Harris and McCallum, ‘“Assaulting the Ears of Government,” 226. 507 Harris and McCallum, ‘“Assaulting the Ears of Government,” 226. 508 The Indian News, 9, no. 4 (December 1966), 5. 509 The Indian News, 9, no. 4 (December 1966), 5.

136 hesitancy on the part of shoppers, to buy unfamiliar brands being introduced into the area.”510 The impact of the program, or perhaps the Bay store manager, may have changed by the time Home Economics students from Winnipeg surveyed the community in 1971 when, as noted, Sharon Parker reported that the local Bay store “was low in stock,” with no fresh fruit, vegetables, milk, or produce, and a limited supply of canned vegetables.511 In addition to instruction in basic nutrition, including food preparation and purchase, “under Sister Grenier’s watchful eye,” the community’s “young Indian ladies” were instructed in baking their own wedding cakes, thus ensuring the appropriate practice for every aspect of the homemaker ideal was instilled in these women, soon to be wives and mothers. This model contrasts against the example of Cote women organizing themselves in Saskatchewan, showing the distinctions between how Homemaker Clubs and Home Economics programs operated in Indigenous communities. In 1969, “home management” was “taught to several housewives” in Fort Hope Ontario, through which “the women [could] learn basic household chores and helpful hints to aid in meal planning.”512 Though not mentioned in the 1966 celebratory piece on St. Theresa Point’s program, the problem of “basic food staples” being “priced too high,” due to what is identified as “isolation,” is raised in discussion of Fort Hope, where it is noted that the two community stores are “both non-Indian owned.”513 Morris Isaac with The Indian News traveled to the community accompanied by DIAND freelance photographer Fred Stevenson and Department Information Officer, Marion Smythe, to “get acquainted with living conditions in the far north.”514 Isaac wrote that there were “approximately 450 Ojibway Indian people on the reserve,” and Chief Louis Waswa was vocal about his community’s achievements as well as obstacles: “we get the normal problems such as IAB people coming in here trying to do good for the people without consulting us first; these things annoy us so we compromise with them and

510 The Indian News, 9, no. 4 (December 1966), 5. 511 Sharon Parker, Memorandum to the Regional Nutritionist, August 16, 1971, “Food Price Data & Food Availability Report Re: St. Theresa – August 10, 1971,” 1, RG 029, ACC: W84- 85/458, Box 11, File 144-2-4 vol. 1 Nutrition Surveys – Reserves (1970-12-01 to 1971-12-31), MSB, DHW, LAC, Winnipeg, MB. 512 Morris Isaac, “Introducing Fort Hope,” The Indian News, 12, no. 1 (April 1969), 5. 513 Isaac, “Introducing Fort Hope,” 5. 514 Isaac, “Introducing Fort Hope,” 4.

137 now things are working out well.”515 As Isaac writes, “Asked what the problems were on his reserve [Waswa] replied without hesitation: ‘lack of communications and consultations with us by IAB.”516 Home Economics student Sharon Parker, while working on collecting data for her survey of food costs in First Nations communities in Manitoba, also provided details of Homemaker programs. She reported that the previous year, DIAND sponsored a four-month homemaking course at the Winnipeg Adult Education Centre.517 She explained that “groups of 10 or 11 women come to Winnipeg on a rotating basis so that women are not away from their families for more than a month at a time.” Like CHRs, candidates for the homemaking course were “selected by their respective Chiefs and Councils on the basis of leadership qualities.” At the course, women received instruction in areas of nutritional education, including cooking, nutrition, canning, and budgeting. Homemakers, for some of whom the Winnipeg course was their “first opportunity to cook following a recipe,” were then expected to return to their communities to conduct their own classes.518 Parker identified the Nelson House program as an example of the work of homemakers, which served women of the community while simultaneously teaching domestic skills to young girls, “who delighted in making stuffed animals while the older women worked on simple clothing.” As with the CHR program, Parker again noted observing that the strong nutrition education component of the program, which was emphasized in homemaker training courses, was lacking when put into practice in home communities.519 A more invasive IAB effort at assimilation that depended thoroughly on home economics and nutrition training was the 1965 Elliot Lake, Ontario, “scheme,” a pilot project devised to “train and relocated Indians wanting the opportunity to better themselves.”520 Those

515 Isaac, “Introducing Fort Hope,” 1, 4. 516 Isaac, “Introducing Fort Hope,” 4. 517 Parker, “Community Programs on Indian Reserves in Manitoba’s North,” 3. 518 Parker, “Community Programs on Indian Reserves in Manitoba’s North,” 3. 519 Parker, “Community Programs on Indian Reserves in Manitoba’s North,” 3. 520 Keith Miller, “I.A.B. and Indians Both Learn from Pilot Project,” The Indian News 11, no. 2 (May 1968), 1. “Competent people were hired to begin the task of selecting Indians considered able to adjust to the pressures of urban living,” and the project, co-organized by the

138 chosen “were given complete medical checkups and outfitted with new clothing” before being sent to the Centre for Continuing Education to be educated in “good housekeeping habits” and proper home management.521 In an accompanying photo, two women, identified as Margaret Mawakesick and Sarah Fiddler, look on as a third woman, Mrs. J. Beaucage, operates an electric stove. The caption informs, “Homemaking is part of the course offered to the northern housewives while their husbands are in upgrading classes.” Indian News reporter, Keith Miller, writes of his visits with new residents, that their houses are “clean and tidy while the children are scrubbed and neat.” Of his visit to resident Louis Bird’s family’s home, he shares his gendered observation: “I could see he had impressed upon his wife, the importance of living in a clean house,” as “the children were clean and well cared for, and everything was neat and orderly.”522 Though many of the eleven relocated families were reported as “adjusting to the change quite well,” Miller informs that seven families had returned to their respective communities within six months of the project’s launch. Leaving mainly due to “loneliness and not being able to adjust to a strange environment,” he further elaborates on the impact the move had on women: “Though their nights were taken up with home-making courses, they missed the familiar life of community living with members of their immediate family close at hand.”523 No matter how clean and new their houses were, over a third of the original participants preferred their original homes and communities over their supposedly improved surroundings. As this and previous examples show, the presumption, which barely changed since the nineteenth century but was managed through different approaches, was that Indigenous women and men were ill-equipped to care for their families, and only by immersing themselves in nutrition education guided by non-Native Canadians could the social and medical ills caused

Department of Manpower and Immigration, proceeded with families chosen from Sandy Lake, Deer Lake, Big Trout Lake, and Pikangikum areas in Sioux Lookout. 521 Miller, “I.A.B. and Indians Both Learn from Pilot Project,” 6. Home management included “learning to manage their own money and pay bills on time.” 522 Miller, “I.A.B. and Indians Both Learn from Pilot Project,” 6. 523 Miller, “I.A.B. and Indians Both Learn from Pilot Project,” 6.

139 by ‘bad mothering’ be remedied.524 More importantly, IAB presumed that Indigenous people were unable to know what was best for themselves and their families, yet ultimately, when given the choice to integrate, many chose (and continue to choose) to remain in their communities. Further, nutrition programs and home economics instruction often fell flat because they worked to redirect First Nations and Inuit mothers and their children from cultural knowledge and foodways towards western ideals that were out of reach or undesirable for many reasons.525 For those removed from traditional practices due to the damage done through Residential Schools and the break of cultural transmission from older generation to younger generation, education provided by Home Economics instruction and some Homemaker clubs reinforced gendered roles for women that Residential Schools worked to make normative. Examples of these programs often mirror too closely the moral uplift provided by Victorian women’s organizations a century prior.526 By the 1960s and ‘70s, this new generation of well-meaning nutrition students worked under the guidance of MSB medical experts to extend benevolent hands to help raise Indigenous women (supposedly struggling to fulfill their domestic duties) to meet the homemaker ideal, whether they wanted this help or not. The homemaker ideal, then, ran through various projects aimed at social uplift and self- sufficiency, which were highly gendered with roles often laid out and clearly defined for male and female community members, as well as children. Vegetable gardening is an example where postwar western gender roles continued to permeate prescription and practice into the later

524 See Kelm, Colonizing Bodies, 57. Kelm argues that “residential schooling was advocated as a means to ‘save’ Aboriginal children from the insalubrious influences of home life on reserve,” particularly from their supposedly inherently ignorant mothers whose dangerous foodways caused disease and death. Rather ironically, Kelm writes, “rather than preserving the bodies of the children,” the schools “tended to further endanger them through exposure to disease, overwork, underfeeding, and various forms of abuse.” Schools also spread disease by sending children, made ill at school, home for summer to their communities. 525 At the most basic level, the homemaker ideal included participation in consumer culture that women in urban centres would have regularly been able to engage with, but which existed in a very different way on Reserves, where choice was often limited and thus the experience of having a preference was often removed, costs were prohibitive and money might have to be carefully allocated towards meeting basic necessities, or a lack of transportation and distance to the closest store erased the choice of where to shop and what could be carried home. 526 See Valverde, The Age of Light Soap and Water.

140 twentieth century, which is further complicated by the promise of western ideology (regularly evidenced through the work of colonizers in more northern regions) to rescue Indigenous communities from their food crises. Like so many nutrition experts working for MSB in the decades prior, in 1980 Otto Schaefer and Jean Steckle remark on the “definite potential” for “supplementing vegetable requirements by local gardening or greenhouses.”527 In their efforts at reinvigorating Indigenous foodways and traditions in communities, and often advised by Indigenous community leaders and CHRs, they allude to the ‘promise’ of ‘hydroponic arrangements’, but also stress that small-scale kitchen agriculture had recently been successfully carried out in the region. Their example, however, imposes colonial practice on largely Indigenous residents of the region: We should not forget that in transitional times White missionaries and traders grew substantial amounts of vegetables such as cabbage, lettuce, carrots and potatoes in gardens in the Slave and Mackenzie River basins; and that practically any other garden product, including tomatoes, was produced in greenhouses, sun porches and windows.528

They add that these methods were “successfully adopted by many native and Metis people at that time,” yet, the practice “has largely been abandoned in recent years when imported foods became more available.” The extent to which this project of hydroponic gardening was carried out successfully by Indigenous peoples in the regions at the time is not clear; however, suggesting Indigenous communities adopt methods employed by colonizing whites seems a misguided endeavor. This is particularly confusing when presented by the authors, who promoted gardening as part of a platform that sees value in making space for Indigenous voices and practices in state policies and guidelines. This period, however, marks a change in policy and practice, as shifting discourses that sought to move towards a postcolonial model of nutrition education begin to appear in government publications and studies. Five years after this publication, as efforts by Schaefer, Steckle, and others embraced increased Indigenous input and approaches to state health and

527 Steckle and Schaefer, Dietary Habits and Nutritional Base of Native Populations of the Northwest Territories (Yellowknife, NWT: Science Advisory Board of the Northwest Territories, 1980); 15. 528 Steckle and Schaefer, Dietary Habits and Nutritional Base, 15.

141 nutrition programs, a different approach to ‘northern’ gardening was already beginning to circulate. Introduced as part of an experimental program organized jointly by the Manitoba Department of Agriculture, the University of Manitoba, and the City of Thompson in northern Manitoba, ‘tunnel gardening’ was producing successful vegetable gardens in regions where growing seasons are otherwise too short to sustain production. As Steckle and co-author Judith Lawn explain in their Handbook of Nutrition Education Methods Used Successfully in Indian and Inuit Communities, the proposed objective of the research group was: … to apply new gardening techniques to northern gardening in order to improve the yield and varieties of vegetables which could grow in the north, to improve nutritional status of the communities and to develop food self-sufficiency.529 Through construction of “inexpensive plastic tunnels,” researchers and gardeners “were able to take advantage of the long hours of sunlight in the North, protect the plants from the wind and retain enough heat to prevent frost damage.” The success of the program became a personal project for Elsie Bushey, Nutrition Health Advisor at Berens River, MB. In 1984, Bushey erected her first ‘tunnel garden’ with assistance from Department of Agriculture horticulturalist, Dinah Ceplis, and “harvested a bumper crop of swiss chard, corn, cucumbers, green beans, cauliflower, green peppers, carrots, turnips, lettuce, tomatoes and potatoes.”530 Bushey reported that “her husband was so pleased with the vegetables that next year he is planning to have his own garden,” while the community was so taken with the project’s success that “at least 25 families” planned to grow “their own mixed vegetable gardens” in the following year. The authors explain the selection of which vegetables would be grown was based on nutritional importance and sources of vitamins and minerals found in vegetables, whether they were “enjoyed by the people,” and their easy incorporation into “existing food practices (e.g. soups, stews).”531 The project required the selection of “seed varieties especially suited to the northern soil and climate,” and soils were analysed then blended with peat moss if needed, to make conditions more suitable for growing. The ground

529 J. Lawn and J. Steckle, Handbook of Nutrition Education Methods Used Successfully in Indian and Inuit Communities (Ottawa: Department of National Health and Welfare, Medical Service Branch, 1985), 29. 530 Lawn and Steckle, Handbook of Nutrition Education Methods, 29. 531 Lawn and Steckle, Handbook of Nutrition Education Methods, 31.

142 was tilled in fall to encourage easier work in spring, with seeds “started indoors in early spring and transferred to the tunnels as soon as the frost is out of the ground.”532 Bushey claimed the one setback she experienced was “keeping the mice and birds away from her beautiful vegetables,” but she used traps and covered ears of corn with paper bags to keep most hungry garden pests away.533 The method of working in a challenging environment and limited growing season employed an inexpensive form of greenhouse production. This was depicted in two images showing, first, a “Berens River couple in front of a greenhouse,” followed by a photograph of a woman tending to plants inside one of the tunnel greenhouses, which were entered through a door and tall enough to accommodate a standing adult.534 The structure was tent-like, with woven plastic ‘Durafab’ sheeting stretched and stapled over “rib-like metal tubes (3/4” electric conduit pipes) secured to a wooden base (2”x4” on edge with a 1’x6” piece of board or a straight 8”x12” diameter log).”535 The frame structure was anchored at the base from the interior, while the plastic cover appears pegged with straps, like a tent-fly, at the corners. The interior image shows vegetables growing both in the ground directly and also on raised tables or benched in trays, while both ends of the ‘tunnel’ include wooden-framed doors to allow both access and ventilation.536 The reported cost of such a structure in 1983, averaging a twelve-by- fifty foot structure and “including seed, fertilizer, and construction materials” was roughly $500.537 In Manitoba, “the provincial Department of Agriculture covered all costs (except hand tools) for each community for a period of three years,” which included leasing communities a rototiller and heavy tilling equipment with an operator when larger garden sites were planned. Lawn and Steckle reported in 1980 that over twenty northern communities were participating in the program, where in some communities over half the population was ‘tunnel gardening’.538 The project was being promoted as one whose success depended on “the

532 Lawn and Steckle, Handbook of Nutrition Education Methods, 31. 533 Lawn and Steckle, Handbook of Nutrition Education Methods, 30. 534 Lawn and Steckle, Handbook of Nutrition Education Methods, 29-31. 535 Lawn and Steckle, Handbook of Nutrition Education Methods, 31. 536 Lawn and Steckle, Handbook of Nutrition Education Methods, 30. 537 Lawn and Steckle, Handbook of Nutrition Education Methods, 31. 538 Lawn and Steckle, Handbook of Nutrition Education Methods, 30.

143 cooperative efforts of everyone involved, the work of the Nutrition Health Advisor, and the obvious benefits to the families concerned.” The authors write: “Besides promoting nutritious vegetables at low cost, gardening is an activity which involves the whole family and it is a good way to keep in shape.”539 They advised that caring for a ‘tunnel garden’ was a commitment of about five hours weekly, which involved “keep[ing] the weeds down, and regularly water[ing] and fertiliz[ing] the plants.” Gardeners were often assisted by student volunteers, who would “help with chores,” and the Nutrition Health Advisor instructed community members and school-aged children in ‘the primary grades’ in nutrition and basic gardening skills; assisted with community gardening ‘problems’; and taught “food preservation (canning, freezing, pickling) to the women” in fall. By the 1980s, then, several communities, including in Manitoba and Saskatchewan, reported community gardening projects were well underway. In the MSB’s Nutrition Newsletters, active garden projects were documented in Cross Lake, Nelson House, Norway House, Oxford House, South Indian Lake, and Split Lake, in Manitoba, as well as Fort Qu’Appelle, SK.540 Seemingly organized as an extension of ‘unfinished business’,541 and taking cues from the reports from nutrition surveyors the decade prior who identified the lack of sustained interest in growing food, outsiders were either hired or came as part of a mission to elevate and enlighten the Indigenous peoples in Manitoba through gardening. In 1982, the MSB hired Raymond Sandberg from Wabowden as a gardening Project Manager for all of the Manitoba communities noted except for Cross Lake, which was adopted in 1980 as a Mennonite Central Committee (MCC) Relief project led by two young Ontario women. Under Sandberg’s guidance, MSB summer students in the communities tilled, seeded, and grew vegetables on the lands with many ‘curious’ community members reportedly having

539 Lawn and Steckle, Handbook of Nutrition Education Methods, 30. 540 Canada, “Return to gardening – Manitoba Region,” Medical Services Branch Nutrition Newsletter 3 (Summer 1982): 34-36; Canada, “Gardening in Fort Qu’Appelle,” Medical Services Branch Nutrition Newsletter 2 (Spring 1981): 14. 541 Antoinette Burton, “Introduction,” in Gender, Sexuality, and Colonial Modernities, ed. Antoinette Burton (London: Routledge, 1999), 1-16. Burton writes that “modern colonial regimes” are “… never fully or finally accomplished, to such an extent that they must be conceived of as ‘unfinished business.’”

144 approached Sandberg to learn more about how to garden.542 The central aim of this particular project was linking nutritional values and the Canada Food Guide’s food groups to actual food items, as the MSB prepared and displayed posters and other materials in local stores that sold the produce harvested from these gardens for “a low sum of money.” MSB declared: “Economically and nutritionally a garden is stiff competition against canned goods and vegetables brought in from the south.”543 Thus, the purpose of the gardens was threefold: teaching locals to garden, educating on the nutritional value of healthy food choices, and presenting affordable options in locations where groceries were neither fresh nor affordable. Because this project was the work of the state, it demonstrates how gardening done as an educational project could be gendered male, as Sandberg led and supervised less experienced growers and community members in the ways of the western gardener, mirroring in many ways the paternalism of previous state projects of uplift. The MCC project in Cross Lake demonstrates an alternate, maternalistic approach, in which Ontario sisters Jane and Elizabeth Nigh spent three months living in the community to help generate a “renewed interest in gardening.”544 According to the article, Jane, 25, was completing a science degree in nutrition at the University of Western Ontario and Elizabeth, 22, is an honours student studying French and English Literature at the University of Ottawa.545 Apparently, the women’s educational aspirations afforded them some authority in their missionary pursuits, as this was presented as key information despite only one sister having any direct training in the field of nutrition, and neither in Agriculture. As educated women, they seem to have been accepted as authorities on growing vegetables, and reportedly shared their wisdom primarily with local community women, like ‘50-year old grandmother’ Bernadette Beardy and ‘housewife’ Victoria McLeod.546 Beardy, Lowery writes, had “a healthy crop of potatoes, lettuce, rhubarb, and her turnips, beets and carrots and onions [sic] look promising.”

542 “Return to gardening – Manitoba Region,”34. 543 “Return to gardening – Manitoba Region,” 34. 544 “Return to gardening – Manitoba Region,” 35. The excerpt detailing the work of these two women was previously published in the Winnipeg Free Press, authored by Bob Lowery, August 19, 1981. 545 “Return to gardening – Manitoba Region,” 35. 546 “Return to gardening – Manitoba Region,” 36.

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However, “as with most local gardeners, she lost her pea and bean crops as a result of a June cold snap.” McLeod felt that gardening “is a great saving when you have a family like mine who are big vegetable eaters,” noting the harvest would carry her family through the summer and fall.547 The community started with three potato patches, with an increase after the women’s first visit to “20 well-cultivated gardens of vegetable and potato crops,” and by the following year “the garden count rose to 30.”548 This successful endeavor was lauded by male leaders, Mayor George McIvor and Deputy Chief Jonah McKay, who credited the young Ontarians with the community’s renewed interest in gardening. Gardening and food preparation thus continued to be presented as primarily gendered work, intended for women to carry out, especially in the final stages of preparation for consumption. Although Bushey’s husband reportedly planned to attempt gardening, her classes on preservation were intended for women, perpetuating gendered roles for women based on a western model of domesticity. In the 1980s, when many women in Canada were firmly established in professional careers and fighting for equal opportunities and pay in the workplace, it seems unclear why programs for Indigenous women in rural communities and First Nations were being guided into postwar domestic familial roles as a means of food security. It is also unclear what role male community members actually played in these projects, as the focus of reporters and MSB staff was on the roles of women, who perhaps they centred in on due to their own assumptions and expectations of who does the work of tending a kitchen garden, as opposed to who conducts the serious, large-scale work of mechanized agriculture. As the articles in the MSB Nutrition Newsletters indicate, perhaps the role of outsider influence – which arrived with its own cultural and gendered experiences, expectations, and world views – also impacted how and within what sort of framework gardening was adopted in individual communities. For instance, although the Ontario women with the MCC initiated a successful gardening program at Cross Lake, the article makes much of younger sister Elizabeth marrying a fellow named Brad Johnson, firmly positioning her in a domestic role as wife and

547 “Return to gardening – Manitoba Region,” 36. 548 “Return to gardening – Manitoba Region,” 35.

146 gardener. Johnson, who was reported as having just “completed two years of an agriculture engineering course at the University of Guelph,” wed Elizabeth between the women’s first and return visits to Cross Lake, and it is noted that Brad saw their return visit as “a very fascinating way to spend a honeymoon.”549 Perhaps this is more reflective of the MSB’s gendered discourse, as their preference for presenting Indigenous men with particular, gendered employment and advancement opportunities generated empowerment through western ideas of masculinity – agricultural leadership, entrepreneurship and business leadership, grocery store management, and self-sufficiency training in gendered CHR positions, as just a few examples – that tended to grow out of the ideology behind gendered education in Residential Schools. Meanwhile, the MSB continually praised Indigenous women during the same period for choosing opportunities that could lead to domestic success, such as through engaging in the types of women’s work defined by homemakers organizations, including the unpaid work of growing a kitchen garden, or given support to take up CHR and later nursing posts that were explicitly defined as feminine. Still other women who were involved in community success stories, such as those discussed in this chapter, were included for filling a necessary role as secretarial assistants to male business leaders in their communities.550 As this chapter illustrates, Indigenous communities have continued to work out alternative sources of food, and have found working within agriculture and with Indigenous foods traditional to their peoples was not only a means of self-sufficiently feeding themselves, but also of entrepreneurship. This included an ongoing effort at individually or collectively organizing kitchen or community gardens to fully operational agricultural operations, innovative gardening and agricultural techniques and models, as well as alternative grocery stores and food cooperatives to the dominant Hudson’s Bay Company community stores. Individuals and communities who persevered in these projects found success in working towards self-reliance, while challenging colonial models that inherently set communities up to fail, such as the wild rice experimental paddies of the 1970s. Men and women, however,

549 “Return to gardening – Manitoba Region,” 36. 550 See Carol Williams, ed, Indigenous Women and Work: From Labour to Activism (University of Illinois Press, 2012); McCallum, Indigenous Women, Work, and History.

147 experienced these opportunities as gendered and stratified, which was only slowly addressed in the coming decades.

148

CHAPTER FOUR

NUTRITION CANADA: THE SEPARATE TREATMENT OF INDIGENOUS PEOPLES IN CANADA’S FIRST NATIONAL NUTRITION SURVEY

“I know that many teams of one kind or another have visited this Indian reserve and people sometimes wonder what benefit there is to such surveys.”551

The fourth chapter is concerned with the largest and first comprehensive national nutrition survey, Nutrition Canada, that included research in various First Nations and Inuit communities in Canada in the late 1960s to early 1970s. Nutrition Canada (NC) was organized and run by the Department of National Health and Welfare (DNHW) for roughly a decade, and studied evidence of nutritional health in Canadian communities and was published as a series of reports under a summary report, Nutrition: A National Priority.552 This was quantified based on medical examinations that included interviews, questionnaires, blood samples, food tracking, and body measurements. Nutrition and medical analysts then drew conclusions based on grouping the white settler society with new immigrant bodies into a ‘general population,’ which was conceived of as separate from two other distinct groups: Indians and Eskimos.553 The surveys in First Nations and Inuit communities were conducted by Departments of National Health and Welfare (DNHW) and Indian Affairs and Northern Development (DIAND), carried out in communities by MSB medical personnel, and ran from 1968 through 1970. The three groupings used in the survey draw attention to the special otherness of First Nations and Inuit

551 Letter from Dr. L.M. Black, Regional Director, Manitoba Region, MSB to Chief Thompson and Council, Peguis Band, “Re: Nutrition Canada,” August 10, 1971, RG 029, ACC: W84-85/458, Box 11, File 144-2-4 vol. 1 Nutrition Surveys – Reserves (1970-12-01 to 1971-12- 31), MSB, DHW, LAC, Winnipeg, MB. Information and quotations are taken from the Peguis- directed letter, but all three letters convey the same information. 552 Canada, Nutrition Canada for the Department of National Health and Welfare, Nutrition: A National Priority (Ottawa: Department of National Health and Welfare, 1973). 553 Concerning terminology, the study uses the terms Indian and Eskimo in defining these research subjects from what they term the General Population. Where these terms are used in this paper, they are in reference to the subjects of the study in the legal terminology used by Nutrition Canada and the Canadian Government. Métis was not used as a subject category in the study, and appears infrequently, almost never, in period sources.

149 bodies and suggest that the project was not simply a benign attempt at raising the standard of health. Instead, as part of an ongoing assimilationist agenda, the NC project served to reinforce the colonial power structure of Indigenous-government relations. This chapter will explore the survey from its initial development through to the published outcomes, which show how NC’s directors lacked an appreciation of Indigenous and colonial Canadian histories and their structural legacies, particularly related to food and nutrition.554 The survey instead assumed all study participants serve as an economically and spatially comparable cross-section, despite these fundamental differences in access to resources inherent in the geographically marginal spaces of many ‘Indians’ and ‘Eskimos’ surveyed. As the chapter shows, NC illustrates the need for the development of research ethics in working with vulnerable populations, as individual experiences, rights, and interests, as well as cultural practices and beliefs, were regularly flattened and even compromised in favour of obtaining data. The chapter takes a particular interest in detailing NC’s methodological approaches and practices to understand the many layers involved in the gendered and racialized experiences of survey leaders, employees, and participants. Through NC, the state’s fixation on controlling diet and nutrition can be read as an attempt to regender the field masculine, as by educating women on ‘proper’ dietary nutrition, the government was also educating the nation that female and moreover cultural knowledge was inadequate and inferior to that of the predominantly male, white, scientific community.555 Thus, NC (and the interests it

554 Harris, Making Native Space; for a comprehensive history of social welfare on Reserves, see Hugh Shewell, ‘Enough to Keep them Alive’: Indian Welfare in Canada, 1873-1965 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004), 4-5. Shewell demonstrates that the welfare politics pursued by the Department of Indian and Northern Affairs and the federal government were only ever intended as assimilative, arguing that “Euro-Canadian civilization – liberal democratic capitalism – has laid waste to aboriginal peoples and their cultures.” Through his analysis, the consequent state of poverty, supported by the modern provision of social welfare, hinges on “the ultimate domination of Western liberal capitalism and ideology.” 555 Canada, Nutrition, 125-136. While it is difficult to gauge, it appears that the hierarchy of participants in administering the survey is heavily male-dominated in the supervisory divisions, while the field staff who collected the raw data appear to have been primarily young, single women (nearly all signified as ‘Miss’es.) See also Cynthia Enloe, The Curious Feminist: Searching for Women in a New Age of Empire (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), for a general discussion of patriarchy and masculinized states. While Enloe is particularly

150 represents) demonstrates a government attempt to minimize historically significant cultural and gendered relationships to food in an effort at creating a universal, scientific understanding and experience of nutrition. The survey and its ‘priority’ were presented as an expression of government concern for a healthy national body, which it was hoped would soon be united by a shared understanding of appropriate dietary choices through increased national nutrition education. It was conceived of in 1964, “when the Canadian Council on nutrition recommended that a comprehensive nutrition survey be undertaken.”556 The “principle objectives of this study” of ‘food consumption patterns’ and ‘nutritional status’ were threefold: first, to “examine the mean consumption of selected food groups and their contribution to nutrient intake of Canadians”; second to “examine patterns of food consumption and nutrient intake at various times of the day”; lastly to “provide information on the changes in eating habits during pregnancy.”557 The data collected, NC proposed, would “prove as a basis for the development of nutrition programs, construction of food guides, evaluation of changes of food patterns in Canada over a period of time,” and finally, “as a basis for food legislation.”558 With regards to the Indian and Eskimo surveys, they assured that “[i]n the long run it will result in the application of programs to ensure the availability of adequate nourishment for everyone, be it by supplementation of existing foods or encouraging the consumption of more nutritious foods.”559 Considering the separate survey work 1971 MSB summer students were carrying out in Manitoba that was concerned with more literal ‘militarization,’ I would extend application of her argument to what can be conceived of as a covert, militarized cultural intervention in the 1970s in Canada aimed at assimilating Indigenous peoples into southern, urban spaces or, at the least, lifestyles. As argued, the techniques used by the government reflect imperial objectives and techniques, including surveillance, gathering knowledge, as well as enforcing cultural and physical regulatory policies. 556 Canada, Nutrition Canada for the Department of National Health and Welfare, Nutrition: A National Priority (Ottawa: Department of National Health and Welfare, 1973) 2. 557 Canada, Nutrition Canada and the Bureau of Nutritional Sciences, Food Consumption Patterns Report (Ottawa: Department of National Health and Welfare, Health Protection Branch, 1975), 6. 558 Canada, Food Consumption Patterns Report, 6. 559 Nutrition Canada, “Native Population Survey: General Plans,” 2, RG 029, ACC: W84- 85/458, Box 11, File 144-2-4 vol. 1 Nutrition Surveys – Reserves (1970-12-01 to 1971-12-31), MSB, DHW, LAC, Winnipeg, MB.

151 being conducted while NC was planning their surveys of Indigenous communities, as detailed here in Chapter Two, this promise seems especially loaded. NC was supported by government health officials from both provincial and federal levels under the supervision of the Department of National Health and Welfare (DNHW). It was conceived of and structured with “related scientific communities in the nation,” in conjunction with the Department of Indian and Northern Affairs, and the content of the program and survey funding were approved in August 1969.560 It was through this survey that the government declared nutrition and all that it implies “a national priority.”561 Amidst a spate of studies into how to solve the so-called ‘Indian problem’,562 Nutrition Canada helped launch a new chapter in the assimilationist project, aimed specifically at nutritionally deviant Indigenous bodies. Study subjects were understood as problematic for either holding onto a so-called traditional or ‘country food’ diet, or ‘modernizing’ the wrong way by adopting a diet that incorporated what were seen as poor choices from packaged western foods shipped into remote northern and rural communities, particularly foods high in fats and sugars. The national survey fieldwork was carried out between 1970 and 1972, when data were collected according to categories based on divisions between age groupings and gender as well as pregnancy. Bodies were studied beginning with infancy; then nutrition patterns (and diversions from them) were measured in participants representing the different life stages from early childhood to adolescence and then adulthood with the latter capped at a category defined as ‘65+.’ The Survey was “designed to assess nutritional status according to region, population type, income and season” and included population samples from five distinct regions: Atlantic, Quebec, Ontario, Prairies, and British Columbia. NC further stratified the Enumeration Areas within each region by population types, defined as metropolitan, urban, or rural, and by income

560 Canada, Nutrition, 2. 561 Canada, Nutrition, title page. 562 The ‘problem’ in the postwar period was how to assimilate Indigenous people into the urban capitalist economy, as increasing numbers of Indigenous people were leaving their communities for cities, largely through a placement program facilitated by DIA. See McCallum, Indigenous Women, Work, and History; also Joan Sangster, “Domesticating Girls: The Sexual Regulation of Aboriginal and Working-Class Girls in Twentieth-Century Canada,” in Contact Zones: Aboriginal and Settler Women in Canada’s Colonial Past, eds. Katie Pickles and Myra Rutherdale, 179-201 (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2005).

152 levels.563 The most striking stratification among these population groupings was the separation of ‘Indian’ and ‘Eskimo’ peoples into distinct categories while all of the other cultural, religious, class, or ethnic groups appeared as a nondescript Canadian citizenry, distinguished in the published reports only by region, age, and gender.564 Separate sample designs were created for the Indian and Eskimo surveys to assess the nutritional status of non-urban Indigenous people in Canada.565 The Indian Survey was carried out from September 1971 to September 1972 and the Eskimo Survey between April and June 1972.566 In preparing for the program of Indigenous community surveys, NC set out a “general plan of operation,” for which the “first steps” began in Ottawa.567 Individual participants were selected “by using the population records on tape (Det. Of Indian Affairs and Northern Development).” MSB Public Health Nurses (PHNs) living in each individual community were then charged with verifying the list, which was to be made available to them three months in advance of the survey. NC planned to select “135 names per reservation” and required eighty survey participants.568 The process then transferred the verified list to Ottawa again to “select substitute names” as “[m]any names may have been dropped because people have moved and no longer live on the reservation.” Ultimately, NC aimed to have PHNs setting up 135 appointments for their survey clinics to best assure that they met the minimum participation number of eighty per community.569

563 Canada, Nutrition, 5–7. Population types were metropolitan (100,000 and greater), urban (5,000 to 100,000), or rural (5,000 and less), and income was based on the 1961 census data. 564 While there is a box in the ‘Household and Family Profile Form 1’ asking for ‘Residence of Family Head (in years),’ asking participants to state their regional background or, if not from Canada, their country of origin, all non-Aboriginal cultural or ethnic statistics are fully integrated in the published report and appear only as crunched data for the regional and national populations. Nutrition: A National Priority, Appendix C, I. 565 Canada, Eskimo Survey Report (Ottawa: DNHW, 1975), 5; Canada, Indian Survey Report (Ottawa: DNHW, 1975), 5–6. 566 Canada, Indian Survey Report, 6; Eskimo Survey Report, 6. 567 Nutrition Canada, “Native Population Survey: General Plans,” 2. 568 Nutrition Canada, “Native Population Survey: General Plans,” 2. 569 Nutrition Canada, “Native Population Survey: General Plans,” 2.

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The Indian Survey participants included members of Indian bands from six culture areas defined by Indian and Northern Affairs for NC as Algonkian, Iroquoian, Plains, Plateau, Pacific, and Mackenzie River. The three locations chosen for the NC Indian Survey in Manitoba were Fisher River, Peguis, and Sioux Valley (Prairies).570 Other communities surveyed across Canada in this first phase included: Seabird Island, Sheshalt, and Chemainus (Coast), as well as Deadman’s Creek and Canim Lake (Inland), British Columbia; Enochs and Stoney Wesley, Alberta (Prairies); Kahavisithaw Saskatchewan (Prairies); along with Iroquois of Caughnawaga and Hurons of Lorette in Ontario.571 These communities were surveyed by the main NC team due to logistics, specifically that they were “accessible by road and [could] accommodate a team of 20 people” and were the first surveyed in the Indian Survey, during the fall and winter months of 1971-72. Following this, Ontario communities were surveyed by the eight-member survey team tasked with surveying all ‘remote’ communities in the north.572 These included the residents of Curve Lake, Oneidas of Thames, Chippewas of Rama, Nipissing, Moose Factory, and Pikangikum, Ontario.573 The two Atlantic Region Nations of St. Mary’s and Pictou Landing (both Algonquin) were also under the jurisdiction of the main survey team, and were visited in summer of 1972.574 It was decided, due to “the availability of trained French-speaking personnel at the end of the Quebec survey,” to “mount a pilot study in the only French-speaking remote Indian Reservation” of Romaine (Algonquin) at the northeastern tip of Quebec by Labrador. As Nutrition Canada reported, Romaine was “selected by our computerized random-selection

570 Notes of Meeting, August 11, 1971, Dr. L. Black, Dr. D.J. Waller, and Miss. L. Cole, RG 029, ACC: W84-85/458, Box 11, File 144-2-4 vol. 1 Nutrition Surveys – Reserves (1970-12-01 to 1971-12-31), MSB, DHW, LAC, Winnipeg, MB; The six ‘Indian cultural groups’ NC used for their sample was broken down and identified as Algonquin, Coast, Inland, Iroquois, Prairies, and Mackenzie (spelling as used in NC documents). See Nutrition Canada, Communiqué 2, no. 3 (October, 1971), 9-10, RG 029, ACC: W84-85/458, Box 11, File 144-2-4 vol. 1 Nutrition Surveys – Reserves (1970-12-01 to 1971-12-31), MSB, DHW, LAC, Winnipeg, MB. 571 Nutrition Canada, “Native Population Survey: General Plans,” 1. 572 Nutrition Canada, “Native Population Survey: General Plans,” 2. 573 Nutrition Canada, Communiqué 2, no. 3 (October, 1971), 9-10. Spellings used as in Nutrition Canada documents. 574 Nutrition Canada, “Native Population Survey: General Plans,” 2; Nutrition Canada, Communiqué 2, no. 3 (October, 1971), 9-10. Spellings used as in Nutrition Canada documents.

154 procedure,” and would be surveyed by the northern eight-member team in fall of 1972.575 Other communities who participated in the NC survey included: Fort George, PQ (Algonquin); Lac La Ronge and Stony Rapids, SK (Prairies); Necoslie, BC (Inland); Fort Smith and Yellowknife, NWT (Mackenzie); and Whitehorse, YT (Inland).576 The lack of attention to self-defined ‘culture groups’ in favour of the simplified regional groupings that NC applied to a diversity of peoples is yet another example of the lack of input from, and respect for, Indigenous peoples prior to participation in community survey clinics. For the Eskimo Survey, Inuit participants were selected from the four settlements of Frobisher Bay, Coppermine, Pelly Bay, and Eskimo Point.577 These more densely populated areas were used in favor of “small settlements and sparsely-inhabited areas” that were deemed “impractical to the survey.”578 One hundred people from each of the four settlements were chosen from lists provided by local health authorities, with sixty per cent participation at the survey centres from this target population of four hundred.579 Most of the participants in the Eskimo study who were over the age of twenty required translators, as did some of the Indian Survey participants living in ‘remote areas’, and translators were drawn from the local population.580 Divisions by age and gender in both the Indian and Eskimo surveys mirror those in the national model with one exception: the oldest age category in both the Indian and Eskimo samples was cut off at 55 years out of recognition of the low numbers of Indigenous people over 65 years of age living in the areas surveyed.581 Nutrition Canada wanted MSB Public Health Nurses to emphasize to Indigenous community members that this survey project would be different from earlier surveys, as “those found suffering from malnutrition will be referred to and treated by [MSB] staff.”582 This promise was referred to repeatedly. For example, MB Regional Nutritionist Lynn Cole wrote in a

575 Nutrition Canada, “Native Population Survey: General Plans,” 2. 576 Nutrition Canada, Communiqué 2, no. 3 (October, 1971), 9-10. Spellings used as in Nutrition Canada documents. 577 Indian Survey Report, 7; Eskimo Survey Report, 7. Spellings as used in the Survey. 578 Canada, Nutrition, 21. 579 Canada, Eskimo Survey Report, 5-6. 580 Eskimo Survey Report, 9; Indian Survey Report, 11. 581 Eskimo Survey Report, 5; Indian Survey Report, 6. 582 Nutrition Canada, “Native Population Survey: General Plans,” 2.

155 memo to MSB Regional Director, Dr. L. Black, that “[t]he initial visit by the [PHN] will be important in providing incentive for individuals to participate.” Further, she explains, “[o]ne aspect is considering this survey as a special clinic where people will be informed individually if there is any need for follow-up after the medical and dental examinations.”583 In a hand-written note at the bottom of the “Native Population Survey: General Plans” document housed in Winnipeg’s LAC branch, a note informs that “meetings with the chief + council have been held on all reserves to discuss the benefits of this survey + to ask for their support.”584 Indeed, correspondence between NC and Manitoba Chiefs indicate communication was initiated in August, 1971, when a first set of identical letters was sent to Chief Thompson (Peguis), Chief Mazawasicuna (Sioux Valley), and Chief Sinclair (Fisher River). Black explained the survey to the leaders in basic terms, laying out the problems Nutrition Canada sought to identify as well as the random selection process of each community and individual included to participate. He wrote, “I would like to ask for your support of this project,” explaining, “I know that many teams of one kind or another have visited this Indian reserve and people sometimes wonder what benefit there is to such surveys.”585 This survey, he asserted, “will be very valuable to your people.” Black assures that “[n]ot only will it help the Canadian government to learn a lot about food problems across the country but in particular, the team will consist of some 20 people and include a medical doctor and assistants and a dentist and assistants.” Residents “examined as part of the survey will have the opportunity of having a complete examination along with laboratory tests.” He emphasizes NC’s emotional appeal to communities living with a severe shortage of access to medical and health services, ensuring

583 Memo from Lynn Cole, Regional Nutritionist, Manitoba Region, to Dr. Black, Regional Director, Manitoba Region, “Re: Summary of Nutrition Canada Workshop – September 27/71,” September 28, 1971, 2, RG 029, ACC: W84-85/458, Box 11, File 144-2-4 vol. 1 Nutrition Surveys – Reserves (1970-12-01 to 1971-12-31), MSB, DHW, LAC, Winnipeg, MB. 584 Nutrition Canada, “Native Population Survey: General Plans,” 2. Punctuation as in original. 585 Letter from Dr. L.M. Black, Regional Director, Manitoba Region, MSB to Chief Thompson and Council, Peguis Band, “Re: Nutrition Canada,” August 10, 1971 RG 029, ACC: W84-85/458, Box 11, File 144-2-4 vol. 1 Nutrition Surveys – Reserves (1970-12-01 to 1971-12- 31), MSB, DHW, LAC, Winnipeg, MB. Information and quotations are taken from the Peguis- directed letter, but all three letters convey the same information.

156 that “any health problems uncovered will be brought to the attention of the person themselves and the nurses will ensure that necessary treatment is undertaken.” In these letters of initial contact, Black also assures community leaders that their Public Health Nurse “will be spending a lot of time in the community informing people about the survey,” and that the chiefs should expect a visit from the PHN soon.586 At this time, he also moved to arrange a meeting in person – “if you are agreeable” – with the chief and council of each of the three selected communities, along with other MSB personnel, “to discuss this survey and try and answer any questions you may have.”587 The letters were copied to the Regional Nurse, as well as the Manitoba Indian Brotherhood. In addition, according to meeting notes from August 11, 1971, MSB staff in Manitoba, who were overseeing the local NC Indian Survey project, noted, “[a]ll those attending [the] meeting visited the Manitoba Indian Brotherhood on the day of the meeting and discussed the project with its President, Mr. D. Corchane [sic].”588 Following their meeting, Black wrote to Courchene to report on the findings of the 1971 summer student surveys conducted in Manitoba under Cole’s supervision.589 He included the students’ summary reports, and assured Courchene that the “work being done on all isolated reserves in the province is providing us with useful information in carrying out our Public Health Program. At the same time,” he continued, “areas open to possible improvement are being discussed with both community leaders and residents, and our own staff or other government agencies.” It would appear that the surveys conducted that same summer had been news to Courchene when he met with MSB’s Black, Cole, and Dr. Waller. Whether Courchene was convinced by the rhetoric Black

586 Black to Thompson and Council “Re: Nutrition Canada,” August 10, 1971, 1-2. 587 Black to Thompson and Council “Re: Nutrition Canada,” August 10, 1971, 2. 588 Notes of Meeting, August 11, 1971, Dr. L. Black, Dr. D.J. Waller, and Miss. L. Cole. Dave Courchene was the Manitoba Indian Brotherhood President at the time of the survey. Those in attendance were Dr. Lyall Black (Regional Director), Dr. D.J. Waller (Dist. Regional Director), and Lynn Cole (Regional Nutritionist), and they met to outline provincial participation strategies for the survey. 589 Letter from Dr. L.M. Black, Regional Director, Manitoba Region, MSB to Dave Courchene, President, Manitoba Indian Brotherhood “Re: Reports of Summer Students in Nutrition,” August 16, 1971 RG 029, ACC: W84-85/458, Box 11, File 144-2-4 vol. 1 Nutrition Surveys – Reserves (1970-12-01 to 1971-12-31), MSB, DHW, LAC, Winnipeg, MB. These reports are discussed in some detail in Chapters Two and Three of this thesis.

157 used to sell the value of nutrition survey projects to the MIB President is uncertain; however, it mirrored that which NC crafted in promoting their work to Indigenous communities. Almost a year earlier, in November 1970, Courchene had reached out to NC, copying both Dr. M.J. DeKoven, then Acting Regional Director, and Dr. K.J. Clement [sic], Prairie Regional Director. He wrote, “[t]he fact that this survey is underway has just come to our attention,” elaborating that “[i]t has long been our concern that many Indian people have incomes below three thousand dollars per annum and that this income level may not include opportunities for an adequate diet.”590 Further, “this group of people is geographically isolated from the general population of Canadians by means of reserve boundaries,” and therefore “have been excluded from consideration in surveys of this nature.”591 In writing, he references NC’s “stated purpose of the national nutrition survey,” as both to address his points of income and exclusion from previous surveys, and “to provide information on the nutritional well being of Canadians,” encouraging that the survey include a Manitoba First Nation in their project. A letter of interest, written only a month after Courchene contacted NC from Dr. Clementi to Dr. DeKoven, responds to DeKoven’s query regarding the inclusion of Indians in the project. As Clementi writes, “You are correct in your statement that no Indians in Canada will be examined in the main part of our National Nutrition Survey. Like you,” he continues, “I have been disturbed by this and have made strong representations on behalf of the governments of the three Prairies Provinces.”592 Clementi informs that the Federal Government has, consequently, decided “to undertake an extension to [NC] on the completion of the latter.” He explains that this special survey will “of necessity take a very different form, will involve all Indian, Metis, and Eskimo populations and will be accomplished using a smaller examination

590 Letter from Dave Courchene, President, Manitoba Indian Brotherhood, “Re: Nutrition Canada,” to National Co-ordinator, Nutrition Canada, November 2, 1970, RG 029, ACC: W84- 85/458, Box 11, File 144-2-4 vol. 1 Nutrition Surveys – Reserves (1970-12-01 to 1971-12-31), MSB, DHW, LAC, Winnipeg, MB. 591 Courchene, “Re: Nutrition Canada.” 592 Letter from Dr. Ken J. Clementi, Regional Director, Nutrition Canada - Prairie Provinces, to Dr. M.J. DeKoven, Regional Director, Nutrition Canada - Manitoba Region, December 11, 1970, RG 029, ACC: W84-85/458, Box 11, File 144-2-4 vol. 1 Nutrition Surveys – Reserves (1970-12-01 to 1971-12-31), MSB, DHW, LAC, Winnipeg, MB.

158 team which will make long stays in each region.” In closing, he writes that dates for this ‘second Survey’ as of December 1970 were not yet set.593 While it is difficult to verify, it appears that Courchene’s letter might have sparked discussion and urgency in planning for a special ‘second Survey’. Though he doesn’t appear otherwise to have been further consulted until the survey was arranged in Indigenous communities of Manitoba, perhaps the voices of Indigenous leaders were being heard by some federal DNHW employees, as both DeKoven and Clementi were sent copies of Courchene’s request to survey a Manitoba reserve.594 However, that Courchene appears to have been included in discussions only once NC was well into the surveying period of their project speaks to the persistence of paternalism into the late twentieth century, with primarily non-Indigenous health and nutrition experts making decisions for and about Indigenous peoples without considering (or as the case may be, acknowledging) their input. This lack of communication is further layered with gendered power relations, as MIB Health Liaison, Jocelyn Wilson, was contacted by Dr. Black in November 1971 to explain that letters regarding the survey were sent to Chiefs and Councils in Manitoba earlier in the year.595 Black indicates he was contacted by Mr. Cuthand “indicating you were not aware of the forthcoming nutritional survey in three reserves in Manitoba.”596 It is unclear from the paper trail how and why Wilson was left out of the discussion, and also whether or not she was truly unaware, as the information was shared third-hand by telephone from Cuthand to Black. However, that Wilson appears to have been an afterthought and was not the one to contact MSB about this oversight speaks to the gendered spaces occupied by prominent physicians and

593 Letter from Dr. Ken J. Clementi to Dr. M.J. DeKoven. 594 While this is speculation, as I make clear, it does seem a likely timeline based on the archival materials housed in Nutrition Canada’s Manitoba files. 595 Wilson is believed to be nurse and RNCIA co-founder Jocelyn Bruyere from Opaskwayak Cree Nation, who became increasingly active in advocating for Indigenous nurses and patients. As McCallum writes, she also worked with the Manitoba Chiefs in drafting “Wahbung: Our Tomorrows,” in response to the 1969 White Paper on Indian Policy. See McCallum, Indigenous Women, Work, and History, 176. 596 Letter from Dr. L.M. Black, Regional Director, Manitoba Region, MSB to Miss Jocelyn Wilson, Supervisor, Health Liaison, Manitoba Indian Brotherhood, “Re: Nutrition Canada Survey,” November 18, 1971, RG 029, ACC: W84-85/458, Box 11, File 144-2-4 vol. 1 Nutrition Surveys – Reserves (1970-12-01 to 1971-12-31), MSB, DHW, LAC, Winnipeg, MB.

159 political leaders, from which women were regularly excluded well into the late twentieth century. Like Courchene, Wilson was not invited to provide input on the planning of the surveys, in spite of her role as Health Liaison with MIB. Although local community members were generally not asked to be involved in conducting the survey, nor consulted in its planning stages, much additional work was placed on already taxed MSB Nurses and Public Health Nurses. PHNs, along with Community Health Representatives (CHRs) were responsible for much of the lead-up work in their community, including extensive preparation with residents and community leaders. Further, NC “felt that the Medical Services nurse is in the best position to win the confidence of the Indian or Eskimo population,” therefore they “urged that a general publicity program in the community be mounted over a period of up to 3 months.” During this time, “the nurse on the reservation and the Regional Nutritionist [were expected to] talk to groups on the reservation and to influential individuals about the forthcoming survey.”597 In the NC “Advance Party Manual: Native Population Survey,” MSB nurses are advised: “Good publicity can be an important factor in the success of any survey.” 598 The manual explains that “[a] public information program for Nutrition Canada has been established and strives to, “first, “explain to the Canadian public the need for the survey”; second, “keep the survey field teams informed of progress and policy”; and third, “elicite [sic] cooperation and participation in the survey areas.” Nurses were advised they would be given a “kit containing copies of news releases and communiques to date” to ensure they were up-to-date on “what the public may know of the survey.” In addition, PHNs were taxed with ensuring the random samples of individuals selected for the surveys, which were generated by Statistics Canada from computer lists, met the minimum number required for the survey sample: “If more than 35 selected people have moved out of the area and you think that less than 80 of the remainder will cooperate, please return the list to Ottawa and request additional names.”599 Expressed concern over

597 Nutrition Canada, “Native Population Survey: General Plans,” 2. 598 Nutrition Canada, “Advance Party Manual: Native Population Survey,” 2, September, 1971, RG 029, ACC: W84-85/458, Box 11, File 144-2-4 vol. 1 Nutrition Surveys – Reserves (1970- 12-01 to 1971-12-31), MSB, DHW, LAC, Winnipeg, MB. 599 Nutrition Canada, “Advance Party Manual,” 4.

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“uncooperative” individuals is ongoing throughout the internal documents regarding the Indian Survey, and the issue of “Refusals” is addressed in the Manual. “Occasionally,” NC informs nurses, “you will find someone who does not want to give information, either because he does not understand why it is necessary, or for some other reason.” When this would happen, nurses were advised to attempt to “obtain his interest and cooperation by explaining the purpose of the survey.” In the face of refusal, NC encouraged nurses to continue to survey the household as a unit, and “list their reasons [for refusing] beside their sequence number.”600 This concern extended to advice on dealing with tardiness, with NC advising nurses to “encourage people to use the [provided] transportation.” Further, “[i]f they insist that they wish to drive themselves, impress upon them that punctuality is important without making them feel that they are part of an ‘assembly line’ process.”601 Though couched in terms that presume Indigenous people to be outside of modernity and unable to understand time, the concern over attendance was not unfounded. In August, 1972, with the “Native Population Survey” nearly complete, NC Assistant Coordinator Elizabeth Campbell wrote from Ottawa to Nathalie Ross, MSB Regional Nutritionist in Regina: “Although the turnouts were not always what we hoped they would be we certainly do have a large body of data from which many and valuable inferences can be made.”602 With the number of nutrition surveys and other research conducted in and about Indigenous communities and their individual members for the better part of the century prior, it is little surprise voluntary participation in yet another project introduced by ‘well-meaning’ outsiders was at a low. To accompany their “Advance Party Manuals,” nurses were also expected to attend a workshop that would train them in the survey procedures. On September 28, 1971, such a workshop was held in Winnipeg to train staff working on the surveys “of Indians on

600 Nutrition Canada, “Advance Party Manual,” 4. 601 Nutrition Canada, “Advance Party Manual,” 14. 602 Letter from Elizabeth Campbell, Assistant Coordinator, Nutrition Canada, to Nathalie Ross, Medical Services Branch, Regina SK, August 11, 1972, RG 029, ACC: W84-85/458, Box 11, File 144-2-4 vol. 1 Nutrition Surveys – Surveys (1972-01-01 to 1973-03-31), MSB, DHW, LAC, Winnipeg, MB. Interestingly, the Indian Survey was being termed ‘Native Population Survey’ by some involved once the project was underway. This change in terms reflected in correspondence and internal documents, however, was not used in the formal publications on the survey.

161 reservations and Eskimos and Whites in Northern Territories.”603 The workshop included a presentation by Dr. Z.I. Sabry, NC’s National Coordinator, which covered a history of the project, survey objectives, “sampling procedure and operational details” for the general survey, and the plans for the survey of Indigenous peoples. Nurse Ethel Mole, who worked for NC, presented on “the use of information from the selected participants lists,” “verification of lists,” the “completion procedures for forms,” as well as “details of the clinic operations.” The session also included information on how to contact individual participants to complete household information and arrange for clinic appointments.604 They were tasked with scheduling clinics, “in 4 two-hour sessions: at 1-3, 3-5, 5-7 and 8-10.”605 “When making appointments,” enumerators were advised, “suggest an hour – do not give the respondents a choice unless they indicate that they cannot come at the hour you have suggested.”606 Nurse Mole was part of the Advance Party who visited communities to prepare for the arrival of the rest of the survey team. She and Bette Purves, who presented a slideshow of ‘clinic operations’, were NC employees present for the workshop, while MSB nurses A. Potherin [sic] (Peguis), I. Henderson (Sioux Valley), Enid McFadden (Kawkewistahaw, SK), and Shirley Houghton (Stony Rapids, SK), as well as Regional Nutritionists N. Ross (SK) and Lynn Cole, attended for training.607 Information on demographics, food purchase, and meal preparation was recorded in the preliminary enumerator sessions by the advance team visiting chosen participants in their

603 Notes of Meeting, Medical Services Manitoba Region “Workshop on Nutrition Canada,” Winnipeg, September 28, 1971, RG 029, ACC: W84-85/458, Box 11, File 144-2-4 vol. 1 Nutrition Surveys – Reserves (1970-12-01 to 1971-12-31), MSB, DHW, LAC, Winnipeg, MB. 604 Nutrition Canada, “Native Population Survey: General Plans,” 3. 605 Nutrition Canada, “Native Population Survey: General Plans,” 3. 606 Nutrition Canada, “Advance Party Manual,” 15. 607 Notes of Meeting, “Workshop on Nutrition Canada”; Memo from R.W. Robertson, Acting MSB Regional Director, Saskatchewan, to Dr. Black, MSB Regional Director, Manitoba, “Nutrition Canada Workshop,” September 16, 1971, RG 029, ACC: W84-85/458, Box 11, File 144-2-4 vol. 1 Nutrition Surveys – Reserves (1970-12-01 to 1971-12-31), MSB, DHW, LAC, Winnipeg, MB. Nurse Potherin’s name is spelled Pothorin, and appears to be hand-written elsewhere as such on a signed document, so it is assumed this is the same person. See MSB Memo from A. Pothorin, Nurse in Charge, Fisher River Health Centre, to Regional Director, Manitoba Region, “Re: Peguis – Nutrition Canada Survey Confirmation,” October 21, 1971, LAC RG 029, ACC: W84-85/458, Box 11, File 144-2-4 vol. 1 Nutrition Surveys – Reserves (1970-12-01 to 1971-12-31), MSB, DHW, LAC, Winnipeg, MB.

162 homes. For the Indian and Eskimo surveys, the district Public Health Nurses were expected to complete these visits.608 In conducting household enumerations, nurses were advised to be “friendly and courteous,” as well as “able to adapt,” using “common sense, patience and tact.”609 As they worked to get through the enumeration process “rapidly,” they were expected – according to a numbered list of suggestions – to “Ask questions as though you expect them to be answered,” “Do not show surprise or disapproval of the respondent’s replies, either by facial expression or tone of your voice,” and while one should “maintain a friendly manner,” enumerators should avoid “engag[ing] in small talk.”610 CHRs were particularly important figures in the home visits stage, when they were expected to attend the first visit with the PHN, then “[j]ust prior to the survey, the [CHR] may revisit families concerned as a reminder as to time of appointments and also for transportation times where necessary.”611 In enumerating residents, NC advised enumerators to “[c]onduct the enumeration with a responsible member of the household, preferably the head of the household or his wife.”’ Consent and protection of children in the process was emphasized, showing the beginnings of a research ethics model emerging during the period, as enumerators were told not to take information from children.612 NC stressed the importance of securing completed consent forms signed by a parent or guardian for all children under twenty-one years old, and which had to be collected in advance of the survey, where adult consent forms were signed at the survey clinic. Further, regarding appointment times, NC’s Manual cautioned scheduling according to what were seen as appropriate times of day for children to be awake or asleep, as pre-schoolers were to be scheduled for afternoon appointments and enumerators were advised, “Do not schedule appointments for children under 12 years of age from 8-10 p.m.”613

608 Eskimo Survey Report, 9; Memo from Lynn Cole, “Re: Summary of Nutrition Canada Workshop – September 27/71,” 1-2. See also Kathryn McPherson, ‘Nursing and Colonization: The Work of Indian Health Service Nurses in Manitoba, 1945–1970,’ in Feldberg et al., Women, Health, and Nation, 223–46. 609 Nutrition Canada, “Advance Party Manual,” 5. 610 Nutrition Canada, “Advance Party Manual,” 5-6. 611 Memo from Lynn Cole, “Re: Summary of Nutrition Canada Workshop – September 27/71,” 1. 612 Nutrition Canada, “Advance Party Manual,” 6. 613 Nutrition Canada, “Advance Party Manual,” 15.

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Local MSB PHNs were also responsible for securing an appropriate location “not unfamiliar to the participants since it is usually held in a community health clinic unit, school facilities or a church hall,” with “2,000 sq. ft. of well lit comfortable space.” Accommodations for a team of twenty medical staff was also to be arranged, either “on or near (within 30 or 40 miles) the reservation.” NC ‘hoped’ MSB nurses, PHNs, and CHRs “responsible for the reservation” would “accompany the driver” for the team “and assist in locating the participants’ homes,” impressing that “[t]he presence of the nurse is essential since any public health problems arising at the clinic will be reported to her at once.” In addition, nurses were charged with securing a volunteer babysitter from their community to facilitate running a “nursery where children may be left,” particularly “during the day sessions, (i.e. 1-7 p.m.).”614 In memos outlining the agreements between MSB nurses and the NC survey team in Manitoba, the Nurse in Charge at Peguis and nurse Carole Bates at Fisher River Clinic #2 in Hodgson provide the locations of the surveys (both at local community halls), and Bates notes that “babysitting will be done by reserve women for $1.00 an hour.”615 Similarly, at Peguis, babysitting was to be provided by ‘two women’ at the same rate.616 Nutrition Canada also clearly laid out the procedures for running clinics consistently in each community, with a team of twenty specially trained employees that included a “physician, nurses, dieticians, technicians, anthropometrists, dental hygienist, drivers and an administrative officer” who oversaw the running of six clinic ‘areas’: “reception, dietary, medical, laboratory, anthropometry, and dental.”617 The goal of the clinic routine was to ‘process’ ten to twelve individual participants within each of the two-hour time slots. Survey participants were to move through reception, then “visit the other five areas in the order assigned by the receptionist.” The dietary interview, which NC referred to as the “inquisition,” was the area where

614 Nutrition Canada, “Native Population Survey: General Plans,” 3. 615 MSB Memo from Mrs. Carole Bates, Fisher River Clinic #2 to Regional Director, Manitoba Region, “Re: Nutrition Canada,” October 22, 1971, RG 029, ACC: W84-85/458, Box 11, File 144-2-4 vol. 1 Nutrition Surveys – Reserves (1970-12-01 to 1971-12-31), MSB, DHW, LAC, Winnipeg, MB. 616 Pothorin, “Re: Peguis – Nutrition Canada Survey Confirmation.” 617 Nutrition Canada, “Native Population Survey: General Plans,” 2. Anthropometry refers to the study of human body measurement for use in anthropological classification and comparison.

164 participants were expected to spend the most time.618 It involved an hour-long ‘in-depth interview’ where individuals were “asked about types and amounts of foods consumed and how often certain foods are eaten.”619 In short, “the purpose of the interview is to determine the eating habits of the individual.”620 In its published form, the survey (which is accessible to the public) consists of a set of bound books, printed in twelve volumes, and accompanied by a separate preliminary summary of the project entitled, Nutrition: A National Priority. Ten of these volumes cover each of the regional-based findings while the final two publications were the separate Indian and Eskimo Survey reports released in 1975. The publication of the series was followed by a report on food consumption patterns based on the findings of the study as well as the Health and Protection Branch Report on the Relationship between Income and Nutrition Based on Analysis of Nutrition Canada Data.621 The preliminary Nutrition summary introduces Canada’s agricultural history to frame the discussion of health in relation to normative dietary choices. The categories of ‘Food Production’ and ‘Food Supply’ are delineated with primarily middle-class, western influenced foods as the basis. Nutrition Canada indicates that most food production is concentrated in the southernmost regions, near the United States border, with no ‘legitimate’ food production in the Northern region due to limiting climate and the “lack of a local market.”622 Canada’s main food crops during this period are identified in the published survey as fruits, specifically apples, along with several non-indigenous berries and drupes, as well as vegetables, amongst which this study groups potatoes, carrots, onions, and turnips as major crops. Cereals, oilseeds, and legumes also constituted a large portion of food production in Canada, with wheat, animal feed grains, and oilseeds as the most commonly manufactured foodstuffs.623 Pigs, cows, and dairy production are cited as the main sources of animal-based foodstuffs produced in Canada. Further, the food industry in Canada is noted for its production

618 Nutrition Canada, “Native Population Survey: General Plans,” 3. “Inquisition” appears in quotation marks in the document. 619 This is discussed in more detail later in the chapter. 620 Nutrition Canada, “Native Population Survey: General Plans,” 3. 621 Food Consumption Patterns Report. 622 Canada, Nutrition, 9. 623 Canada, Nutrition, 9-10.

165 and distribution of processed meats and dairy, canned fruits and vegetables, confections, vegetable oils, food and drink powders, soft drinks, distilled alcohols and beers, with most economic activity localized in Ontario and Quebec.624 Further, the food industry in Canada is noted for its production and distribution of processed meats and dairy, canned fruits and vegetables, confections, vegetable oils, food and drink powders, soft drinks, distilled alcohols and beers, with most economic activity localized in Ontario and Quebec.625 Looking at these food products as symbols of culture, the trend clearly emphasizes the centrality of a western diet, which informed the initial demand for specific types of agricultural development in resettling the country. Despite a handful of common Asian, Indigenous, and Southern European foods listed in the survey’s breakdown of agriculture, the food options listed in the survey reflect the predominance of western food culture in Canadian nutrition standards. The chapters in the regional, Indian, and Eskimo reports are organized along a model that includes a synopsis of the study: “Measurement of Nutritional Status,” “Sample Design and Response,” “Survey Procedures,” and “The Interpretation of Data.” This is followed by the presentation of regional results, showing a breakdown of various vitamins and minerals consumed for the specific population studied, which are then measured against the national findings. The findings for each group of participants, a total of 19,000 individuals overall, are then medically presented, detailing nutritional intake and status as well as areas of deficiency or ‘risk.’626 All sections are presented both through written summary and multiple graphs and tables, and include bibliographic references. No photographs are included in any of the publications, nor are there any specific details that would identify individual NC participants. The questions asked concern not only location details and the number of individuals in a home but specific aspects of everyday living conditions. A ‘List of Household Members Form,’ for example, is laid out in columns that ask for the interviewee’s ‘Sex and Pregnancy Status,’ ‘Highest School Grades Obtained,’ and ‘Employment Status.’627 The surveyors also tabulated household details including where food was purchased, who prepared it, whether there was

624 Canada, Nutrition, 11. 625 Canada, Nutrition, 11. 626 Canada, Nutrition, 3. 627 Canada, Nutrition, 3., Appendix C, II.

166 storage space for perishables, how much was spent on weekly purchases, and mode of transportation (‘own’ or ‘pick-up’). The form’s individual subject boxes contain nutritionally incriminating evidence of the ‘problem’ of national health. For instance, Box H, ‘Type of Cook Stove,’ allows for the following options listed in order from top to bottom: ‘electric range or rangette,’ ‘natural gas range,’ ‘hot plates,’ ‘wood/coal/oil,’ ‘primitive,’ and ‘other.’ The various options, which are presented as a kind of hierarchy of modernity which then spirals downwards to below ‘primitive’ means of cooking, seem to have little to do with nutrition. Instead, they position subjects who check the lower boxes outside of modernity and thus outside of the professional middle-class knowledge of household science. As historians have documented, the discourses surrounding the type of stove that women did or did not use often said more about the educational and ideological objectives of the schools, physicians, dieticians, nurses, and government publications dispensing advice than about nutrition per se.628 In the survey, the participants employing methods of food preparation that are deemed ‘primitive,’ which arguably include the methods used by primarily Indigenous communities living in subsistence conditions or on combinations of ‘country’ and imported foods, are pathologized as practising poor nutrition. Similar treatment is given to food storage, with options listed from top (‘refrigerator’) to bottom (‘other’), along with a second section that indicates a range of choices from ‘refrigerator & freezer’ down to ‘other.’ The message seems clear: for the mothers storing their food in the less than ideal conditions of a refrigerator and freezer, poor nutrition, and the accompanying stigma of unhealthy children and high infant morbidity, appear to be the inevitable results. An important point missing from this attempt at turning human subjects into numerical data is the material circumstances of life for many in northern communities at the time. For instance, as discussed in Chapter Two, electricity was still absent in many northern Manitoba communities in the decades the survey was conducted.

628 For example, see Joy Parr, ‘Shopping for a Good Stove: A Parable about Gender, Design, and the Market,’ in Joy Parr, ed., A Diversity of Women: Ontario, 1945–1980 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995), 75-97; also Caroline Durand, “Rational Meals for the Traditional Family: Nutrition in Quebec School Manuals, 1900-1960,” in Iacovetta, Korinek, and Epp, eds., Edible Histories, Cultural Politics, 109-127.

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Summer nutrition students working for Medical Services Branch noted that, in 1967, Split Lake was without electrical power, which was no longer the case by 1971; however, Shamattawa, Pauingassi, and Granville, south of Lynn Lake, were without hydroelectric power that same year.629 According to The Indian News, this was not unique to Manitoba, as communities in other provinces were also either without electricity or connecting to it. In 1960, Dokis First Nation in Ontario was installing power lines, and in 1961, the Piegan, Samson, Montana, and Ermineskin Nations in Hobbema, Alberta, were “modernized” through a rural electrification program.630 Also that year, 17-year-old Vina Starr from Kitamaat Village, BC, gave a speech to the annual high school public speaking contest sponsored by Rotary Clubs. She spoke of modern conveniences and their impact on her community, reporting that a “convenience which is tremendously important is electricity.” As she explained, the power plant only operated in the evenings, but it provided “a great aid to the daily chores of the housewife.”631 Flattening the complications posed by modes of living and family organization that researchers could not tidily fit into their study, the categories in the NC survey are organized hierarchically based according to a middle-class model in which the ideal household is composed of a single, nuclear family dwelling. In addition, the tasks of purchasing and preparing family meals are gendered with the expected presence of a female homemaker. Boxes Q and R, inquiring consecutively into ‘who usually decides what food to purchase’ and ‘who usually prepares food,’ have the option of ‘wife’ squarely positioned at the top of the list. Below in box Q, the options of ‘husband,’ ‘husband & wife,’ ‘other adult,’ and ‘other’ are listed in descending order, while box R offers the same options with the exception that ‘other’ is replaced with ‘child (12–18 YRS).’ Again, similar to the “Guide to Nutrition Education in Home Visiting” document detailed in chapter 2, the message seems clear: not only are women the

629 Trudeau and Wolczuk, “Preliminary Report on Nutrition Survey 1967,” 4; Mills, “Split Lake & York Landing – Collection of Food Price Data,” 1-2; Mills, “Collection of Northern Food Prices by Summer Students,” 5; Lynne Cole, Memorandum to the Regional Director, July 27, 1971, “Food Price Data – Little Grand Rapids,” 1, RG 029, ACC: W84-85/458, Box 11, File 144-2- 4 vol. 1 Nutrition Surveys – Reserves (1970-12-01 to 1971-12-31), MSB, DHW, LAC, Winnipeg, MB. 630 The Indian News 4, no. 2 (May 1960), 10; The Indian News 5, no. 1 (June 1961), 8. 631 The Indian News 5, no. 1 (June 1961), 3.

168 appropriate option to check in both boxes, but these women are to be mothers. This underlying assumption that mothers are the family’s food provider is not unique to this survey, of course, but fits with a larger gendered discourse regarding food preparation in Canadian families.632 Most nutrition education campaigns in Canada, as well as the United States, were directed at mothers as a fairly inclusive and broadly defined category.633 It is not surprising, given that Canadian officialdom had created separate educational campaigns for Indigenous mothers on the ground that they and their children constitute a separate class and culture in need of special education, that NC chose to separate ‘Indian’ and ‘Eskimo’ families from the national population for the purposes of its nutrition survey. Indeed, it is consistent with a history of racializing Indigenous women. In Canada’s colonial projects, health education has reinforced the notion of Indigenous mothers and their domestic arrangements as a threat to the “physical, social, and spiritual survival” of their children.634 In the survey, the organization of families in some Indigenous communities was also framed as deviant, particularly in communities where the central organizing unit was often an extended rather than nuclear family structure. Such findings challenge the main tenets of a postwar nutrition ideology that presupposes, and therefore normalizes, the nuclear family. For instance, in the postwar period, observers noted that the emergence of organized caribou hunts “represents the institutionalization of the share ethic of the extended family.”635 In these extended families, men were often charged with procuring much of the food, thus denying women the supposedly natural role of shopping and securing meals for the family. However, this does not seem to have impacted the practice of nutrition experts placing blame on mothers, some of whom who did not always easily fit the normalized role of a mother as primary feeder.

632 See Iacovetta and Korinek, ‘Jell-O Salads, One-Stop Shopping, and Maria the Homemaker”; Iacovetta, Gatekeepers, Chapter 6, ‘Culinary Containment? Cooking for the Family, Democracy, and Nation.’ 633 Rima D. Apple, Perfect Motherhood: Science and Childrearing in America (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2006). 634 Kelm, Colonizing Bodies, 57. 635 Robert M. Bone, Changes in Country Food Consumption: Report 3-85 (Ottawa: DIAND, 1985), 7.

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Similarly, the presence of Indigenous children as family cooks is understood as posing yet another problem in family organization because, according to the dominant ideology, children in ‘normal’ Canadian families are fed, not feeders.636 The NC survey reflected this strain of thought. For example, the lowest acceptable age listed for youths who acted as family cook (on Form 1) is 12 years, with no ‘other’ box to tick, indicating that there is no room for younger children to take on this role. The methodology involved in creating this form, and the cultural assumptions informing such methods, place all of the responsibility for living up to middle-class standards of family ‘normalcy’ on the mothers. Conversely, it creates ‘bad mothers’ out of those who do not fulfill expected roles.637 This pathologizing of Indigenous women was not unique to NC but part of a larger project of assimilation through educational programs aimed at Indigenous mothers. As part of various ongoing efforts to transform the bad mother into the ‘Clever Mother,’ as discussed in Chapter Two, Indian and Northern Health Services published in 1958 a text entitled The Pre-Schooler, which recommended lifestyle changes for Indigenous mothers who were presented as being in need of re-education.638 Nutrition experts and state projects, like Nutrition Canada, similarly drew on the colonial discourse that Indigenous parents and their homes were inherently diseased.639 These and other publications and educational pamphlets from the period send an implicit message that ‘A Clever Mother’ who follows

636 On Canadian postwar ‘normalcy,’ see Mary Louise Adams, The Trouble with Normal: Postwar Youth and the Making of Canadian Heterosexuality (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997); Mona Gleason, Normalizing the Ideal: Psychology, Schooling, and the Family in Postwar Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999). 637 See Molly Ladd-Taylor and Lauri Umansky, eds., “Introduction,” in ‘Bad’ Mothers: The Politics of Blame in Twentieth-Century America, 1-28 (New York: New York University Press, 1998), 3. The authors argue that ‘bad mothers’ tend to fall into three groups: those living outside of a ‘traditional’ nuclear family; those who ‘would or could not protect their children from harm’; and ‘those whose children went wrong.’ On Canada, see Julie Guard, ‘Women Worth Watching”; Iacovetta and Korinek, ‘Jell-O Salads,’ 193–4. 638 Canada, Indian and Northern Health Services, The Pre-Schooler: From the Age of One to Six Years (Ottawa: DNHW, 1958). 639 Kelm, Colonizing Bodies, 57. See also her ‘Diagnosing the Discursive Indian.”

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‘expert’ guidelines will have a healthy child, whereas Indigenous mothers relying on knowledge provided by those without professional credentials will raise sick children.640 The increasing presence of health officials and services in northern communities on account of poverty-related diseases also directly impacted who was chosen to participate in NC. The authors of the published reports explain how “Indians in Bands on Reserves and Crown Lands” were studied on the basis of a sample “according to region, distance from urban centres, and cultural area.” The six ‘Indian Culture Areas’ in Canada chosen for the Survey sample (as listed above) were based on stratifications defined by Indian and Northern Affairs.641 M.S. Nargundkar, Methodology of Field Surveys, Dominion Bureau of Statistics, was a consultant on the “design of the survey and the sampling procedure,” and he explains the procedure for selection of Bands for the Indian survey as it pertained to NC ‘Culture Areas’: “Within a stratum, Bands are listed by Agencies and within Agencies Bands are listed in alphabetical order, along with the population of each Band living on reserves and crown land.”642 Further, within these agencies, “two or more Bands are grouped together if the total population of the Bands on reserve and crownland is less than 130 persons.” Essentially, the “grouped Bands are treated as a Band for the purpose of selection of the Bands in the sample.” Nargundkar breaks down the selection procedure, noting that “[o]ne of the assumptions is that the list of bands is a random list (which is fairly true),” and the process is called “the random systematic with probability proportional to the size of Bands.”643 According to calculation of the selection interval, Nargundkar explains that the population of the Band at this stage determined random sampling, as the total population of the stratum was divided by the number of bands to be selected.644 However, Sabry and his team emphasized in memos and manuals that, “before the list of bands could be finalized we

640 For a discussion of child health in Canadian history, see Canadian Bulletin of Medical History / Bulletin canadien d’histoire de la medicine CBMH/BCHM 19 (2002). 641 Canada, Nutrition, 16, and Indian Survey Report, 7. 642 Memo from M.S. Nargundkar, Methodology of Field Surveys, Dominion Bureau of Statistics, to Dr. Z.I. Sabry, National Coordinator, Nutrition Canada, “National Nutrition Survey – Sample of Indian Population,” RG 029, ACC: W84-85/458, Box 11, File 144-2-4 vol. 1 Nutrition Surveys – Reserves (1970-12-01 to 1971-12-31), MSB, DHW, LAC, Winnipeg, MB. 643 Nargundkar, “National Nutrition Survey – Sample of Indian Population,” 1. 644 Nargundkar, “National Nutrition Survey – Sample of Indian Population,” 1-2.

171 need to assess the accessibility of the reserves and the facilities available to handle a team of 8 persons with equipment.”645 This factor contributed substantially to the choices of Manitoba communities surveyed. MSB Regional Director Dr. Black informed that the team “would prefer to make accommodation arrangements for the entire team at hotels in Riverton or Arborg, and do not require any overnight accommodation at the residence or mobile trailers at Fisher River Hospital,” in spite of the Administrator at Fisher River Indian Hospital having already arranged for their stay less than a week prior to their arrival.646 This display of privilege through intersecting notions of class and race not only presents a lack of interest on the part of NC in making any sort of connection with local residents or familiarizing themselves with the communities they surveyed, but also reads as disrespectful to an already marginalized host community that was willing to accommodate non-Indigenous outsiders for yet another nutrition study. According to the published Survey, “in recognition of cultural differences,” NC “selected bands representative of each culture area.”647 Despite the extensive planning for random sampling and resulting explanation, DIAND ultimately provided Nutrition Canada with a list of bands, along with a selective list of members from these bands. Essentially, NC shaped the scope of participants in the survey and, in turn, its results. Communications between regional MSB employees and federal NC staff regarding the scope of the survey show a lack of interest in hearing local input, and also in seeking out information on communities where the survey and its supposed aims might have proven more beneficial to participants. In Manitoba, for example, Black contacted NC’s National Coordinator, Dr. Sabry, regarding the decision to survey Peguis, Fisher River, and Sioux Valley. He wrote that MSB “Public Health staff have not indicated nutrition to be one of the prevalent health problems on two of these reserves,” likely speaking to Peguis and Fisher River, where much

645 Memo from Dr. Z.I. Sabry, National Co-ordinator, Nutrition Canada to Dr. M.J. DeKoven, Regional Director, Manitoba Region, “Re: Peguis, Fisher River, Oak River Sioux,” May 12, 1971, RG 029, ACC: W84-85/458, Box 11, File 144-2-4 vol. 1 Nutrition Surveys – Reserves (1970-12-01 to 1971-12-31), MSB, DHW, LAC, Winnipeg, MB. 646 Memo from Dr. L. Black, Regional Director, Manitoba Region, MSB to Administrator, Fisher River Indian Hospital, “Meals and Accommodation, Nutrition Canada Survey Team,” December 2, 1971, RG 029, ACC: W84-85/458, Box 11, File 144-2-4 vol. 1 Nutrition Surveys – Reserves (1970-12-01 to 1971-12-31), MSB, DHW, LAC, Winnipeg, MB. 647 Canada, Nutrition, 17.

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MSB work had recently been concentrated.648 He references data collected by the 1971 summer Home Economics student team, indicating that “if any substitute reserves are chosen for study we would gladly furnish you additional information on reserves in the north,” for which he presents the example of God’s River, where students found that the cost of groceries exceeded Winnipeg prices by one hundred and twenty percent that same year. Moreover, he points to there being “no fresh vegetables” in the stores.649 In spite of intimate knowledge of the province’s Indigenous communities, and that Black provided information on a community in the midst of a food security crisis, NC ignored the advice that was, apparently, uninvited and proceeded as planned without the input of MSB staff. What Black seemed to miss was the more important element in selecting Bands from the list put forward by NC to Regional MSB Directors, which, as indicated, Sabry identified in 1971 as ‘accessibility’ and ‘facilities available’. Only then, “once the list of bands [was] finalized,” did NC’s Coordinator “hope to have a chance to discuss the details of the project with [DeKoven] and [his] staff.”650 Further, while NC identified feedback to community members who presented with health concerns as a main goal in the Indigenous survey process, Black contacted Sabry again in January of 1972 for follow-up: “Can you advise us if we are to receive at Regional Office any feedback from the medical component of the survey done on Peguis, Fisher River and Sioux Valley Reserves?” He informs Sabry that, as per NC’s guidelines, the MSB staff “had advised these communities at the time of the survey that people would be informed of any condition requiring further medical attention, within a month after the survey in December.”651 On behalf

648 Memo from Dr. L.M. Black, Regional Director, Manitoba Region, to Dr. Z.I. Sabry, National Co-ordinator, Nutrition Canada “Re: Basic Information Questionnaires,” June 30, 1971, RG 029, ACC: W84-85/458, Box 11, File 144-2-4 vol. 1 Nutrition Surveys – Reserves (1970-12-01 to 1971-12-31), MSB, DHW, LAC, Winnipeg, MB. This includes the summer student surveys and research discussed here in Chapters Two and Three. 649 Memo from Dr. L.M. Black, “Re: Basic Information Questionnaires,”1. 650 Memo from Dr. Z.I. Sabry to Dr. M.J. DeKoven, “Re: Peguis, Fisher River, Oak River Sioux,” May 12, 1971. 651 Memo from Dr. L.M. Black, Regional Director, Manitoba Region, to Dr. Z.I. Sabry, National Co-ordinator, Nutrition Canada “Survey of Manitoba Indian Reserves,” January 25,

173 of the survey, he had reached out to the three MB Chiefs following the clinics in each of their communities, writing that MSB staff “will have the results of the medical checkups shortly,” and that the community’s nurse “will notify any people who need further medical attention within the next month.”652 That Black had no feedback as January drew to a close mirrors decades of empty promises made to Indigenous peoples, into which Black, working intimately with both state regulations and community staff members, could have been attempting to intervene. When Sabry replied the following month, he asked Black to “[p]lease rest assured that you will be receiving the feed-back from the laboratory tests of the survey carried out in Peguis, Fisher River and Sioux Valley.”653 Sabry explained how NC processed laboratory data, assuring Black that the ‘complete laboratory sheets’ produced by their programme would be sent out when they were available. “Unfortunately,” Sabry concluded, “we have encountered some delay and therefore these sheets were not sent to you in the anticipated time.” As was consistent with the period, staff employed at the federal level were so far removed from local residents that they could remain blind to the urgency felt by local survey participants in receiving feedback on their health. While the Regional MSB staff were tasked with carrying out the work in communities, their own expertise and familiarity with potential participants appears to have been overruled by NC staff running the survey. Thus, while the discussion of MSB Public Health Nurses being the first line of contact between NC and participants focused on maximizing the currency of familiarity, as the language of the documents also revealed, they were understood as merely a tool for NC to get into communities and gather data. Moreover, as indicated, not only Public

1972, RG 029, ACC: W84-85/458, Box 11, File 144-2-4 vol. 1 Nutrition Surveys – Surveys (1972- 01-01 to 1973-03-31), MSB, DHW, LAC, Winnipeg, MB. 652 Letter from Dr. L.M. Black, Regional Director, Manitoba Region, to Mr. Vernon Mazawasicuna, Chief of Sioux Valley Reserve, December 17, 1971, RG 029, ACC: W84-85/458, Box 11, File 144-2-4 vol. 1 Nutrition Surveys – Reserves (1970-12-01 to 1971-12-31), MSB, DHW, LAC, Winnipeg, MB. Black sent letters with the same content to Mr. Albert Thomson, Peguis, and Chief Sinclair, Fisher River. 653 Memo from Dr. Z.I. Sabry, Nutrition Canada to Dr. M. Black, “Re: Survey of Manitoba Indian Reserves,” undated memorandum date stamped as received on February 15, 1972, RG 029, ACC: W84-85/458, Box 11, File 144-2-4 vol. 1 Nutrition Surveys – Surveys (1972-01-01 to 1973-03-31), MSB, DHW, LAC, Winnipeg, MB.

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Health Nurses but several levels of MSB staff carried out the tasks expected to be completed by PHNs. This is seen in the correspondence discussed here between head nurses, physicians, and nutritionists who relayed information to complete tasks assigned to community PHNs. There is no indication of follow-up or questioning of this diversion from NC guidelines in the archived correspondence, but it opens questions of other ways the survey might have steered off track, in spite of careful planning and efforts at thoroughly training MSB staff working in Indigenous communities. Individual survey participants in and of themselves, not unlike local MSB staff, seem to have been the least of the federally situated survey planners’ concerns. Similar to previous nutrition studies discussed in Chapter Two, those who participated in the Indigenous surveys were understood as potentially unreliable deviants, which was evident in survey paperwork and procedures. The participants, according to the Indian Report, “were not informed beforehand of the nature of the dietary interview so that they would not deviate from their usual eating habits.”654 The interview required the completion of both the ‘24 Hour Dietary Recall Form’ and ‘Food Frequency Questionnaire.’ The three variations of the Recall Form, appended to the National Priority report, were each created with specific questions for distinct age groups of participants and organized by age: thirty-six months and over, up to thirty-six months, and expectant mothers.655 The ‘36 Months and Over Form’ asked interviewees to recall when and what they had consumed for the past twenty-four hours, with tracking recorded for time of day, place, type (food or drink), description, and amount consumed. The recall forms for expectant mothers and infants under thirty-six months reflect the heightened concern for pregnant bodies and the nation’s future citizens. Here, questions dealt with whether children were bottle or breast fed, and whether table food – home or commercially prepared – was fed to the child. As NC was conducted in what Catherine Carstairs and Rachel Elder have called the “child-centred culture of the postwar years,” when debates over water fluoridation included

654 Canada, Eskimo Survey Report, 9. 655 Canada, Nutrition, Appendix C, III-IV and VIII.

175 claims that denying the advice of experts was tantamount to child abuse, everything children consumed was subject to scrutiny.656 The greatest degree of scrutiny, though, seems to have been reserved for expectant mothers. Devising the interview required an additional page of fact gathering by nutritionists. The list of special concerns includes whether moms-to-be have made any dietary changes, and there is a detailed box on what food groups have either decreased or increased because of pregnancy. The form asks, ‘How did you know how to make these changes?’ and the optional responses listed begin with the expert ‘Doctor or Clinic’ and end with ‘Other,’ right below ‘Self Imposed.’657 These categories reflected the pervasive view of pregnancy as ‘an illness of nine months’ duration.”658 As Barbara Clow argues, recent “prescriptive literature” on pregnancy is “infused with the alarming message that unborn babies are desperately vulnerable to harm or neglect.” The postwar notion that a mother’s diet has consequences for her unborn baby’s health was central to the Nutrition Canada survey, as the pregnancy as pathology thesis was an established medical discourse that contributed to both NC’s methodology and its approach to data collection. Pregnant women for the Indian and Eskimo surveys were not required to be chosen from Statistics Canada’s computer-generated random participant list.659 For their sampling, PHNs were “requested to find six pregnant mothers (three for each day of the clinic),” who resided on the Reservation, to participate in the survey.” The pregnant women who participated, therefore, were chosen by the community PHN, or other health worker, who enumerated their community. In the collection of data, the recall form was used in combination with a dietary interview. This included inquiry into foods consumed by the interviewee over the previous month based on a ‘Food Frequency Questionnaire’ that listed only seventy-eight food items.

656 Catherine Carstairs and Rachel Elder, “Expertise, Health, and Popular Opinion: Debating Water Fluoridation, 1945–80,” Canadian Historical Review 89/3 (2008): 360, 352. 657 Canada, Nutrition, Appendix C, V. 658 Barbara Clow, “‘An Illness of Nine Months’ Duration: Pregnancy and Thalidomide Use in Canada and the United States,” in Women, Health, and Nation: Canada and the United States Since 1945,” eds. Georgina Feldberg, Molly Ladd-Taylor, Allison Li, and Kathryn McPherson, 45- 66 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2003). 659 Nutrition Canada, “Advance Party Manual,” 17.

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The authors of the Survey assert that interviewers were “thoroughly trained in the use of the questionnaire forms and food models before going into the field” and instructed on “the importance of non-verbal, as well as verbal communication.”660 Reporting on the planning stages, NC shared that “interviewers were carefully selected professional dieticians and nutritionists.” They felt it “essential that each one had a thorough understanding of food composition, food preparation methods and was able to communicate well with people at all levels.”661 In data collection interviews, interviewers assisted interviewees by “encouraging a review of the previous day’s activities” and using portion-sized models designed for the study to “define objectively the quantities of foods consumed.”662 According to preliminary planning, “[p]reparation of portion size models that would assist both the interviewer and interviewee required ingenuity.”663 NC created models that were “an extension of those developed at Tulane University,” however, they asserted that the “Canadian design is more serviceable and flexible in that the materials and shapes suggest only size rather than food type and thus afford a wider range for descriptive purposes.”664 Central to this project was the disciplining of bodies through monitoring food consumption. In considering the links between reclaiming indigenous foodways and health, Monica Bodirsky and Jon Johnson argue that, although colonialism ultimately failed to sever Indigenous peoples from the lifeways and traditional teachings of their ancestors, “the intergenerational impacts of colonial institutions including the reserve system, Indian Act, and residential schooling point to the specific and largely deleterious effects on traditional Indigenous diets and food knowledge.”665 NC, however, ignored this history and, instead,

660 Canada, Food Consumption Patterns Report, 8. 661 Nutrition Canada, Communiqué 2, no. 3 (October, 1971), 2. 662 Canada, Eskimo Survey Report, 9. 663 Nutrition Canada, Communiqué 2, no. 3 (October, 1971), 2. 664 Nutrition Canada, Communiqué 2, no. 3 (October, 1971), 2. 665 Monica Bodirsky and Jon Johnson, “Decolonizing Diet: Healing by Reclaiming Traditional Indigenous Foodways,” Cuizine 1/1 (2008): par. 3. Journal online. Available at http://id.erudit.org/iderudit/019373ar. Accessed 11 February 2009. On the disciplining of Aboriginal bodies, see Milloy, A National Crime, and Harris, Making Native Space. This was not particular to Aboriginal peoples: see Franca Iacovetta, Roberto Perin, and Angelo Principe, eds., Enemies Within: Italian and Other Internees in Canada and Abroad (Toronto: University of

177 treated all study participants as representing a comparable cross-section of the nation despite crucial differences in class, income, and access to resources between urban and non-urban populations.666 It effectively denied the material realities of those Indigenous and other non- urban communities whose food costs, particularly those deemed healthy by nutritionists, continue to be far higher than in urban centres.667 The data collected on food intake for the survey were based on the DNHW model of five food groups, which were rigidly outlined in their educational pamphlet Good Eating with Canada’s Food Guide, with the supplemental “Good Food: Good Health!” pamphlet provided to surveyors in Indigenous communities.668 However, to mediate the concern that if “too many foods were grouped together the usefulness of the data would be impaired,” the department decided to use the nine groups developed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA).669 These nine groups, which represent a breakdown of foods at the time condensed into the five- category-Canadian model, included: dairy products; meat, poultry, fish and eggs; cereal products; fruit and fruit products; vegetables; fats; nuts and dried legumes; foods primarily sugar and beverages and soft drinks; and lastly, miscellaneous.670 Like Canada’s food groups, these USDA-based categories privilege Western dietary choices, such as milk and milk products, which are the primary category, while the example foods for each category reinforce these

Toronto Press, 2000); Mona Oikawa, ‘Cartographies of Violence: Women, Memory, and the Subject(s) of the “Internment,”’ in Sherene Razack, ed., Race, Space, and the Law: Unmapping a White, Settler Society (Toronto: Between the Lines, 2002), 71–98. 666 See Hugh Shewell, ‘Enough to Keep Them Alive’: Indian Welfare in Canada, 1873– 1965 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004). 667 The persistence of the many reasons for food insecurity in northern Manitoba continues to be reflected in unaffordable staple food prices. See Debora Lyell, Northern Food Prices Project Report (Winnipeg: Healthy Child Committee of Cabinet, Government of Manitoba, 2003). Shirley Thompson, Natural Resources Institute, University of Manitoba, has collaborated with First Nations and Northern Manitoba communities to address the lack of affordable foods and food insecurity in northern Manitoba stemming from the impact of colonialism. See Thompson’s participatory video, Growing Hope in Northern Manitoba. http://home.cc.umanitoba.ca/~thomso4/Movie.html. 668 Canada, Good Eating with Canada’s Food Guide (Ottawa: DNHW, 1967); Canada, “Good Food: Good Health!,” pamphlet; Canada’s Food Guide Handbook (Ottawa: DNHW, 1977), 40. See also Aleck Ostry, Nutrition Policy in Canada, 1870–1939 (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2006). 669 Food Consumption Patterns Report, 10. 670 Food Consumption Patterns Report, 14–15.

178 norms. For cereal products, for instance, while the Indian and Eskimo reports include bannock, the standardized sample considers breads, rolls, or pastas as normative choices.671 Aside from the inclusion of bannock and a brief mention of the slight modification to food groups to include wild game,672 reflections of culture were flattened in the Indian and Eskimo surveys. In spite of preliminary data collection on food availability and consumer choices in the communities surveyed, national and international Western nutritional standards during the period were closely adhered to by NC. As these standards present examples of foods for each group reflective of western food choices, most are accessible only to those with adequate storage facilities and in close proximity to urban centres.673 Moreover, guidelines emphasize fresh over packaged or frozen food for cost effectiveness and better health.674 Instead of addressing culturally unique dietary needs, the survey emphasized hegemonic nutrition. Much like a precursor to this survey, a postwar pamphlet detailing Food Customs of New Canadians, the survey provided a “guide … to equip front-line activists with ways of encouraging immigrants [and more central to the survey, Indigenous peoples] to adapt their food patterns to Canadian foods, recipes, equipment, and eating regimes.”675 Alongside rules for what should be consumed, the guide outlined when it should be eaten and in what combination. Similar to the Food Customs pamphlet, the survey “reflected middle-class, pro- capitalist, North American assumptions, such as the wisdom of a three-meals-a-day pattern

671 Food Consumption Patterns Report, 14. 672 Food Consumption Patterns Report, 10; on intake data, which reflects these modifications, 202, 221. 673 See Joy Parr, Domestic Goods: The Material, the Moral, and the Economic in the Postwar Years (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999). 674 See Valerie Korinek, Roughing It in the Suburbs: Reading Chatelaine Magazine in the Fifties and Sixties (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000). 675 Toronto Nutrition Committee, Food Customs of New Canadians, Revised Ed. (Toronto: Toronto Nutrition Committee, 1967); Iacovetta, “Recipes for Democracy?”, “Recipes for Democracy? Gender, Family, and Making Female Citizens in Cold War Canada,” in Mona Gleason and Adele Perry, eds., Rethinking Canada: The Promise of Women’s History, 5th Edition, 264-277 (Don Mills, ON: Oxford University Press, 2006) 306.

179 because it was well suited to Canadian school and work hours.”676 A “pattern for a day’s meals” was proposed by Canada’s Food Guide, starting “with a good breakfast for all!” at seven a.m.677 There was little room in postwar nutrition programs for negotiating class or cultural variations that did not fit the standards of Canada’s Food Guide, such as ‘country’ or Indigenous foods consumed primarily by non-urban Indigenous communities. The term ‘country foods’, as detailed in the previous chapter, refers to an Indigenous diet of natural resources that are harvested regionally and seasonally, including ‘big game’ meat, birds, fish and whales (and their eggs or grease), and smaller fur-bearing animals, as well as the cultivation or collection of fruits, greens, tubers, berries, wild rice, and other foods available from the land. ‘Country foods’ are both high in nutritional value, and equally important in their contribution to maintaining cultural tradition through the acts of hunting and sharing the wealth.678 While DIAND, along with MSB and its nutritionists, increasingly acknowledged these features by the mid-1980s,679 in the period of the NC survey the interests and lifestyles of the many unique Indigenous communities in Canada were yet to be considered by nutrition professionals. When they were recognized, as in the Indian and Eskimo surveys, Indigenous foods were treated as limited and supplementary, rather than as normative, legitimate dietary choices with adequate nutritional composition and consumed on a regular basis. Inuit diets, which ranged from game to marine mammals, were supplemented by a variety of land and sea vegetables, such as berries, willow buds, herbs, and some roots.680 As detailed in Chapter One, the traditional Inuit diet focused on consumption of meat and fat, and the limited technology available for cooking foods encouraged consumption of what communities believed to be nutritionally complete raw, frozen, or aged foods. While these diets were increasingly supplemented with heavily

676 Iacovetta, “Recipes for Democracy?”, 306. 677 Good Eating with Canada’s Food Guide, inside panel; see also Mosby, Food Will Win the War. 678 Bone, Changes in Country Food; Kelm, Colonizing Bodies. 679 See Canada, Nutrient Bar Graphs: A Teaching Aid to Learn the Value of Native Foods (Ottawa: Health and Welfare Canada, Medical Services Branch, 1984). 680 Otto Schaefer and Jean Steckle, Dietary Habits and Nutritional Base of Native Populations of the Northwest Territories (Yellowknife, NWT: Science Advisory Board of the Northwest Territories, 1980), 2.

180 processed and sugary foods by the 1960s, consumption of traditional or ‘country foods’ continued to be both nutritious and affordable for many Indigenous households. 681 MSB efforts at improving health tended towards increasing western foodways and reducing the reliance on game meats and other ‘country foods.’ However, communities in northern Manitoba, who consume large quantities of packaged western foods shipped in from Winnipeg, as well as those on the northwest coast, who have engaged in vegetable gardening for generations, at present face epidemic rates of Type 2 diabetes that have been linked to the consumption of these types of foods.682 Denying the significance of Indigenous dietary staples and supplements to Indigenous communities and imposing the normalcy of Canada’s Food Guide choices not only created the postwar conditions of Indigenous nutritional health, but also perpetuated a narrow view of the diverse diets of equally diverse Indigenous cultures in Canada. Moreover, this approach reinforced colonial relations between Indigenous people and the Canadian state as it worked to colonize Indigenous nutrition. Based on such relations, the samplings of Indian and Eskimo peoples used by NC provide an essentialist approach to studying Indigenous peoples in Canada, patterned, in part, after mass government data collections such as the census. Like the census, nutrition surveys like Nutrition Canada should be read not as a harmless head count but as an inherently disciplinary practice.683 As historian Bruce Curtis argues, Census making involves identifying political subjects and centralizing knowledge. It entails the grouping of subjects together to form a ‘population’ whose elements may then be selectively disaggregated and made the objects of social policy and projects. As a practice that creates social equivalencies, census making is further bound up with the formation of states. It serves to increase the possibilities for intensive administration.684 NC demonstrates what Curtis refers to as the creation of ‘social equivalencies,’ in which groupings do not reflect actual diversities but minimize or deny them in favour of

681 Pauktuutit, The Inuit Way, 20. 682 Waldram et al., Aboriginal Health in Canada, 97–101. 683 Bruce Curtis, The Politics of Population: State Formation, Statistics, and the Census of Canada, 1840–1875 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002), 26. 684 Curtis, The Politics of Population, 3.

181 uncomplicated statistical samples.685 As Curtis argues, “making a census involves the application of what Michel Foucault called ‘normalizing judgment’ to social relations. Censuses discipline elements of the social in order to assign them to their ‘proper places,’ and ‘propriety’ is inescapably political.”686 Thus, accuracy is an impossibility, as statistical surveys based on an imagined ‘population’ are “inescapably overdetermined.”687 While the population divisions used by the survey were purportedly intended as a sampling of representatives of the general state of Canadian nutritional health, accepting Curtis’s argument that population is an “abstraction,” it is reasonable to read these samplings as ‘made’ rather than inherently or ‘naturally’ representative and distinct from any other given stratum.688 Near the end of the publication, the National Survey reads: results … probably present an optimistic view of the nutrition problem in Canada. In surveys of this magnitude, the persons selected who do not take part are often the ones with nutritional or other health problems. Those who participate are usually aware of the importance of nutrition and are likely to be fairly well nourished.689 Even when given the information to extend their scope to include participants who had been identified as struggling with food security and, consequently, nutrition, NC ignored the advice of Dr. Black when he suggested Peguis and Fisher River were not representative of Manitoba communities in a state of food crisis.690 Instead, the project proceeded, overlooking communities like God’s River where, while not close to main highways or comfortable hotels, residents could have participated in shaping a different survey that addressed the actual concerns NC stated were within its mandate. While NC declares personal choice played the most significant role in skewing results, clearly the process of Band selection had already affected outcomes. Nutrition Canada, then, shaped a survey for which the participants and results were already largely known, but documenting and quantifying nutritional status of groups or individuals who presented as moderate outliers would sufficiently open future

685 Curtis, Politics of Population, 3–4. 686 Curtis, The Politics of Population, 4. 687 Curtis, The Politics of Population, 4. 688 Curtis, The Politics of Population, 4. 689 Canada, Nutrition, 111. 690 Black to Sabry, “Re: Basic Information Questionnaires.”

182 research and allow for the development of new and more refined guidelines for national nutrition standards. According to the published National Survey, the importance of ‘need to know’ nutritional health information for the Canadian citizen “has steadily increased over the past decade because of the tremendous change in the nature of the national food supply and in the eating habits and life style of Canadians.”691 Although the expressed focus appears to be on the increasingly sedentary habits of Canadians, who during this period were increasing their intake of processed foods while decreasing their physical activity, the chapters, guidelines, questionnaires, and results of the survey in many ways reinforce the normalcy of this lifestyle, further demonstrating that the survey was organized around preconceived results. For instance, the “24 Hour Dietary Recall” form that lists examples of presumed typical foods Canadians would consume on a daily basis in three regular meals a day. These include: colas, separate from ‘other’ soft drinks; dairy milk; alcoholic beverages; artificial sweeteners; pasta, pizza, pancakes, potatoes, breads, and pastries; processed and generic meats, such as ham and beef; processed fish and dairy; as well as a lengthy list of packaged or ‘instant’ sweets, candies, puddings, and frozen desserts.692 Strangely absent from this lengthy, detailed, and suggestive list are fresh fruits and vegetables. The published Indian and Eskimo surveys reflect the persistence of nineteenth-century colonial relations, employing notions of scientific approaches to studying bodies used by Victorian experts. The anthropometric body measurements used in the Survey indicate that a small proportion of underweight children were at risk with “severe growth retardation and wasting”: “generally, the prevalence of moderate weight deficits were higher among Indians and Eskimos than the General Population.”693 For example, the category of ‘Protein-Calorie Malnutrition, Moderate Risk,’ based on evaluations of five-year-old children produced results of 4.7 per cent of the General Population, 7.7 per cent of Indians, and 6.1 per cent of Eskimos ‘at risk.’694 In addition to the overall problems of the results from such surveys, this ‘scientific’

691 Canada, Nutrition, 1. 692 Canada, Nutrition, “Appendix C,” VI-VII. 693 Nutrition, 58. 694 Nutrition, 67.

183 approach to studying humans based on racially distinguished dietary difference and measures of anthropometry mirror past problematic and insidious studies of anatomy.695 Also problematic is the language used in the period, and adopted by NC. The term Eskimo exemplifies a lack of cultural recognition and initial input by study participants, as Pauktuutit asserts, yet was used by the government during the Nutrition Canada survey.696 For the Canadian government, terminology and identity were linked to food resources used by the Inuit. For instance, proponents of the mid-century Inuit relocation program reinforced colonial interests, suggesting that “eskimos,” [sic] as opposed to “ordinary white” and “civilized” men, “will gladly settle in any part of [the Arctic] provided they can kill enough seals and caribou and muskoxen to provide them with food and clothing.”697 The ideology anthropologist Diamond Jenness embraced when essentializing the dietary and cultural habits of the Inuit was erased from state discourse when, in 1987, DIA deputy minister Jacques Gerin stated that “there was no ulterior motive” in the relocation program: While they were not forcibly moved, it is also true that it is not the kind of thing the government could get away with today without a lot of consultation … Rightly or wrongly, at that time the government moved all the Inuit great distances to settlements so they could be near health services.698 Again, the official intent was ‘helping’ Inuit better their community health, in defense of a clear program of assimilation and physical control through peopling the ‘empty’ Canadian north with adaptable, or expendable, bodies. As Frank James Tester and Peter Kulchyski argue, this defense is unlikely since the health services at the point of origin, Inukjuak, were “infinitely

695 See Matthew Frye Jacobson, Barbarian Virtues: The United States Encounters Foreign Peoples at Home and Abroad, 1876–1917 (New York: Hill and Wang, 2000), particularly the chapter, “Theories of Development: Scholarly Disciplines and the Hierarchy of Peoples,” 139– 172; Jennifer Morgan, Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004). 696 Pauktuutit, The Inuit Way, 4. “The use of the term ‘Eskimo’ is no longer popular because of its origin [as it] is derived from an Indian phrase meaning ‘eaters of raw meat,’ and refers to … a custom the Indians found to be rather upsetting.” Thus Inuit, ‘the people,’ is the term used by Inuit to refer to themselves. 697 Kulchyski and Tester, Tammarniit (Mistakes), 112, 375. Diamond Jenness, “leading Canadian anthropologist at the time,” from a lecture given 9 December, 1944, and 5 December, 1945. 698 Kulchyski and Tester, Tammarniit (Mistakes), 115.

184 better than those at Craig Harbour,” and “certainly no worse than those available at the military base in Resolute Bay,” where many Inuit were relocated.699 Hence, like First Nations communities in the 1960s and 70s, relocated Inuit families “had settled into communities where attempts were being made to organize Inuit life according to Western ideas about the family, work, community, and social relations,” and, of course, food and nutrition.700 However, despite representations of Inuit as a “vanishing race,”701 or as “innocent and malleable children,” the relocated Inuit “increasingly resisted attempts to assimilate them within the dominant Canadian culture.”702

While racialized participants were given special attention with the creation of separate Indian and Eskimo surveys, not surprisingly, the bodies Nutrition Canada identified as most often lacking adequate nutrients were those of pregnant mothers and young children in all survey regions. Although changes to the field of nutritional science had an impact on some aspects of NC’s work, the core focus on the role of mothers, ultimately as community members who should be under constant surveillance and guidance, persisted. According to NC, after carefully studying their bodies and lifestyles, iron, caloric intake, and protein were found deficient in expectant women, thus, shortages were also present in babies and young children. Thiamin deficits were found in pregnant women, particularly among Indian populations while calcium and vitamin D shortages were seen in infants, children, and adolescents. There were also vitamin A shortages among pregnant Indians and Eskimos, but “no indication of deficiency among adolescents and adults.”703 Ironically, the pregnant women in this study were expected to demonstrate “a superior picture of health to that which actually exists in the pregnant population.”704 This seems a fairly insignificant distinction, since the women studied among the General Population generally presented with minimal ‘risks’ and deficiencies, with some shortages − such as iron and serum

699 Kulchyski and Tester, Tammarniit (Mistakes), 115. 700 Kulchyski and Tester, Tammarniit (Mistakes), 3. 701 Doug Wilkinson, “A Vanishing Canadian,” The Beaver: Magazine of the North (Spring 1959). 702 Kulchyski and Tester, Tammarniit (Mistakes), 3. 703 Nutrition, 112–14. 704 Nutrition, 103.

185 folate − indicating a need for closer dietary monitoring. However, severe shortages of iron and serum folate, as well as moderate to severe protein deficiencies, were identified in both the Indian and Eskimo populations, and Eskimo populations showed a higher ‘risk’ (for example, anemia indicators placed 65 per cent of Eskimos at risk, with deficiencies in only 25 per cent of the General and Indian populations).705 Most notable, though, are the vitamin C deficiencies among Eskimo and Indian women, and especially the observation that “foods high in vitamin C may not be currently available in remote areas of the north nor do they form part of the customary Indian and Eskimo diet.”706 Indeed, this statement directly contradicts the assertion made only three pages earlier in the report, that “the food distribution system in Canada seems to be effective.”707 Soon after the survey was published, the 1975 Health and Protection Branch Report on the Relationship between Income and Nutrition Based on Analysis of Nutrition Canada Data was released, which studied the overlooked significance of income on NC’s conclusions.708 This follow-up study emphasized the problems pertaining to the survey by addressing its published assertion that income levels have little to no relation to nutrition.709 Yet the ‘problem’ of nutrition in Indigenous bodies is ultimately a problem of access to affordable fresh food, which hinges on the high cost of food in many northern communities. This income analysis, in contrast to the original survey, provides evidence that nutritional deficits should be directly linked to income: as the report clearly states, “for most physiological groups a relationship does exist between income and nutritional status.”710 Unlike more recent government publications and studies concerning the health of Indigenous people in Canada,711 NC ignores the role that

705 Nutrition, 103. 706 Nutrition, 114. 707 Nutrition, 111. 708 Canada, DNHW, Health Protection Branch Report on the Relationship between Income and Nutrition Based on Analysis of Nutrition Canada Data (Ottawa: Minister of National Health and Welfare, 1975). 709 Nutrition, 111. 710 Health Protection Branch Report, ‘Summary of Report,’ 1. 711 Robert Allec for Inter-governmental Committee on First Nations Health, First Nations Health and Wellness in Manitoba: Overview of Gaps in Service and Issues Associated with

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Canada’s colonial history of government-initiated relocation, settlement, and disciplinary ‘continuous monitoring’ of Indigenous peoples played in creating the conditions of poverty as well as the decreased access to both traditional and Western foods. Through their published surveys, Nutrition Canada emphasized the heightened ‘risk’ of malnutrition and consequent poor health in the Indian and Eskimo studies, particularly for expectant mothers and their infants. Yet, as Waldram, Herring, and Young write regarding the survey results, “the proportion of people classified as at high risk was lower among First Nations and Inuit than among Canadians in general, except for First Nations men fifty-five and above.”712 Their summary of the survey’s findings contrast against the discourse of poor health that frames NC’s publications, as most categories are represented as high risks for poor dietary health. Moreover, Nutrition Canada and similar nutrition studies conducted during the period713 contributed to an intensified backlash by First Nations, Métis, and Inuit communities, who in the mid-1970s gained government recognition of their right to study and monitor nutrition and health on their own terms, without state interventions.714 While this is discussed in detail in Chapter Six, the following chapter will first consider some of the emotional histories of NC and the period during which it was carried out.

Jurisdictions: Final Report (2005): 11–13. Available at http://www.gov.mb.ca/ana/ publications/1st_nations_health_final 2005.pdf (accessed 21 February 2009). 712 Waldram, Herring, and Young, Aboriginal Health in Canada, 96. 713 Some of these surveys and related research studies are discussed in Chapter Two as fairly representative of period standards, which are also detailed in the chapter through discussion of guidelines circulated between MSB staff and student assistants. 714 Canada, Department of National Health and Welfare, Medical Services Branch, Indian Health Discussion Paper (draft) (Ottawa: Department of National Health and Welfare, 1979) 1- 2. In 1977, the National Indian Brotherhood launched the Commission Inquiry on Indian Health, after the group “called on the federal government to put aside its unilateral approach to the development of Indian Health policy and to support Indian efforts to contribute meaningfully to such efforts.”

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CHAPTER FIVE

‘AMUSED NATIVES’, ‘HAPPY INUIT’, AND ‘(DIS)SATISFIED RESEARCHERS’: EMOTIONAL ENCOUNTERS AND EXPERIENCES OF FOOD AND NUTRITION

“When they’d come for our survey they seemed to enjoy providing specimens of their blood and urine.”715

While the national Nutrition Canada (NC) food survey detailed in the previous chapter presents a history of food and nutrition in Canada, with special attention to Indigenous communities across the country, the materials generated by nutritionists, dieticians, physicians, nurses, and others involved in the project also provide a history of emotions. In conducting the NC fieldwork, nutrition experts and their cadres entered ‘foreign’ places where they encountered ‘Amused Natives’, ‘Happy Inuit’, and an ‘alien race’ of often difficult study participants.716 By reading these encounters through theories of emotion, this chapter examines the emotive expressions documented by both visiting experts and resident study- participants in Indigenous communities. I am interested here in questions of perception, performance, and communication as it is shaped through discourses on ‘Indians’ and ‘Eskimos’, ‘whites’, ‘outsiders’, and other categories perpetuated by uneven relationships between health experts, state officials, and Indigenous peoples. This is further complicated in the late 1960s with the increased participation of Indigenous people in medical service positions.717 These

715 Andree Beaulieu, “A Nutrition Surveyor’s Journal,” Nutrition Today 9(1) (January/February 1974), 18. Referring here to Inuit participants. 716 Beaulieu, “A Nutrition Surveyor’s Journal,” 16-18. Preliminary research on this discussion presented in a conference paper, “‘Amused Natives’, ‘Happy Inuit’, and ‘(Dis)satisfied Researchers’: Nutrition Experts’ Emotional Encounters with an ‘Alien Race’ in Northern Canada, 1960-1980,” at the 2014 Annual Meeting of the Canadian Historical Association, Brock University, St Catharine’s, ON, May 2014. 717 For example, Community Health Representatives would have been community members identified as Indian or Inuit with cultural and linguistic knowledge that enabled them to train and act as sort of intermediary members of northern healthcare teams. The position was initiated as part of a Medical Services Branch program in the 1960s, “in an attempt… to increase the amount and effectiveness of health teaching done among the Indian and Eskimo people,” with a Representative “qualified by lifetime knowledge of his community, as well as by

188 experiences, thus, were not only shaped by racialized categories rooted in colonial relations, but were highly gendered, classed, and intersectional for both men and women. Unlike earlier approaches to emotional history, or ‘emotionology’, which simplified emotional expressions and reactions and understood them as a part of the process of civilization, this analysis is informed by more recent scholarship that encourages historians “to take emotions as seriously as they have lately taken other ‘invisible’ topics, such as ecology and gender.”718 As Barbara Rosenwein writes, ‘I am convinced that, as sociologists already know very well, ‘the source of emotion, its governing laws, and its consequences are an inseparable part of the social process’.”719 Margaret Wetherell theorizes that “Affective practice focuses on the emotional as it appears in social life and tries to follow what participants do.” She writes: “It finds shifting, flexible and often over-determined figurations rather than simple lines of causation, character types and neat emotion categories.”720 She argues that the role of theories of affect is to “expand the connotation of affect beyond the familiar emotional palettes”721: Affect is about sense as well as sensibility. It is practical, communicative and organised. In affective practice, bits of the body (e.g. facial muscles, thalamic-amygdala pathways in the brain, heart rate, regions of the prefrontal cortex, sweat glands, etc.) get patterned together with feelings and thoughts, interaction patterns and relationships, narratives and interpretive repertoires, social relations, personal histories, and ways of life.722

training.” Canada, The Community Health Worker in Indian and Eskimo Communities (Ottawa: Department of National Health and Welfare Medical Services Branch, 1970): 1. 718 Barbara Rosenwein, Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006), 1-2. Emotionology was coined by Peter and Carol Stearns in the mid-1980s, which for they and others was linked to the civilizing process, seeing tantrums and emotional outbursts as child-like emotional expressions, and more refined displays of emotions marked for their theory the movement towards more ‘civilized’ emotions. See Peter N. Stearns and Carol Z. Stearns, “Emotionology: Clarifying the History of Emotions and Emotional Standards,” American Historical Review 90, no. 4 (October, 1985): 813-836. 719 Rosenwein, Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages, 1. Rosenwein is quoting David Franks’ “The Bias of Emotions in Western Civilization.” 720 Margaret Wetherell, Affect and Emotion: A New Social Science Understanding (London; Los Angeles: SAGE Publications, 2012), 4. 721 Wetherell, Affect and Emotion, 6. 722 Wetherell, Affect and Emotion, 13-14.

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Wetherell’s approach presents a useful framework for thinking about what constitutes emotions, going beyond expected or anticipated expressions and reactions, and looking to embodiment and affective movement or motion. For Rosenwein studying emotions at the community level provides context. She writes, “the historian will be able to compile a dossier of sources produced by the group in question,” arguing that emotional communities are “largely the same as social communities.”723 They include, for example, families, neighbourhoods, syndicates, academic institutions, monasteries, factories, platoons, and so on. The researcher’s work here is, above all, to uncover systems of feeling, to establish what these communities (and the individuals in them) define and assess as valuable or harmful to them (for it is about such things that people express emotions); the emotions that they value, devalue, or ignore; the nature of the affective bonds between people that they recognize; and the modes of emotional expression that they expect, encourage, tolerate, and deplore.724 Analyzing an emotional community in writing such a history, as Rosenwein argues, “must not deny the biological substratum of emotions, since it is clear that they are embedded in both the body and the brain.” As Wetherell asserts, “Interweaving patterns often form affective ruts.” Essentially, following an occurrence of an emotional or embodied experience, “a groove [can be] cut in the social psychological life of the community,” as ‘affective ruts’ are created that facilitate changed responses and behaviours.725 While theories of emotion and affect open new avenues into studying histories of communities, they also introduce critical questions. As Wetherell admits, “affect presents a huge theoretical and practical challenge,” specifically: “How can we engage with phenomena that can be read simultaneously as somatic, neural, subjective, historical, social and personal? What are the best ways to move forward?”726 For projects such as this, how does an historian of Canada’s colonial history, who is always faced with the challenge of keeping colonialism’s persisting foundations of biologically-rooted racial difference and hierarchy in its place, then

723 Barbara H. Rosenwein, “Problems and Methods in the History of Emotions,” Passions in Context I (1/2010). www.passionsincontext.de/uploads/media/ 01_Rosenwein.pdf. Accessed October 8, 2013. 11-12. 724 Rosenwein, “Problems and Methods in the History of Emotions,” 11. 725 Wetherell, Affect and Emotion, 14. 726 Wetherell, Affect and Emotion, 11.

190 bring in arguments to suggest that claiming biological inheritance is acceptable? Could not one reify the other? For the materials and subject matter addressed here, I argue that denying the emotions expressed and experienced by Indigenous, and non-Indigenous, peoples ignores their lived experiences. Specifically, with heightened emotions expressed primarily when stabilizing forces such as rights, values, or security are compromised, pretending that history happens in the absence of emotions denies systems of feeling as a form of dissent, community organization, or self-preservation. This is particularly critical when people themselves intentionally name or express, through their faces or bodies, their emotional experiences, marking these feelings as important to their identity and thereby, arguably, writing them into their histories. Those involved in nutrition studies, whether as researchers or community members, present emotional histories through their expressions of ‘systems of feeling’. For example, in winter of 1971 to ’72, Andree Beaulieu, the Registered Dietician who “assume[ed] responsibility for developing the plans and details of operation” of Nutrition Canada’s Indian and Eskimo surveys,727 visited what she called “the vast, icy wilderness of northern Canada.”728 As she explained in a 1974 article, she and her research team stopped in communities from the north shore of the St. Lawrence River up to Frobisher Bay, on the Atlantic opposite Greenland, across Hudson’s Bay and up to the Arctic Ocean’s Coast, then finally to the Pacific coastal islands. Part of Nutrition Canada’s Survey Team, Beaulieu visited First Nations and Inuit settlements across northern Canada as leader of the NC northern team, composed of a trained nurse, four dieticians, an equipment officer, lab technician, and two doctors in advanced residence at Montreal General Hospital.729 In her travelogue-style report, she recounts her emotional experience surveying northern communities, as well as the feelings expressed by study participants across the country. Her writing engages in the colonial discourse of ‘travel writing’,

727 Letter from Dr. Z.I. Sabry, National Co-ordinator, Nutrition Canada to Dr. M. Black, Regional Director, Manitoba Region, August 30, 1971, RG 029, ACC: W84-85/458, Box 11, File 144-2-4 vol. 1 Nutrition Surveys – Reserves (1970-12-01 to 1971-12-31), MSB, DHW, LAC, Winnipeg, MB. 728 Andree Beaulieu, “A Nutrition Surveyor’s Journal,” Nutrition Today 9(1) (January/February 1974): 16. 729 Beaulieu, “A Nutrition Surveyor’s Journal,” 17.

191 reflective of accounts penned by European, primarily male, explorers and adventurers who spilled ideological presumptions into their reports on encountering the new world.730 The accounts and studies written by nutrition researchers, as well as the counternarratives within these works, demonstrate that both researchers and participants were engaged as members of ‘emotional communities’.731 Problems associated with ‘Aboriginal nutrition’ and the way in which the state sought to correct them in this period were, thus, modeled on a colonial template. Until the inclusion of structuralist analyses that trickled into nutrition studies in the late 1970s, experts neglected to consider the social and economic circumstances of food access and diet, or the perspectives of Indigenous peoples when crafting nutrition education tools for First Nations, Métis, and Inuit children. Nutrition researchers entered what they referred to as ‘isolated’, ‘foreign’, and ‘remote’ spaces, where they paid much attention to gathering and interpreting data on what constituted or was consumed by bodies; some, like Beaulieu, also attended briefly to interpreting how they were received by their subjects. In these communities, nutritionists and their cadres of experts encountered what Beaulieu referred to as ‘an alien race’ of people and scenarios they understood in part through emotional responses, both their own and of study participants. Beaulieu wrote that First Nations and Inuit participants “must hold the world’s record as the most intensely studied peoples on the globe.” “They have,” she wrote, “probably been prodded, poked, measured, and interrogated more often than any racial groups anywhere … a thought to give one pause as he packs his calipers, syringes, urine specimen flasks and the like and heads north.” Her team had been warned [that], during the past year, the Inuit had been surveyed by two teams of radiologists who took x-rays of everyone; a group of opthalmologists [sic] who peered into their eyes; anthropologists with calipers and questionnaires doing all sorts of things that amused the natives; two teams of sociologists who asked questions that irritated some of the people; [and] census takers.732

730 See Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992). 731 Rosenwein, “Problems and Methods in the History of Emotions,” 11. 732 Beaulieu, “A Nutrition Surveyor’s Journal,” 16.

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Turning to her agenda, she confirmed that, “despite their life under the white man’s magnifying glass, Indians and Inuit were willing subjects and we got our survey done.” Despite her attention to the affective incisions that must have been made through these and countless other colonial experiences, Beaulieu asserted authority over the ‘indolent Indians’ to be surveyed by writing of them much like experts encountering Indigenous peoples a century earlier. According to Beaulieu, “You can’t study an Indian the way you study an Inuk. They are very different people.” By her comparison, “Interrogating and examining the Inuit was a breeze. They were easy to get along with, they seemed to enjoy being with us, they were helpful and so cooperative at times as to be almost embarrassing.” She referred to them fondly: “they were a joy, as nutrition subjects.”733 “All in all,” she concluded, “we could not ask for a more pleasant experience than to survey the Inuit.”734 In contrast, she argued that the same could not be said “for most of the Indians,” explaining that “while the majority showed up to be surveyed and some were even friendly, on the whole they were not enthusiastic about our project.”735 “The Indian,” she wrote, “is not an outgoing person. He is taciturn and, perhaps for a very good reason, suspicious of the white man.”736 Through sharing emotional responses of Indian survey participants, Beaulieu seemed to recognize that a history of colonization and ongoing projects, particularly the James Bay Hydroelectric development, would be inseparable from projects like Nutrition Canada. She wrote that few of the participants who attended the Fort George clinic were “interested in … questions about health and nutrition. They came,” she argued, “only because it gave them an opportunity to vent their feelings about one grievance or another.”737 Beaulieu, too, summarized the NC project in emotional terms: “upon reflection,” she wrote of the Indian community surveys, “we are still surprised that we did as well as we did.” But, she concluded, “it was a dissatisfying experience that gave us little hope that the nutritional status of these

733 Beaulieu, “A Nutrition Surveyor’s Journal,” 17. 734 Beaulieu, “A Nutrition Surveyor’s Journal,” 18. 735 Beaulieu, “A Nutrition Surveyor’s Journal,” 17. 736 Beaulieu, “A Nutrition Surveyor’s Journal,” 32. 737 Beaulieu, “A Nutrition Surveyor’s Journal,” 32.

193 people will change in the near future.”738 As Beaulieu makes clear, despite seemingly forgetting her own preamble about the history behind this project, it is little surprise that First Nations communities surveyed by her research team would present as difficult research subjects. With references to expressions on faces or to emotional reactions, all involved in these exchanges of culture participated in presumptuous readings, interpretations, and misunderstandings of complex masking, secrecy, and exposure of feelings based on a history of colonial encounters. These expressions of emotion are likely not as straightforward as Beaulieu’s readings. She reported on an “innate friendliness” which she attributed to the Inuit having “nothing the white man wants.” The Inuit, according to Beaulieu, “are a happy people and they appear to have a high regard for the white man.” Of those surveyed, she claimed, “they seemed to enjoy providing specimens of their blood and urine.”739 The image brings to mind Paul Laurence Dunbar’s poem, “We Wear the Mask,” along with Maya Angelou’s adaptation “When I Think About Myself,” in which both authors explore the masked emotions of African Americans who carry the experiences and memories of enslavement and oppression, compelled to grin for the public while repressing their pain.740 In her journal, there is little recognition of this as performance or acting as expected to get a desired response. The closest Beaulieu came to suspecting anything less than “straightforward” or “reliable” answers was when the research team realized Inuit referring to their children or parents frequently meant relations formed through informal adoptions, or customary gifting of children to extended family members. Beaulieu argued this custom was unclear due to a “natural desire of the Inuit to be helpful.”741 She similarly overlooked the possibilities of masked or manipulated emotions in her negative impression of First Nations study participants. She made a clear distinction between ‘Happy Inuit’ and angry Indian subjects, noting the history of colonial medicine and anthropology participants would have endured. Yet, she focused in her journal on the lifestyle of First Nations in Canada, linking

738 Beaulieu, “A Nutrition Surveyor’s Journal,” 33. 739 Beaulieu, “A Nutrition Surveyor’s Journal,” 18. 740 See Robin D.G. Kelley, Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class (New York: The Free Press, 1994), 15, and for further discussion; also Maya Angelou, “When I Think About Myself,” The Complete Poetry (New York: Random House, 2015), 29. 741 Beaulieu, “A Nutrition Surveyor’s Journal,” 18.

194 anger, lassitude, and parenting style to poor nutrition. “Not that it has anything to do with nutrition,” she wrote, “but the way the northern Indian treats his children is another feature of the native life style that appears to defy change.” Further, contradicting her previous statement, she indicates it is all about nutrition: “If ‘to train the child is to make the grown-up’, then there is faint hope for nutrition education of future adult natives of the Canadian north.”742 Concerned with lack of attention to the clock, late bed-times, early waking, lack of concern for schedule, and lateness to appointments when they showed up at all, Beaulieu concluded that Indian survey participants “seemed to be wholly oblivious to the existence of the clock,” in a culture where “parental guidance … hardly exists.”743 Her focus on what she seems to have seen as groups of ungrateful and difficult people overlooks the possibility of First Nations organizing themselves as what Barbara Rosenwein refers to as “emotional communities,” or William Reddy as “emotional cultures.”744 I would argue that being difficult study participants was no accident. Tardiness, rather than oblivion, can be read as a community response and protest to yet another intrusion into the lives and bodies of the community. For example, organizing as an emotional community or culture of resistance through expressions of anger and indifference towards non-Indigenous outsiders, study participants in Fort George were in protest. Historian Robin D.G. Kelley considers similar organizing in the histories of Black working class people in the United States.745 Kelley frames his assertions through James C. Scott’s theory of ‘infrapolitics’: “the circumspect struggle waged daily by subordinate groups is, like infrared rays, beyond the visible end of the spectrum.”746 Kelley explains that, “despite appearances of consent, oppressed groups challenge those in power by constructing a ‘hidden transcript’, a dissident political culture that manifests itself in

742 Beaulieu, “A Nutrition Surveyor’s Journal,” 33. 743 Beaulieu, “A Nutrition Surveyor’s Journal,” 33. 744 See William M. Reddy, “Historical Research on the Self and Emotions.” Emotion Review 1:302 (2009): 302-315. 745 Kelley, Race Rebels. 746 Kelley, Race Rebels, 8. Here, Kelley is quoting and summarizing theories posed by Anthropologist James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), 183. While I find the theory useful, it is Historian Kelley’s application that I feel speaks to my own argument of resistance through everyday acts.

195 daily conversations, folklore, jokes, songs, and other cultural practices.”747 He writes that this ‘hidden transcript’ also appears “in spaces controlled by the powerful, though almost always in disguised forms.” These “everyday forms of resistance,” including “theft, footdragging, the destruction of property,” or tardiness, are integral to “the political histor[ies] of oppressed people,” which Kelley argues “cannot be understood without reference to infrapolitics.” As he asserts, “these daily acts have a cumulative effect on power relations.”748 One critical point he makes concerning those exercising often subtle (or even invisible) acts of dissent is that “above all, they wanted to exercise power over institutions that controlled them or on which they were dependent.”749 While his subject is Black working-class resistance in the American south, Kelley’s discussion of Black women, men, and youth embracing and producing clothing, music, poetry, and other forms of culture that worked to shift the balance of power is present in other emotional communities. The Indigenous communities surveyed were in need of, or ‘dependent on’, the medical institutions that sought their cooperation, and in many ways, residents likely felt this was an unbalanced relationship of power. As discussed in Chapter Two, residents in many communities, as was particularly evident in Manitoba, lived where there was neither a regular doctor nor hospital. As Michèle Têtu reported in The Indian News, “many Indian and Eskimo women are struggling desperately for such basics as adequate health services for their communities – even for running water, in a lot of cases!”750 Moreover, seasonal or temporary social assistance was required for many residents due to the legacy of colonialism and consequent lack of work, natural resources, and high food prices. When the state named residents on a list expecting them to participate in nutrition survey clinics – moreover, that participation carried with it the promise of medical assessment and follow-up treatment – this placed already vulnerable residents in a precarious position and pushed them into compliance.

747 Kelley, Race Rebels, 8. 748 Kelley, Race Rebels, 8. 749 Kelley, Race Rebels, 74-75. 750 Michèle Têtu, “The Royal Commission on the Status of Women,” The Indian News 13, no. 9 (December 1970), 1. This appeared as part of her report on the 1970 Royal Commission on the Status of Women’s that concluded in assessing the lot of Canadian women, “the poorest are the Indian, Métis and Eskimo women.” Punctuation as in original.

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According to NC planning documents, those who resisted or refused were to be documented, as enumerating Public Health Nurses were to “list their reasons [for refusing] beside their sequence number.”751 As indicated, were a resident on the list to refuse to participate, PHNs were advised to “obtain his interest and cooperation by explaining the purpose of the survey.” Pressure by the local nurse and accompanying CHR to participate, combined with being flagged as dissenting or difficult by those with power over access to health care and other related resources in the community, likely compelled some residents to comply. Negotiating power was also visible in the MSB’s 1967 Home Economics summer students’ visit to Fort Alexander and Split Lake, MB, to conduct a nutrition survey. The students reported that in Split Lake, having the CHR accompany them on home visits “was necessary on the first visit only at most homes for the people had become used to us and their English increased surprisingly.”752 Thus, as I argue in Chapter Two, local residents used language to shift the balance, as the ‘surprising’ acquisition of English by First Nations survey participants could be read as an act of resistance or self-preservation, particularly for those regularly studied by nutrition and medical research teams. That research teams commented on sudden language acquisition demonstrates a lack of cultural awareness and training prior to entering Indigenous communities.753 Further, “the team’s position as outsiders without connection to the community likely contributed to their plans for random sampling being thwarted by Fort Alexander residents.” The students were unable to connect with families on “the eastern end of the north side of the river,” a section they saw being of interest as “it is one of the poorer sections,” as they realized that “none of the families wished to participate.”754 Though the students attribute this to a religious divide between the local CHR and the community’s ‘poorer’ residents, that everyone in this pocket of Fort Alexander abstained also points to an organized emotional community, in Rosenwein’s terms, ‘defin[ing] and assess[ing]’ the nutrition survey ‘as valuable or harmful to them’.755

751 Nutrition Canada, “Advance Party Manual,” 4. 752 Trudeau and Wolczuk, “Preliminary Report on Nutrition Survey 1967,” 3. 753 See Chapter Two, page 100, of this dissertation. 754 Trudeau and Wolczuk, “Preliminary Report on Nutrition Survey 1967,” 1-2. 755 Rosenwein, “Problems and Methods in the History of Emotions,” 11.

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Similarly, that participants in Beaulieu’s survey clinics arrived late and showed up only to “vent their feelings,” but also that they thought “that somehow [Nutrition Canada] was connected to [the hydroelectric] project,” is significant.756 She dismissively writes, “fewer than half the number of the people to be surveyed showed up,” and “[v]ery few of those who did come… were interested in our questions about their nutritional health.” Instead, they wanted “to complain about the dam being built on La Grande River that would surely flood their lands,” and “[w]ith the impending construction of the hydroelectric project on the river, which empties into James Bay not far away, they were in no mood to be surveyed.” A different reading than that Beaulieu offers could be that these First Nations participants used feelings and expressions of negative emotions as resistance against what would have been understood by the Fort George community, flooded by hydroelectric development soon after Nutrition Canada’s visit, as one part of a larger colonial project. Further, Beaulieu’s report on the always happy and cooperative Inuit participants, who she perceived as happy to provide samples of blood and urine, may have been performing for their visiting audience. As Kelley argues, “because most Southern whites accepted their own racial mythology” that presumed Black people “were happy and content,” the “mask of ‘grins and lies’ enhanced black people’s invisibility and enabled them to wage a kind of underground ‘guerilla’ battle with… representatives of the status quo.”757 For example, smiling, shuffling, and other deferential behavior towards those in positions of power or authority “mitigated potential punishment” for Southern Black workers.758 These ‘masks’ can be seen as performative emotions that the community understands they are collectively presenting to outsiders, and that have been agreed upon either formally or informally by members of the community. Paige Raibmon explores similar performances, asserting that “Aboriginal people were far less likely to gain access to [the] public sphere when they did not ‘play Indian’.”759 As Philip J. Deloria argues, ‘playing Indian’ involves the complicated relationship between real

756 Beaulieu, “A Nutrition Surveyor’s Journal,”32. 757 Kelley, Race Rebels, 7. Here Kelley is drawing on Paul Laurence Dunbar’s poem “We Wear the Mask,” 15. 758 Kelley, Race Rebels, 22. 759 Paige Raibmon, Authentic Indians: Episodes of Encounter from the Late-Nineteenth- Century Northwest Coast (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 11.

198 living Indians and imaginary or idealized stereotypes.760 Here, in this in-between space, liminal experiences of metaphorical identities flourished, allowing whites to imagine themselves discursively as both wild and civilized. ‘Indianness’ was performed in both public and private arenas, including fraternal orders, children’s camps, and historical re-enactments (such as the Boston tea Party), as notions of supposedly authentic Indian experiences both fed and drew on narratives popularized through literature, film, music, and environmentalist campaigns.761 By extension, as Raibmon illustrates, ‘playing Indian’ was also a political and economic act employed by Indigenous peoples, using expected imageries and playing on ideologies in an attempt to gain power (and perhaps profit) from the limited roles and wage work available to Indigenous peoples as colonial projects took root across North America. Thus, as Inuit participants smiled through the slate of tests and questions posed by NC’s northern team, their responses seem to have been framed by the same understanding that motivated Indigenous west coast hop pickers, Hollywood actors, and performers in the Chicago’s World Fair.762 By performing expected emotional responses, which positioned them as deferential to their white guests, Inuit participants may have worked to create an easy environment where, collectively, they could shape how they would be perceived and treated. Deloria also shows how non-Indigenous ideologies have created expected and unexpected places or experiences for Indigenous peoples, with notions of Indianness confusing and conflicting with real, lived experiences and the opportunities Indigenous peoples embrace, from sports and colleges to beauty salons.763 While Inuk survey participants were, as Beaulieu

760 Philip J. Deloria, Playing Indian (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998). See also Olive Patricia Dickason, The Myth of the Savage and the Beginnings of French Colonialism in the Americas (Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 1984). 761 See Martin J. Cannon and Lina Sunseri, eds., Racism, Colonialism, and Indigeneity in Canada: A Reader (Don Mills, ON: Oxford University Press, 2011), particularly Thomas King, “You’re Not the Indian I had in Mind,” 36-43, and Deborah Doxtator, “The Idea of ‘Indianness’ and Once Upon a Time: The Role of Indians in History,” 31-35.

762 See Philip J. Deloria, Indians in Unexpected Places (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2004), and Raibmon, Authentic Indians, for details of these histories that explore both political resistance and economic ingenuity through performance. 763 Deloria, Indians in Unexpected Places.

199 shows, performing accepted roles as passive and happy, First Nations participants were employing “nonindigenous forms to address political issues” or “play[ing] Indian in ways that offend the sensibilities of those who would believe in noble savages.”764 Such encounters with residents of Indigenous communities, moving in public spaces and wearing clothing without regalia or ceremony, reflected neither the Indians of historical and Hollywood fantasy, nor the contemporary leaders of organizations and bands, who regularly attended meetings with government officials in intricately beaded jackets and ties, such as Harold Cardinal or George Manuel.765 Without suggesting these leaders were ‘playing Indian’, I would argue that many of the public images of Indigenous peoples, as Raibmon and Deloria also suggest, reflected these dichotomies, both shaping non-Indigenous perceptions of what Indian looked like, and in turn leaving little room for the range of identities and lived experiences of First Nations, Métis, and Inuit peoples in Canada. In explaining the emotional responses of their receiving communities, nutrition surveyors like Beaulieu demonstrate the influence of what Raibmon refers to as an “either/or” dichotomy.766 While NC staff reveal emotional histories through their writings, they also bore witness to such communities and applied this knowledge to their planning and approach to accessing Indigenous communities. For example, when letters were drafted to Chiefs of Manitoba’s First Nations survey communities, these were sent in an attempt at good will and out of respect for the multitude of previous studies, which NC knew they needed to address. This is seen in Dr. Black’s letter to Manitoba chiefs and councils, which recognizes “that many teams of one kind or another have visited this Indian reserve and people sometimes wonder what benefit there is

764 Raibmon, Authentic Indians, 11. 765 It was not uncommon in the late 1960s and early 1970s for The Indian News to run stories and photographs of prominent leaders, who displayed handmade wares with pride. For example, see The Indian News 13, no. 9 (December 1970), 1; The Indian News 13, no. 10 (January 1971), 1. 766 Raibmon, Authentic Indians, 11. Raibmon explains how, for the northwest coastal communities she studied, there was “no single, unified Aboriginal experience of true ‘authenticity’.” The notion that either Indigenous people were truly authentic or not pitted non- Indigenous notions of ‘tradition’ against ‘modernity’ when, as seen in lived experiences, these are not categories that can exist exclusively. Moreover, as she argues, when the people she studied “engaged in colonial categories, they invariably meant something different by them than did colonizers.”

200 to such surveys.”767 After Black had already contacted local chiefs, NC also sent letters from then DNHW Minister John Munro for regional representatives to distribute, to “formally introduce Nutrition Canada to the Indian Chiefs in your region and request their cooperation in the survey.”768 According to an NC Communiqué, in announcing the special Indian and Eskimo surveys, “Mr. Munro expressed his personal interest in this phase of the project and his continued concern for the health and well-being of the native peoples.”769 As Munro and NC were not initially intending to survey Indigenous peoples at all, this late decision still required adequate advertising and public relations work, which is visible in the efforts made on paper to inform local leaders of the survey plan. Simply advising leaders after the survey was already taking place seems short-sighted, as inclusion at the outset of Indigenous leaders, already vocalizing frustration over being excluded from decisions and plans being made by the government about them and their communities, would have made the efforts at amelioration more meaningful. As noted, MIB President Dave Courchene contacted NC ‘s Directors regarding the inclusion of Indigenous peoples in the national survey project, specifically encouraging survey of residents of Reservations in Manitoba. 770 His letter, which perhaps other Indigenous leaders similarly submitted, may have impacted the scope of the survey. The rare decision to actively reach out to community leaders in advance might also reflect a resolution made at the 1971 Federation of Saskatchewan Indians chiefs’ conference, where delegates voted in unanimous agreement with the resolution that government departments at all levels discontinue their arbitrary appropriation of funds to research,

767 Letter from Black to Chief Thompson, “Re: Nutrition Canada,” August 10, 1971, RG 029, ACC: W84-85/458, Box 11, File 144-2-4 vol. 1 Nutrition Surveys – Reserves (1970-12-01 to 1971-12-31), MSB, DHW, LAC, Winnipeg, MB. 768 Letter from Carole Peacock, Information Services Directorate, Nutrition Canada to Dr. L. Black, Regional Director, Manitoba Region, September 15, 1971, RG 029, ACC: W84-85/458, Box 11, File 144-2-4 vol. 1 Nutrition Surveys – Reserves (1970-12-01 to 1971-12-31), MSB, DHW, LAC, Winnipeg, MB. 769 Nutrition Canada, Communiqué 2, no. 3 (October, 1971), 11. 770 Courchene, “Re: Nutrition Canada.”

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study and probe the Indians without consultation with the chiefs and councils or their representative body, the F.S.I.771 The report advised that “The Indian people are tired of these tactics,” and “are now prepared to carry on their own research in areas of concern to Indians.”772 The FSI chiefs voiced their frustration in emotional terms, referring to their people as ‘tired’, while The Indian News reported on delegates being ‘exasperated’ and ‘impatient’, experiencing ‘displeasure’ with a federal government “beating around the bush, with political promises,” specifically with regards to Munro’s dealings with health care.773 These heightened emotional responses, as Rosenwein argues, indicate a community under threat – “for it is about such things that people express emotions”774 – as they saw their Treaty rights being denied through removal of medicare promised under the medicine chest clause in Saskatchewan treaties.775 Nutrition Canada may have made attempts to get Indigenous leaders on board with their project, but they were less subtle in their interests when they exploited the intimate relationships afforded by nurses and CHRs already familiar to communities. Specifically, they appealed on emotional terms to the unique bonds formed between MSB staff and residents, where professionals often visited patients or clients in their homes. As Beaulieu herself wrote, in a letter personally inviting the MSB Manitoba Regional Nursing Officer to the NC planning workshop, “We feel that the nurse responsible for the Reservations chosen to be studied is the best person to contact our participants.”776 This was consistent with the survey guidelines and expectations of MSB Regional and Public Health Nurses, who with CHRs were tasked with using their familiarity with, and influence in, their communities to “win the confidence of the Indian

771 “Saskatchewan Indians Meet at Prince Albert,” The Indian News 13, no. 12 (March 1971), 4-5 772 “Saskatchewan Indians Meet at Prince Albert,” 5. 773 “Saskatchewan Indians Meet at Prince Albert,” 4. 774 Barbara H. Rosenwein, “Problems and Methods in the History of Emotions,” Passions in Context I (1/2010). www.passionsincontext.de/uploads/media/ 01_Rosenwein.pdf. Accessed October 8, 2013. 11. 775 “Saskatchewan Indians Meet at Prince Albert,” 4. 776 Letter from Andree Beaulieu, Nutrition Canada, to Miss L. Malowany, Regional Nursing Officer, Manitoba Region, Medical Services, September 13, 1971, RG 029, ACC: W84- 85/458, Box 11, File 144-2-4 vol. 1 Nutrition Surveys – Reserves (1970-12-01 to 1971-12-31), MSB, DHW, LAC, Winnipeg, MB.

202 or Eskimo population.”777 Though nurses and CHRs were understood through their community bonds to be the best contact people for potential Indigenous survey participants, NC still outlined best practices for how to present oneself when conducting household interviews: “Much of your success as an enumerator will depend upon your manner of approach.”778 The Manual for enumerators advises, “[m]ost people will react favourably if you are friendly and courteous,” as “[c]ourtesy and thoughtfulness are essential.”779 Beaulieu and Nutrition Canada, thus, offer present readers an emotional history of survey participants. The series of interconnected and relational expressions, which engage with and build discourses, community bonds, and ‘emotional capital’ (whether shared vocally, in writing, and through embodied acts, or reported on by experts in reports or articles) each serve to illustrate Wetherell’s assertion that “the study of affect is inextricably to do with the study of pattern. These are patterns which are multiple, dynamic, intersecting, sometimes personal and sometimes impersonal.”780 She explains that “[p]atterns are sometimes imposed, sometimes a matter of actively ‘seeing a way through’ to what comes next, and sometimes, like a repertoire, simply what is to hand, relatively ready-made and ‘thoughtless’.” The individuals involved in nutrition surveys, Homemakers’ organizations, political movements, and simply as part of cultural communities, are consistent with Rosenwein’s definition of emotional communities, as “groups in which people adhere to the same norms of emotional expression and value - or devalue - the same or related emotions.”781 As these examples demonstrate, “[m]ore than one emotional community may exist - indeed normally does exist - contemporaneously, and these communities may change over time.” Beaulieu’s informal, intimate, and gendered reflections on her experience leading a NC research team present a unique perspective, as they are not consistent with the dominant publications on nutrition in Indigenous communities from the period that are predominantly formal and written by male NC and DNHW leadership. Scientific data and prescriptive analysis

777 Nutrition Canada, “Native Population Survey: General Plans,” 2. 778 Nutrition Canada, “Advance Party Manual,” 4. 779 Nutrition Canada, “Advance Party Manual,” 4. 780 Wetherell, Affect and Emotion, 16. 781 Rosenwein, Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages, 2.

203 are replaced here with playful descriptions that account for why “the nutrition surveyors’ lot is usually a happy one.” She refers frequently to feelings and personal perceptions, writing that “[e]ven the simplest people are usually eager to talk about food.” She felt that participants “may not quickly grasp the importance of things sociologists and anthropologists have to do to get information, but, like everyone else, food talk is always fascinating.”782 In addition to presenting the emotional responses of her hosts, Beaulieu also shares her own feelings, including finding pleasure in these encounters as what one might call a ‘foodie’. Despite the many hardships and “ennui” of surveying this northern frontier, Beaulieu wrote, “our life had its rewards.” For example, in Pelly Bay, the team housed with a pilot of German descent and his wife, “an ebullient Canadian woman.” The woman, Beaulieu recalled, “prepared the most marvelous food. Her most memorable dish was a Hungarian goulash wherein the meat was not beef, as one might expect, but large chunks of delicious Arctic char.” She concluded, “My mouth waters as I write about it.”783 The satisfaction she found in these non-Indigenous encounters seem to mark the boundaries of Beaulieu’s comfort with ‘exotic’ northern fare, as her various reports on what First Nations and Inuit families were consuming are veiled in disappointment, judgment, and even disgust. In addition to remarks and accounts of what study participants ate and how it was prepared or eaten, as well as the lack of appreciation for timed meals, Beaulieu made clear links between diet and capable or proper parenting. She wrote of Inuit mothers, “despite the almost total unconcern for balance and variety in the diet of her family, a concern we regard as a quality of motherhood, we found little evidence of overt malnutrition in Inuit families. Of course,” she continues, “the government freely distributes vitamin and mineral supplements and they offer protection.” Beaulieu concluded that “free choice of foods must have certain virtues, for Inuit mothers violate just about every practice taught in homemaking classes elsewhere.”784 Unlike Beaulieu’s unique report, more prominent Medical Services Branch researchers tended to focus their research on the physical embodiment of nutritional status and diet, or that which they could crunch and measure as data. For example, Dr. Otto Schaefer, whose work

782 Beaulieu, “A Nutrition Surveyor’s Journal,” 16-17. 783 Beaulieu, “A Nutrition Surveyor’s Journal,” 34. 784 Beaulieu, “A Nutrition Surveyor’s Journal,” 18.

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Beaulieu references and who published extensively on the health and nutrition of First Nations and Inuit people in the 1960s through ‘80s, made much of the impact of western diets introduced into northern communities through Hudson’s Bay Company and similar stores. For example, in his often-referenced 1971 article, “When the Eskimo Comes to Town,” Schaefer detailed the problems of rapid changes in lifestyle that Inuit communities experienced in the mid-twentieth century: “their teeth rot, his wife comes down with gallbladder disease and, likely as not, a member of his family will suffer one of the degenerative diseases for which the white man is well known.”785 Schaefer worked closely with and often for the Medical Services Branch of the Department of National Health and Welfare, and by the end of the 1970s was an advocate for a return to so-called traditional, country, or Native foods. In a departure from his more formal medical approach, in 1974, Schaefer gave an address at the Symposium on Circumpolar Health on “Eskimo Personality and Society – Yesterday and Today.” This was based largely on the work of then recently-deceased Father Matayer, who was responsible for “geneaological and kinship studies - very likely the most extensive ones of the Copper Eskimos ever to be undertaken,” and which were still in progress in 1974.”786 Schaefer focused on Matayer’s work on feelings, particularly how emotions were linked to family relations. According to Schaefer, within an Inuit family unit, an “individual was more totally responsive in all his or her actions … to the interests of the family as a group than is the case in Western Society, or for that matter in all more complex western civilizations.”787 Schaefer related how Matayer’s research distinguished between past and present. In a tableau reflecting these comparisons, titled “Members of the nuclear Eskimo family,” he detailed how “in the past” emotional wellness and pride were dependent on established gender roles for parents, and family experiences defined by stable and interdependent positions within the family for adults and children. For example, a father in the past was ‘highly respected’ as ‘provider of food’ for all community members, which purportedly “was a source of the greatest

785 Otto Schaefer, “When the Eskimo Comes to Town,” Nutrition Today 6: 6 (November/December 1971): 8. 786 Otto Schaefer, “Eskimo Personality and Society – Yesterday and Today,” Arctic 28:2 (June 1975): 87. 787 Schaefer, “Eskimo Personality and Society,” 88.

205 pride and satisfaction to him.” This contrasts with the ‘now’, when fathers feel “useless and worthless.” Having “lost the independence of the traditional hunter,” he wrote, they seek “transient emotional relief from feelings of frustration, idleness, dependence and hurt pride.”788 According to Schaefer, a mother in the past felt “loved and needed” through a structured, gendered role as “preparer of shelter, food and clothing, and indispensable centre of family.” Mothers, he documented, “Were always busy making and repairing fur clothing, tents and utensils, tending seal-oil lamps day and night, and nursing, training and playing with children.” A mother “gave and received stimulation and satisfaction in intense interaction with child carried skin-to-skin on her back or breast for three years.” By the 1970s, Schaefer and Matayer believed mothers felt “dispensable and idle.” Mothers had “lost [their] central role in [the] family,” and so-called traditional responsibilities were rapidly replaced with new ones based on a capitalist consumer model of convenience: “Buys clothing and food in store. Bottle- feeds infants and deposits them with siblings or grandparents…,” feeling “impatient and punitive with less-well-understood and less-well-trained children.”789 Inuit children in the past were “loved and cared for, feeling secure and satisfied with ideal image of parents to live up to.” ‘Now’, Schaefer wrote, children “feel loss of intimate infant-mother interaction and understanding; have less secure shelter, and inferior nourishment.” Schaefer continued, arguing that children “feel emotional and sensory deprivation”; are “deprived of the ideal image of their parents” and “do not respect them.” Most significantly, he argued, children, “having lost any functional role in the Eskimo world without being able to realize the dreams produced from school and movies, feel useless, and become confused, frustrated and rebellious.”790 Families, thus, had reportedly changed from a “very close” unit with “complete and unquestioned interdependence,” to a group of people “drifting apart,” with “expressions of anger and intolerance” dominating feelings and driving emotional responses.791

788 Schaefer, “Eskimo Personality and Society,” 88. 789 Schaefer, “Eskimo Personality and Society,” 88. 790 Schaefer, “Eskimo Personality and Society,” 88. 791 Schaefer, “Eskimo Personality and Society,” 88.

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Schaefer was aware of the problems with such a tableau, which he wrote was “naturally far too generalized and simplified, compressing as it does a living continuum of great dynamic complexity and, with great local variations, into an exaggerated and polarized still-picture.” He explained that it might “nevertheless allow one to see more clearly some of the most important cultural and sociological trends which have had such an impact on the physical, mental and social health of today’s Eskimo society.”792 This is more carefully considered in a second tableau, on “Social values, attitudes and practices.” While also essentializing and flattening, the comparisons reflect material and emotional shifts in colonization and an increased participation in the global, capitalist economy. In the past, Schaefer asserted, sharing and possessions centred largely on getting and distributing food to keep the community well emotionally and physically. The shift in valued skillsets by the 1970s altered gendered roles, with men as wage- earners and women as consumers. Though Schaefer’s article is reporting on observations of Inuit peoples, these feelings of disconnection and idleness were not unique to his report. Other Indigenous women during the same period who experienced a lack of connection to traditional or Indigenous cultural knowledge sought it out in community homemaking or craft enterprises. In addition to Homemakers’ organizations, these included artisan co-operatives, where women learned cooking, sewing, weaving, and tanning from other Indigenous women in their communities. An example is the women of the Kehewin Cree Nation, who in 1972 sought instruction, for example, in sewing and beading by Anna Cardinal, and in scraping, stretching, and smoking hide with Maggie Dion.793 The “rebirth” of the Alberta community involved “working in close unity towards the accomplishment and realization of a rich, full life together, thus making the Reserve a happy community and a better place to live.” Flookes reported that, once the women were comfortable, they shared that the opportunities afforded by the program gave them, for the first time in many years, the ability to buy sufficient food and clothing for their families, at the store of their choice.” She explains: “The humiliation they were subjected to with the use of the voucher has been removed and the freedom to decide for themselves where to shop gives

792 Schaefer, “Eskimo Personality and Society,” 89. 793 Pierrette Flookes, “Even Older People Find Rewarding Jobs as Kehewin Reaches Full Employment,” The Indian News 15, no. 2 (July 1972), 1, 4-5.

207 them a renewed dignity.”794 This resurgence of cultural handicraft work connected women to others in their communities, instilled cultural knowledge in a generation removed from the transfer of such skills, and also reportedly generated feelings of pride and happiness in women who were “earning their livelihood.” Flookes reported that the program “has brought happiness to Kehewin,” as “people have finally found a more purposeful way of life, while reawakening the pride of their heritage.”795 By emphasizing the feelings of happiness through experiences of pride on an individual and community level, Flookes argues that community economic and social development upgrade programs were a means to reignite cultural knowledge and provide purpose through traditional handicrafts produced for the modern economy: “remov[ing] the feeling of despair” and guiding participants “towards a more dignified and fulfilling life.” These and other programs, often supported financially by DIAND and celebrated by the Department and its newspaper, were part of the integrationist agenda that looked for ways to encourage Indigenous participation in the economy through workplace training. While many such placements removed young individuals from their home communities and relocated them through urban placements, others like the Community Health Representative and Handicraft programs kept residents in their home communities.796 In addition to these articles, The Indian News regularly documented and expressed a range of emotional histories of women, men, and sometimes children and youth. In its early decades, the general editorial tone of the paper focused on eliciting feelings of pride amongst its Indigenous audience, celebrating stories of achievement and success in communities. This focused not only on the success of IAB/DIAND itself, but also of individuals through their gains in areas such as education, sports, art, and community development projects (particularly those

794 Flookes, “Even Older People Find Rewarding Jobs as Kehewin Reaches Full Employment,” 5. 795 Flookes, “Even Older People Find Rewarding Jobs,” 5. 796 In the same issue, The Indian News reported on the success of the Split Lake, MB, Ladies’ Co-operative, representing ten women that included local artists like Christina Garson and Dorothy Spence, along with a group of ten women from Nelson House, MB. Each community of women collectively received ‘winter works’ funding for their handicraft businesses. The Indian News 15, no. 2 (July 1972), 3.

208 who exemplified working towards the IAB/DIAND period goal of integration). An area of great interest was food and nutrition in communities, which were often lauded for their Homemaker organizations, Home Economics training programs, or agricultural and gardening initiatives, with an emphasis on how these made participants feel. As detailed in Chapter Three, Homemaker projects were loaded with emotional experiences and expectations, particularly the pride and pleasure for women learning new skills, taking leadership roles, but also socializing with other women in their communities. At times these organizations generated what Wetherell refers to as “emotional capital,” seeing themselves as a positive source of pride and success for themselves and their communities.797 An example of this is Homemaker Mrs. J. Lesage of Garden River, Ontario, who asserted: “If we Indians want to have the respect of others, the we have to respect ourselves, our homes, our reserves, our families and our own Indian people.”798 She chastised “lazy and careless” individuals, stressing, “[i]f we are to be proud of being Indians, we must stop dreaming of the time when our great-grandfathers owned all the deer in the forest and all the fish in the lakes.” Moreover, she claimed, “[t]he kind of interest that will make active Homemakers’ Clubs requires red-blooded Indian women, women who have real Indian pride and not self-pity.”799 By engaging in a discourse of pride over self-pity, and identifying the source of empowerment as being successful Homemakers and working with Homemaker organizations, Lesage worked to create an emotional community that identified itself through expressions of pride and respect, simultaneously defining what this would look like for her community. As Wetherell argues, “Power works through affect, and affect emerges in power.”800 Lesage’s appeal to the fifty female delegates she was addressing at a convention is, thus, evidence of affect in motion. By exploring how participants in successful endeavours felt, The Indian News sought to elicit similar emotional responses and, through these shared ‘affective practices’, encourage readers to engage in the range of integrationist programs offered by IAB/DIAND.

797 Wetherell, Affect and Emotion, 16. 798 The Indian News 3, no. 2 (October 1958), 4. 799 The Indian News 3, no. 2 (October 1958), 4. 800 Wetherell, Affect and Emotion, 16.

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With this in mind, it would be a mistake to simply accept the authenticity of every expression of feelings in The Indian News – often labeled by the paper rather than identified by the people being documented – as they may instead be representative of what Kelley and Scott refer to as ‘infrapolitics’.801 A useful example of this problem is the piece, “Portage la Prairie Students are Happy,” about students in the Manitoba Residential School.802 Though published in 1957, it illustrates the common thread amongst many of the paper’s pieces from the 1950s and 1960s, which focused on positive, feel-good stories of triumph over adversity. The paper explains accompanying photographs of smiling students representing a range of ages: “pupils seem eager to learn, cheerfully adjusting to school routine and discipline,” as some “enjoy a geography lesson” in a “cheery classroom at the school.”803 Whether students were genuinely feeling happy, smiling for the camera on command, or masking more complicated emotions that could land them with severe punishments, seems a separate history from what the paper worked to portray. Frequently, ‘fun’ and ‘happiness’ were prescribed as an idyllic state achieved through good health and nutrition practices, including student nutrition contests. For example, the 1965 competition that promised “Good Health, Good Fun,” of which the paper reported that children who participated “had special satisfaction from observing good health rules.”804 This discourse was not unique to the paper, as seen in various other mid-twentieth century MSB, DNHW, and IAB/DIAND publications, including The Pre-Schooler, which equated cleanliness and good nutritional health with happiness.805 Still other publications include images depicting smiling, playful families celebrating good health, such as the 1967 “Good Food, Good Health!” brochure.806 The cover of the brochure depicts four smiling people of

801 Kelley, Race Rebels, 8. Kelley’s reading and theorizing of Scott’s work on ‘infrapolitics’ is discussed in more detail earlier in this chapter. 802 “Portage la Prairie Students are Happy,” The Indian News 2, no. 3 (March 1957), 12. 803 “Portage la Prairie Students are Happy,” 12. 804 The Indian News 8, no. 1 (March 1965), 6. 805 Canada, Indian and Northern Health Services, The Pre-Schooler: From the Age of One to Six Years (Ottawa: Ottawa: Department of National Health and Welfare, 1958.) This brochure is discussed in greater detail in chapter 2. 806 Canada, “Good Food: Good Health!,” pamphlet. “Good Food: Good Health!”, published in 1967, was modelled on Canada’s Food Guide and printed in full-colour with illustrations throughout. It laid out the then five food groups and presented optimal eating and

210 various ages, illustrated with an Indigenous appearance, with a male adult playfully tossing a smiling young child into the air. Similarly, the earlier DIAND publication, Northern Cookbook, opens with a series of illustrations by James Simpkins, which reflect ideologies and popular representations of Indigenous people from the postwar period. Simpkins imagines two smiling male hunters carrying a deer tied upturned onto a pole, returning to a cabin to meet a smiling woman ready to cook, with frying pan in hand.807 Below, an Inuit family drawn to depict traditional clothing and seated in wait for a meal amidst an icy environment, smile as a woman carries a large platter with a meal, followed by a smiling husky with an eagerly visible tongue. The cookbook later presents a slim, smiling woman with long braids, clad in a decorated dress met at the hem with fringed footwear, ladling food from a large pot over an outdoor fire.808 A young child whose face is obscured by a bowl from which he is eating, but whose head is adorned with a feather, enjoys his meal while the woman, working in front of teepees while birds fly overhead, happily watches him. The Northern Cookbook, which opens with an extensive breakdown of nutrition rules and suggestions for how to plan and time meals, cook, shop, store, ‘keep food costs down’ and ‘save fuel’, as well as preserve foods, serves to “record facts about some of the wild game, game birds, fish, fruit and vegetables available in Canada’s north,” which editor Eleanor Ellis explains “includes not only the Arctic and sub-Arctic, but the northern lake and forest regions of all the provinces.”809 Further, the collection “suggest[s] methods by which these foods may be prepared and served.” Ellis shares discourses on foods familiar to western kitchens in her chapter introductions, such as the section on soups: The type of meat stock that conjures up visions of warm kitchens which abound with love and laughter, though, is made by putting soup bones (crack large bones with an axe or hammer), and meat trimmings in a big pot, adding salt and enough cold water to cover, bringing them slowly to a boil and then letting them simmer for four to five hours

shopping specifically for an Indigenous consumer. The six-panel pamphlet features illustrations of Indigenous-looking family members of different ages in playful, physical contact in proximity to food. See Chapter Two of this thesis for a more detailed discussion. 807 Eleanor A. Ellis, ed., Northern Cookbook (Ottawa: Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development, 1971), 1. 808 Ellis, ed., Northern Cookbook, 19. 809 Ellis, ed., Northern Cookbook, vi.

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on the back of the stove. Vegetables (fresh or dried) and rice or barley, may be added if desired to make a thick soup stock, or the soup may be strained, cooled and skimmed of fat to make a cleared soup stock. Whichever you prefer, you have a tasty base for endless variations.810

Recipes, such as English Brown Stew and Sweet and Sour Deer Ribs, show the attempt at integrating Indigenous and non-Indigenous fair into hybrid recipes that make use of Indigenous or country foods, but also situate these ingredients in modernity, cooked with spices, lemon juice, and Worcestershire sauce in a stovetop pot or an oven.811 Thus, distinguishing between authored expressions of feeling and those named or illustrated by the contributors to various government publications sometimes opens the possibility of a counternarrative of Indigenous experiences, but other times these feelings are simply prescriptive. Both reading along and then against the grain, as Ann Laura Stoler explains, presents opportunities to understand both the framework within which these sources were generated, and only then allows us to dig deeper to consider other readings of them.812 Emotions in period publications were not always positive. As outlined in Chapter Three, the 1965 Elliot Lake, Ontario, IAB assimilation “scheme” presents a window into the role loneliness played in various state-driven integration projects of the period. Building on the Indian Placement and Relocation Program, which McCallum refers to as “the first organized national labour program” that “sought to place First Nations people in permanent positions in urban areas,”813 Elliot Lake was a pilot project that “train[ed] and relocated Indians wanting the opportunity to better themselves.”814 According to The Indian News, “[c]ompetent people were

810 Ellis, ed., Northern Cookbook, 19-20. 811 Ellis, ed., Northern Cookbook, 60. 812 Ann Laura Stoler, “Colonial Archives and the Arts of Governance,” Archival Science 2: 87-109, (2002): 100. See discussion in the Introduction of this thesis, regarding Stoler’s question: “How can students of colonialisms so quickly and confidently turn to readings ‘against the grain’ without moving along their grain first?” As I explain with respect to how I am engaging in this methodology, “reading sources along the archival grain encourages understanding what Stoler refers to as ‘the circuits of knowledge production in which [colonialisms] operated and the racial commensurabilities on which they relied’. This presents an important framework for looking at sources produced as part of colonial structures.” 813 McCallum, Indigenous Women, Work, and History, 66-67. 814 Keith Miller, “I.A.B. and Indians Both Learn from Pilot Project,” The Indian News 11, no. 2 (May 1968), 1.

212 hired to begin the task of selecting Indians considered able to adjust to the pressures of urban living,” and the project, co-organized by the Department of Manpower and Immigration, proceeded with families chosen from Sandy Lake, Deer Lake, Big Trout Lake, and Pikangikum areas in Sioux Lookout. As indicated in the previous chapter, while many of the eleven relocated families were reported as “adjusting to the change quite well,” seven families had returned to their respective communities within six months of the project’s launch. Author Keith Miller identified “loneliness and not being able to adjust to a strange environment” as key reasons residents chose to leave. He elaborated specifically on how women felt about the experience: “Though their nights were taken up with home-making courses, they missed the familiar life of community living with members of their immediate family close at hand.”815 In spite of the promise of an improved life that would take full advantage of modern nutrition education, along with related sanitation and homemaking skills, over a third of those who participated longed for their original communities to such a degree that they abandoned the project and returned home. Over time, as the following chapter will show, The Indian News was overseen by Indigenous editorial teams and the tone shifted to one of pride, followed by protest, with less of the cheerful celebrations of the 1950s and 60s as the paper moved into a decade of turmoil and frustration expressed by various Indigenous voices across Canada. For example, Editorial Assistant Michèle Têtu’s coverage of pressing issues for Indigenous women, which ran over four issues in 1970-71, highlighted the Royal Commission on the Status of Women’s ‘special statistics’ for Indian, Métis, and Inuit women.816 She reported that “[t]he life expectancy of Indian women, as estimated in 1968, was about 66, while the figure for all Canadian women was nearly 76.” She continues, critiquing the plight of Indigenous women, arguing, This is certainly no wonder when one notes the condition of many Indian homes. The lack of sewers, septic tanks, toilets, running water, central heating and electricity has resulted in serious health problems. To add to this, native women must cope with a critical scarcity of field personnel, poor transportation facilities and lack of adequate

815 Miller, “I.A.B. and Indians Both Learn from Pilot Project,” 6. 816 Têtu, “The Royal Commission on the Status of Women,” 7.

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facilities and staff in hospitals. And Eskimo women are even worse off than Indian women!817 Têtu further reported that the Commission recommended “women of each community must be consulted to determine their particular needs,” with particular emphasis on access to “basic educational broadcasts on food, hygiene, housing and child care.”818 This more frustrated or even angered tone, as Beaulieu and Schaefer also show, was already present in communities feeling the pressures of ongoing nutrition and health studies, deteriorating material conditions in communities, hydroelectric and other resource development projects, integration programs, and micromanagement of all areas of life by DIAND and other colonizing arms of the state.

Nutrition surveys themselves present only a small window into the material conditions and embodiment of nutritional health of participants. While she identifies, almost incidentally, the material conditions of survey participants, Beaulieu is more interested in expressing either joy or frustration with community members. She writes, “Everywhere we went we found that game, fish, and foods that grow wild are the staples of the Indian diet.” This initially reads as a neutral, or even positive observation, but the negative impressions are quickly revealed: “To be sure, when we visited their houses we found such items as flour, sugar, lard, tea and canned milk in the kitchen. Many had freezers which were usually well stocked with wild fowl and game.”819 She continues to lament that both Inuit and Indian participants “are hooked on sweets,” and that in each of the communities they visited, she and her team “were stunned by the quantities of hard candies, chocolate bars, sweet cookies, and chewing gum that they bought at the local store.” Beaulieu also complains that, while “all children are trained to hunt and fish,” the team “never found any evidence of discipline or the cultivation of good personal habits in the home or at meals.” By indicating that of the “most trying problems” surveying was “the general lassitude of the Northern Indians, not just toward our survey but in their whole outlook on life,” she extends her expert assessment into personal opinion, complaining that “[t]he Indian seems to

817 Têtu, “The Royal Commission on the Status of Women,” 7. 818 Michèle Têtu, “The Royal Commission on the Status of Women, Part II,” The Indian News 13, no. 10 (January 1971), 8. 819 Beaulieu, “A Nutrition Surveyor’s Journal,” 33.

214 be wholly oblivious to the clock.”820 Her accounts of visiting communities like Necoslie, La Romaine, and Ft. George, are filled with her own complaints of ‘irritated’ participants: “More than once our team sat for hours in a cold, barren hall waiting in vain for the Indians who had promised to come. Although we were aware of the reason for their difference in attitude, it did affect the survey.”821 Beaulieu remarks that participants, “one or two, sometimes more,” arrived “drunk for their examinations,” or “when ‘allocation day’ comes around” and “the government hands out money to the Indians,” the nutrition surveyor should plan to take a day off because nobody will show up.822 Following the publication of Beaulieu’s article, Nutrition Anthropologist Norge Jerome (University of Kansas) submitted a response to the editorial team of Nutrition Today.823 He expressed concern particularly over the “description of her team’s approach to the Inuit and Indians of Northern Canada,” arguing it serves as “the perfect example of ethnocentrism” and, if accurate, provides “very good reason to question and challenge her ‘findings’ and ‘conclusions’.” He rightly accuses the research team of neglecting to take time to engage in preliminary research and fieldwork “to learn something about assumptions, expectations, life patterns, cognitive maps, and world view of the groups she planned to study.” Quoting Beaulieu to point to her own unprofessional oversight, he writes: “Surely, she would have learned one of the basic operational principles of nutrition fieldwork, i.e. ‘You can’t study an Indian the way you study and Inuk: They are very different people’.” As Jerome suggests, this could have easily been addressed through “adequate preparation” or “consultation with anthropologists,” which “might have indicated that a ‘monotonous diet’ as defined by an outsider has very little to do with ‘nutritional deficiency’.” Criticizing the process as lacking in objectivity and inappropriately applying what he argues are non-existent “universal causal relationships,” Jerome makes an intervention into Beaulieu and NC’s discourse. Specifically, he argues that had the team taken time to adequately

820 Beaulieu, “A Nutrition Surveyor’s Journal,” 33. 821 Beaulieu, “A Nutrition Surveyor’s Journal,” 17. 822 Beaulieu, “A Nutrition Surveyor’s Journal,” 33. 823 Norge W. Jerome, “Surveyors Journal,” letter to the editor, Nutrition Today 9, no. 3 (May/June 1974): 35.

215 and genuinely work to understand their study participants, “Miss Beaulieu would have learned that ‘concern for balance and variety in the diet of her family’ as defined by an outsider is in no way related with ‘quality of motherhood’ as defined by the culture bearers.” Further, had the team sought to work on the schedules of host communities, she “would have captured and reflected the styles of food preparation and consumption of the groups she planned to study – not her own!”824 He closes his letter with a most pointed critique: “I regret having to disagree with Miss Beaulieu’s claim regarding the data. Actually, she did not get the data. She and her team simply completed preliminary field studies – with cultural blinders intact.”825 In her response that follows, Beaulieu neglects to reasonably speak to Jerome’s accusations, instead glossing over his critiques and standing behind the team’s seemingly hasty, ill-prepared visit and ‘ethnocentric’ process of data collection. Defending the survey’s limited methodological scope as not “an anthropological study,” she upholds the decision of hiring exclusively nutrition-focused staff to conduct the survey adhering to the narrowly defined goals of the team who worked to “obtain uniformity from one end of Canada to the other.”826 She also defends the decision to hire a team to collect data for Indigenous peoples in the north and Arctic who “were not specialists of Indian and Eskimo questions,” insisting, “[w]e started up North without any preconceived ideas.” Clearly, from her article, this was not the case, as the piece is almost exclusively a reflection on how one group or other either confirmed or challenged her preconceived notions of ‘Indianness’ or ‘Inuitness’. She concludes in her brief response piece that the team completed their “assignment” – “to obtain data from the Northern people to complement those already obtained from Southern populations in Canada” – in spite of, and never directly addressing, Jerome’s fair claims that question the capacity, methodology, and hence data collection of NC and their chosen staff. Otto Schaefer, whose life work involved advocating for better understanding of Indigenous, particularly Inuit, peoples of Canada’s ‘north’ and Arctic regions, also challenged NC’s approach to studying peoples with whom survey staff could not be bothered to meet,

824 Jerome, “Surveyors Journal,” 35. Emphasis in original. 825 Jerome, “Surveyors Journal,” 35. 826 Andree Beaulieu, response to Norge Jerome, “Surveyors Journal,” Nutrition Today 9, no. 3 (May/June 1974): 35-36.

216 understand, and accommodate.827 He brought into question the confusion amongst NC staff, who were unable to distinguish between Inuit and ‘Indian’ communities, which Schaefer clarifies through a breakdown of regional foodways and linguistics applied in the naming of different culture groups. Moreover, he defends the eating of raw fish and meat as not only culturally relevant but nutritionally valid and significant in maintaining good health throughout regions where other foods are seasonally unavailable. He points, more importantly, to the methods used by NC survey teams, which he criticizes for giving “great prominence” to a “comparison of Ponderal Indices (expressed as percentages at high risk) of general Canadian population, Indians and Eskimos,” which he argues is “misleading” due to its generalizing about body shape, size, and distribution of weight. Instead, Schaefer calls for then recently privileged measures, such as skinfold thickness, expressing shock that the survey would without question classify 70-80% of Inuit adults at “high risk” of obesity or obese. In another brief reply from an NC expert, the project’s National Coordinator, Dr. Zachary Sabry, defends using the ponderal index, even though his own team reported on its limitations. Yet, he asserts that regardless of the ‘high risk’ assigned Indian and Eskimo groups, “the relative imprecision for using the ponderal index should have little impact on the conclusions of the study.” Sabry also writes, rather dismissively, that “Dr. Schaefer’s comments in the first paragraph of his letter, as he agrees, are minor and do not warrant comment.”828 Arguably, Schaefer did not see his comments on the importance of distinguishing between very different culture groups as “minor” or otherwise insignificant, and he did not here suggest their lack of merit. Though not naming it, Schaefer, like Jerome, was calling NC’s ethnocentric approach into question. Consistent with Schaefer’s extensive work – attempting through his health and nutrition advocacy to correct and reframe non-Indigenous assumptions and misunderstandings of Indigenous peoples, due largely to colonial nutrition and medicine combined with a lack of education, experience with, or misinformation about Inuit, First Nations, and Métis people in Canada – I would suggest that he did not see this concern as anything less than critical. It does,

827 Otto Schaefer, “Canadian Ponderals,” letter to the editor, Nutrition Today 9, no. 3 (May/June 1974): 35. 828 Z. I .Sabry, Response to Otto Schaefer, “Canadian Ponderals,” letter to the editor, Nutrition Today 9, no. 3 (May/June 1974): 35. Emphasis added.

217 however, speak to the emotional aspect of defending one’s own research agenda or work, or conversely, defending the integrity and cultural traditions of one’s research subjects-turned- community.829 Though, as Jerome and Schaefer argue, the NC northern team’s data is contentious, Beaulieu’s documentation of her experience and perceptions presents a unique perspective on nutrition surveys and study participants, while Schaefer offers a window into emotional history through feelings associated with nutritional health. Beaulieu’s is also a highly gendered experience, documenting her own feelings and, through her eyes, those of the mostly female study participants she explained being able to connect with during her journey north. Both her article on the NC Survey and Schaefer’s on Inuit personality hold a missing piece from histories of health and medicine, specifically the emotional intimacies that might develop between researchers or medical experts and study participants or patients, the emotional bonds and important feelings that historically sustained Inuit families and shaped how they organized, and the emotional communities forged by First Nations whose lands and resources were being stripped and repeatedly colonized by non-Indigenous outsider projects. Nutrition Canada and The Indian News illustrate how emotions were used as a tool to sell their position and appeal to Indigenous peoples on an intimate level. The prescriptive feelings ascribed, for example, to Indian children in Residential Schools reveals the role The Indian News played in its early years as a propaganda piece for IAB/DIAND, but later features demonstrate how changing interests reflected the development of an emotional community through actively uniting Indigenous interests and voices across Canada. During this period, many of the histories of Indigenous peoples were written by non-Indigenous people (including much of the nutrition history records in Medical Services Branch publications and archives), making it important to read these documents for evidence of residents resisting, manipulating, and protesting, which can be seen in part through highlighting the acts of emotional communities. Building on this discussion of Indigenous acts of resistance, Chapter Six will look

829 Schaefer’s work in and with Indigenous communities is further discussed in the following chapters, and demonstrates an increased alliance in the 1970s and 80s with Inuit communities in the NWT in particular.

218 at Indigenous organizing, activism, and approaches to food, nutrition, and health care for Indigenous people.

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CHAPTER SIX

“EXTREME DISSATISFACTION WILL BE ORGANIZED AND DEMONSTRATED”: INDIGENOUS ORGANIZING FOR HEALTH AND NUTRITION IN THE 1970S

“If we the Indian women are ignored by government we promise that extreme dissatisfaction will be organized and demonstrated within the near future.”830

During this same period of state and MSB nutrition surveys and studies, some Indigenous people in Canada were actively fighting against what western medicine, education, and other state programs had to offer, and were forming organizations to challenge further colonization of their bodies, communities, and approaches to healthcare. For many Indigenous peoples, the 1970s were experienced as a decade of intensified political organization. In Canada, Scott Rutherford writes that “between 1973 and 1976, twice as many indigenous protest actions and legal challenges took place per year as compared to any year between 1960 and 1969.”831 The political climate of the period influenced the 1968 formation of the first Canadian pan-Indian organization, the National Indian Brotherhood (NIB), which reflected a similar national scale of organizing seen in Expo 67;832 reforms to education throughout the 1970s, through which some First Nations and Métis communities took over local elementary and secondary schools;833 local activism located within a global or transnational anticolonial movement in the 1970s, such as the forty-day armed occupation in 1974 of Kenora Ontario’s Anicinabe Park by the Ojibway Warriors Society;834 and protests by Aboriginal women to reform the Indian Act’s discriminatory sections that stripped women of their status upon marriage,

830 Kainai News 1, no. 3 (April 15 1968), 8. 831 Rutherford, “Canada’s Other Red Scare,” 77-78. 832 Myra Rutherdale and Jim Miller, “‘It’s Our Country’: First Nations’ participation in the Indian Pavilion at Expo 67,” Journal of the Canadian Historical Association 17, issue 2 (https://www.erudit.org/revue/jcha/2006/v17/n2/016594ar.pdf): 148-173. 833 Dickason, Canada’s First Nations, 337. By 1984, 187 bands were fully operating their own schools. 834 See Scott Rutherford, “Canada’s Other Red Scare: The Anicinabe Park Occupation and Indigenous Decolonization,” in ed. Dan Berger, The Hidden 1970s: Histories of Radicalism (New Brunswick, NJ, and London: Rutgers University Press, 2010): 77-94.

220 which were not formally addressed until Bill C-31 (returning legal status to women who married non-Indians and their children) was passed in 1985.835 This chapter, accordingly, will look at Indigenous organizing, activism, and approaches to food, nutrition, and health care for Indigenous people, arguing that the 1970s was a moment of possibility for genuine change and self-sufficiency previously not experienced by Indigenous peoples and communities in Canada. As part of this reclamation of Indigenous methods of feeding and healing, many Indigenous women and mothers embraced and promoted breastfeeding, which was a significant space for women’s activism in the 1970s and 1980s. In the 1970s, a decade that began on the heels of the Trudeau government’s Health Plan for Indians in 1968, followed by the 1969 White Paper on Indian Policy, many Indigenous peoples were involved in organizing on a national or even transnational scale. Response to state policies and procedures, specifically over food, health, and material conditions, drove much of the activism that grew in the 1970s. As Maureen Lux explains, the government’s “Health Plan for Indians” was announced “on the eve of Medicare.”836 Drafted in an attempt “to cut budgets in anticipation of the costly national health insurance to begin in mid-1968,” Lux argues “it was couched in the same language of ‘equality’ and ‘non-discrimination’ for Aboriginal people that would inform the disastrous White Paper on Indian Policy the next year.” Devoid of consultation with Indigenous communities, and announced to band councils through letters informing that their health care would no longer be subsidized by the MSB, the program aimed to make access to coverage an option only out of “necessity” and “indigency” to be determined by MSB.837 That spring, the Kainai News (Blood Indian Reserve, AB) printed a protest telegram from the Native Women’s Conference Women’s Delegation, which challenged the government’s “meddling” in health service provisions for Indigenous peoples. The delegation, identifying itself

835 On Bill C-31, see Dickason, Canada’s First Nations, 331, and Lawrence, Real Indians and Others. 836 Maureen Lux, Separate Beds: A History of Indian Hospitals in Canada, 1920s-1980s (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016), 153. For more on the history of medicare, see Esyllt Jones, Radical Medicine: The International Origins of Socialized Health Care in Canada (Winnipeg: ARP Books, 2019). 837 Lux, Separate Beds, 153-154.

221 as 210 “Indian wives and mothers,” asked that “medical services for Indian people be continued as before with the federal government assuming full financial responsibilities.” They warned: “If we the Indian women are ignored by government we promise that extreme dissatisfaction will be organized and demonstrated within the near future.”838 Blood Reserve Home Economist, Bernice Fox, reported to Kainai News readers that the women delegates marched to the Legislative Buildings in Edmonton “to confront Premier Manning” about the MSB’s policy: “No doubt our show of strength was meaningful and contributed to the restoring of our health services.”839 According to The Indian News in 1969, “Registered treaty Indians in the province of Saskatchewan came under the provincial medicare scheme at the first of the new year” with “the Saskatchewan government ha[ving] assumed responsibility from the federal government for providing the medical coverage.”840 While not explicitly focused on food and nutrition, the response to the White Paper similarly took up the call for improved health care and related services for Indigenous peoples.841 For example in the Manitoba Indian Brotherhood’s response paper “Wahbung: Our Tomorrows,” the Chiefs declared that “the whole of the Indian Act must be revised and corrected in consultation with the Indian people.”842 Regarding health-related points, they wrote: These sections in the Act must be reworded to provide for complete and total medical services for all Indian people in any circumstance. Medical Services are not mentioned in the existing Indian Act. It should be an entrenched benefit. It is not a matter of government policy. There should be complete and total medical services including

838 Kainai News 1, no. 3 (April 15 1968), 8. 839 Kainai News 1, no. 3 (April 15 1968), 5. 840 The Indian News 11, no. 7 (March 1969), 5. 841 See Canada, Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development (DIAND), Statement of the Government of Canada on Indian Policy (Ottawa: the Honourable Jean Chrétien, PC, MP Minister of Indian Affairs and Northern Development Ottawa, 1969); Indian Chiefs of Alberta, Citizens Plus: A Presentation of Indian Chiefs of Alberta to Right Honourable P.E. Trudeau, Prime Minister and Government of Canada (Edmonton: Indian Association of Alberta, 1970); Indian Tribes of Manitoba, “Wahbung: Our Tomorrows,” (Manitoba Indian Brotherhood, 1971); Dale Turner, This Is Not a Peace Pipe: Towards a Critical Indigenous Philosophy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006). 842 Indian Tribes of Manitoba, “Wahbung,” 17-18.

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dental, optical, hearing, drugs, transportation, hospital care and public health services.843

Moreover, regarding foodways, specifically Hunting, Fishing, Trapping, and Gathering Rights, they asserted: “These rights should have entrenched protection under the Constitution. They have been totally omitted from the existing Indian Act and this is inexcusable.”844 Other activists and leaders during the years that followed were working on projects related to gendered, regional, health, or age-related experiences and concerns. Some examples include the 1973 Native Youth Association’s twenty-four hour sit-in protest of DIAND offices in Ottawa, when 150 members occupied the offices845; the growing protests against the James Bay Hydroelectric Project846; and the NIB’s ongoing work, including a 1979 trip to London, England, to “attempt to block patriation of the BNA Act, Canada’s constitution and the origin of the INDIAN ACT.”847 It is important to also recognize these mobilizing movements as part of a study on food and nutrition, since the policies created are a product of the material conditions within and against which many of these Indigenous organizations were struggling.

843 Indian Tribes of Manitoba, “Wahbung,” 18. 844 Indian Tribes of Manitoba, “Wahbung,” 18. 845 The Indian News 16, no. 2 (October 1973), 1; 14. The occupation of the offices was reportedly to “bring to the attention of government officials and to the public certain issues that the association felt were not receiving full attention or action,” and “emphasize the awareness and the concern of young native people on issues that will be affecting Indian life and ways. (1)” These included the DIAND Youth Liaison Specialist program, which the group “felt was just another program of the department that was being forced on the Indian people without consultation,” the James Bay Hydroelectric Project, the Jay Treaty, and the land claims made by the Union of B.C. Indian Chiefs at the time. 846 See for example The Indian News 16, no. 8 (January 1974), 1. The paper reported that on November 30, 1974, roughly 300 people from Montreal, Ottawa, Toronto, along with residents from the James Bay area, “marched on Parliament Hill” to peacefully protest the Quebec Court of Appeal’s handling of the James Bay development “scheme.” 847 The Indian News 20, no. 5 (September 1979), 3. The delegation included Noel Starblanket and other members of the NIB executive, along with over 300 Chiefs and elders. Emphasis in original. There were many other organizations working to assert self-determination and rights during the period, some of which were documented for the National Film Board (NFB). See PowWow at Duck Lake (Ottawa: National Film Board of Canada, 1967); Martin Defalco and Willie Dunn, directors, The Other Side of the Ledger: An Indian View of the Hudson’s Bay Company (Ottawa: National Film Board of Canada, 1972); Mort Ranson, director, You Are on Indian Land (Ottawa: National Film Board of Canada, 1969).

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The shift in political goals and leadership during this period was reflected in The Indian News, which experienced a sweeping change in tone and subject, as well as staff and contributors. One area the paper focused on was women’s activism, especially mothers and grandmothers who were pivotal in forming indigenous women’s organizations, speaking out and writing about women’s rights issues, which included working towards better conditions and support for mothers and children. In 1975, Indian News Editor Theresa Nahanee declared that International Women’s Year brought “little or nothing” to “significantly change the lives and life-styles of Indian women.”848 Explaining that women were in the midst of a pressing struggle over legal equality with men on the issue of status, she reported on the range of issues Native women were organizing to address in the mid-1970s, including status, education, employment, women’s centres, justice, housing, and health. Primary health concerns expressed during a national International Women’s Year seminar held in Ottawa included housing and support for senior women, as well as dental health and related facilities that were sorely lacking in Indigenous communities. In 1979, Christine Sioui reported on The Native Women’s Walk that originated in Tobique, NB and brought them from Oka, PQ to Ottawa in July.849 She shared that the walkers, whose efforts were not supported by NIB leaders, highlighted the “problems they faced as Indian women: Housing, health, discrimination and the Indian Act.”850 Sioui shared intimate details of the walk, including the meals the women prepared and ate with their young children on their journey, such as a “cooked vegetables supper, prepared by three walkers” the first night, then a supper of “stew and macaroni cooked on an open fire behind the school” in Alfred, ON. The focus of her report, however, centred on the organizing efforts of women struggling for legal rights.851 Of course, women were not the only ones vocal on issues of food

848 The Indian News 17, no. 5 (October-December 1975), 2. 849 The Indian News 20, no. 5 (September 1979), 1. 850 The Indian News 20, no. 5 (September 1979), 7. On tensions amongst Indigenous activists in Canada at the time, particularly the issue of male activists dismissing ‘women’s libbers’ as undermining or antithetical to what predominantly male leaders and organizers identified as Indigenous struggles, see Joyce Green, ed., Making Space for Indigenous Feminism (Winnipeg: Fernwood Press, 2006). 851 The Indian News 20, no. 5 (September 1979), 7.

224 and nutrition as part of their participation in organizing for improved conditions. The Thunder Bay, ON, Indian Friendship Centre’s Director, Xavier Michon, asserted in 1973 that a “combination of poverty and isolation” led to housing and food being a “top priority of Indian people in the north,” declaring that only after these had been sorted “can Medical care have an impact upon their health.”852 Mary Jane Logan McCallum situates the founders of the Registered Nurses of Canadian Indian Ancestry (RNCIA) “in a period during which First Nations, Métis, and Inuit peoples organized formally for unmitigated and constitutionally based rights to self-government and status as Aboriginal peoples in Canada.” Self-determination regarding health, she explains, “was an integral aspect of these larger efforts.”853 The struggle to gain numbers and footing was taken up by Indigenous nurses in Canada, who made up a small number of the country’s nurses overall.854 The 1975 formation of the RNCIA (then in 1983 the Indian and Inuit Nurses of Canada or IINC, and now the Aboriginal Nurses Association of Canada or ANAC) reflected the movement towards self-determination that many Indigenous leaders and other individuals embraced in the period.855 According to Waldram et al, the organization was formed by a core group of forty nurses, who were initially discouraged by the federal government until the 1980s, when MSB began providing financial support for the organization.856 Cree RN Jean Goodwill, a founder of the organization, writes that the group, which “was the first Native professional organization in Canada,” was “conceived in 1974 amid the preparation for International Women’s Year.”857 The initial impetus to form came from concern over keeping a registry of Indigenous nurses, while appealing to other Indigenous peoples to go into nursing or

852 The Indian News 15, no. 6 (January 1973), 8. 853 McCallum, Indigenous Women, Work, and History, 171. 854 McCallum, Indigenous Women, Work, and History, 170; 187. In 1975, the organizers of the RNCIA estimated there were about two-hundred status Indian nurses in Canada, and more including those who were non-status. In 1983, out of eight-hundred MSB nurses, just thirty-one (less than four percent) were Native nurses. 855 See Jean Cuthand Goodwill, “Indian and Inuit Nurses of Canada,” Canadian Woman Studies/Les cahiers de la femme 10, no. 2-3 (Summer/Fall 1989): 117-124; Waldram, Herring, and Young, Aboriginal Health in Canada, 282; McCallum, Indigenous Women, Work, and History, 167. 856 Waldram, Herring, and Young, Aboriginal Health in Canada, 282 857 Goodwill, “Indian and Inuit Nurses of Canada,” 117.

225 other health fields, and “establishing a mechanism to work for and lobby on behalf of better health care in Indian and Inuit communities,” which remain at the core of the organization’s current goals.858 Goodwill points to the very political nature of health care provision for Native people in Canada stemming from the signed treaties, particularly the Treaty Six “Medicine Chest Clause,” promising comprehensive and appropriate medical services to all Native people, comparable to what other Canadians could receive.859 McCallum presents a history of the association as a group of primarily women nurses driven by the health needs of other Indigenous peoples to organize, similarly to other labour activists, into a recognized union.860 She writes that “RNCIA was an important voice in an Indigenous political scene that was dominated by men,” but that the organization appeared to “walk a fine line in terms of Native women’s politics and mainstream second-wave feminism,” which she attributes in part to “its interactions with larger, more formal Indian organizations.”861 Goodwill explains that gendered roles and expectations affected funding opportunities, as the organization chose to welcome male nurses like Tom Dignan “rather than compromise its professional status to achieve funding.”862 McCallum elaborates, adding that Dignan, “the only known male nurse of Aboriginal ancestry at the time,” was elected by the group of women nurses to serve as RNCIA president for its first five years (1975-1980).863 She explains that this earlier activity served to reaffirm the organization’s insistence that it was primarily a “professional association”; however, by the early 1980s this had shifted as women’s issues began to hold an increasingly prominent place in RNCIA conferences and associations.864 The organization quickly recognized that the “link between status and Indian women’s poverty and ill health” fit with their central objectives of fighting for “Indian control,” or the goals of”

858 Goodwill, “Indian and Inuit Nurses of Canada,” 117. 859 Goodwill, “Indian and Inuit Nurses of Canada,” 117. 860 McCallum, Indigenous Women, Work, and History, 167-169. 861 McCallum, Indigenous Women, Work, and History, 171. 862 Goodwill, “Indian and Inuit Nurses of Canada,” 119. 863 McCallum, Indigenous Women, Work, and History, 171-172. 864 McCallum, Indigenous Women, Work, and History, 172. For example, in 1982 the RNCIA invited activists such as Myrna Whitehawk and Kathleen Jamieson to speak at their annual conferences, and in 1992 they joined the Native Women’s Association of Canada and Pauktuutit (the Inuit Women’s Association).

226 self-determination and self-government in the field of health.” This was significant, as for RNCIA it “referred to acting with authority in the areas of knowledge production, policy and planning, and education in Aboriginal health.”865 While there were very few Indigenous physicians working in Canada during this period, some were quite vocal about the unique circumstances surrounding the health services available to Indigenous peoples, as well as their peoples’ health.866 For example, Dr. Melvyn R. Lavalee, a practicing Indian physician in Slave Lake, AB, in 1973 discussed the complicated and divisive opportunities for young Indigenous people accused of leaving their communities to “get themselves an education, then assimilate themselves into white society.”867 He shares that, “as a treaty Indian,” he had “travelled alone on a long and lonely road through eight years of university,” through which “it was inevitable that somehow [he] almost lost the path that led back to [his] home and people on the reserves.”868 However, he was drawn by a “built-in homing instinct” and “opened a door which has been closed to natives in Western Canada” that, while “clouded by health needs of our people,” presented to him “a field of unlimited medical opportunity extending well over the horizon.” His opinion tended strongly towards the necessity for many more Indigenous doctors and nurses, along with “an army of certified nursing assistants,” hospital orderlies, and Community Health Representatives. In analyzing the various conditions he was working to improve, he noted the presence of dietary problems, countering claims of other primarily non-Indigenous experts, however, by asserting that malnutrition “is not a common sight today.”869 At the same time, Dr. Clare Brant, an Indian physician working with the Sioux Lookout Indian Hospital in northwestern Ontario, provided an explanation and history of the

865 McCallum, Indigenous Women, Work, and History, 172-173. 866 See Waldram, Herring, and Young, Aboriginal Health in Canada,” 281. By 1991, the number of practicing Aboriginal physicians in Canada was estimated at between eighteen and twenty-five, then in 1996 the number rose to sixty-seven due to recognition by some medical schools that they should increase the number of Aboriginal students in their programs who, as in the University of Alberta’s program, were being recruited and trained in a model that combined western medicine and Aboriginal healing practices by the late 1980s. 867 The Indian News 16, no. 6 (October 1973), 1. 868 The Indian News 16, no. 6 (October 1973), 1-3. 869 The Indian News 16, no. 6 (October 1973), 3.

227 government’s role and position on Indigenous health services. She highlights the contradictory nature of the state’s position, quoting MSB Edmonton, AB area director Dr. H.B. Brett, who asserted: “It is the responsibility of the [DNHW], [MSB], to provide an adequate public health program for all residents of the north.”870 Meanwhile, she writes that then Minister of Health and Welfare, Alan Munro, stated that the “federal government has a moral but no legal responsibility to provide health services to the native peoples of Canada.” Consequently, while the period of the mid-twentieth century in Canada (not unlike the United States) tends to be read by historians as one of social and political organizing and action on both local and national or pan-national levels, it is critical to look beyond the postwar decades to see Indigenous peoples in both countries featuring prominently as historical actors struggling for political, legal, and social change. Some groups of Indigenous peoples were also redefining the fields of ‘Aboriginal Health’ and ‘Aboriginal Nutrition’ in different ways, which often embraced traditional knowledge and practices using plant-based healing and unique cultural approaches that connected them to their elders, ancestors, and lands. For example, in a 1979 Special Report to The Indian News, Raymond Obomsawin, “a 28 year-old Abenaki from the Odanak Indian Reserve in Quebec, midway between Montreal and Quebec City,” reported on his experience and training in “Traditional Indian Health and Nutrition.”871 Obomsawin, who had attended Kingsway College in Oshawa, ON, and Southern Missionary College in Tennessee, USA, completed post-graduate studies in herbal and traditional therapies, and was at the time of publication the NIB’s Health Coordinator and Chair of the National Commission Inquiry on Indian Health. In a study contrasting the historical diets and health of Indigenous peoples against that of Europeans, meanwhile critiquing colonialism and its legacies on health and nutrition, Obomsawin argues that the likely cause of rampant illness and disease amongst Europeans, with over 30,000 catalogued diseases as opposed to only 87 known – “and then rarely” – among Indigenous

870 The Indian News 16, no. 6 (October 1973), 10-11. 871 Raymond Obomsawin, “Traditional Indian Health and Nutrition: Forgotten Keys to Survival into the 21st Century,” The Indian News 19, no. 11 (March 1979), 4. See also his condensed version, “Traditional Indian Natural Tradition,” Canada, Medical Services Branch Nutrition Newsletter 2 (Spring 1981): 6-9.

228 peoples in the 1800s, was “the almost total absence of fresh fruits and vegetables in the European diet.” He asserts: “Dried (and later refined) grains (bread), domesticated meat and dairy products were their primary food staples.”872 His central argument is that, based on contemporary, scientific studies of the traditional diets of Indigenous peoples in the Americas, Indigenous peoples should not only be proud of their dietary heritage, but should attempt to eat a diet of these traditional, ‘living foods’. In addition to various nutritionists and physicians studying the traditional diets of Indigenous peoples throughout North America, Obomsawin quotes extensively from Dr. Schaefer’s writing on Indigenous peoples and the impact of a ‘western diet’ as a process of decline and malnutrition due to the pressure to remove traditional foods potentially contaminated with mercury or becoming over-hunted, combined with increased access and reliance on community store offerings. Though the piece can be accused of romanticizing and conflating multiple peoples’ diets into an ideal diet (and geographically unattainable for most peoples in northern regions, as some of the foods noted – mango, cassava, pineapple, and avocado for example – are from ‘the tropics’), he presents a history of plant use and availability, both as food and medicine, which are often for him synonymous.873 His celebration of foods available from the land, including onions, currants, rosehips, strawberries, blackberries, blueberries, raspberries, artichokes, garlic, asparagus and sunflowers, point to possibilities of wild harvesting for Indigenous communities looking for alternatives to high-cost store items. Further, his focus on eating uncooked foods presents an opening for less reliance on modern conveniences (clean water, electricity, electric stoves, and so on), which many people living on Reserves at the time would not have had consistent access to.874 Obomsawin challenges the common germ theory of diseases of contact, agreeing with Dr. William Saunders’ assertion that these diseases caused devastation to Indigenous peoples

872 Obomsawin, “Traditional Indian Health and Nutrition,” 4. 873 Obomsawin, “Traditional Indian Health and Nutrition,” 4-5. 874 See previous chapters of this thesis for discussion of access or lack thereof to water, electricity, and household implements in Indigenous communities during this period, and how some people were either working around lack of access to these conveniences and necessities while others were struggling to have them brought into their communities.

229 only “after they changed their way of life” and adopted western dietary and lifestyle habits.875 While exactly which diseases Saunders references are not clear, those linked to nutritional status and food insecurity (diabetes, tuberculosis, cancer, and heart disease, for example) have led other physicians and nutritionists, including Schaefer and Steckle, to extoll the virtues of Indigenous foodways, while pointing to the damaging effects of highly processed foods.876 An interesting aspect of Obomsawin’s report is his call for increased Indigenous healing practices as part of reforming Indigenous health services. He writes: “The therapeutic system that is based upon natural or organic law is not empirical, experimental, haphazardous, nor employed haphazardly.” He explains that this system “is established upon a settled and scientific basis, having fixed and true principles to guide the employment of all its measures,” and “[e]very particular will conform to the principles of nature.”877 Examples of traditional healing practices Obomsawin recommends include “daily water baths (a practice commonly condemned by white society in the last century), deep breathing, heliotherapy, herbal treatments, (internal and external), fasting, hydrotherapy, clay poultices, physical and spiritual exercises.” He concludes by linking a contemporary need for “the policy and means to affect a massive lifestyle reeducation of Indian people” with “the vital principles and laws of sound healthful living, hygiene and diet that was once their tradition,” assuring that a ‘better way’ can be “found in the old Indian way of health by healthful living.”878 The discourse in this piece, while incorporating the teachings of non-Indigenous medical and nutrition experts, diverges from that dominant in the fields of Indigenous health and nutrition from the period. Because Obomsawin held such a high position of power and prestige with the NIB and National Commission Inquiry on Indian Health, it would be remiss to overlook his contribution to the development of Indigenous health services as they shifted after 1978. In addition, some communities across Canada were working to formally incorporate Indigenous or ‘traditional’ healing methods into their health care services. In Kenora, northwestern Ontario, for example, the Lake of the Woods District Hospital was reportedly

875 Obomsawin, “Traditional Indian Health and Nutrition,” 6. 876 Obomsawin, “Traditional Indian Health and Nutrition,” 7. 877 Obomsawin, “Traditional Indian Health and Nutrition,” 7. 878 Obomsawin, “Traditional Indian Health and Nutrition,” 7.

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“considering hiring a shaman, or medicine man, to help doctors treat Indian patients.”879 The idea, suggested by Indigenous peoples from the region, was backed by hospital medical staff and was expected to result in a shaman from Grassy Narrows or Whitedog “working in conjunction with a hospital health team.”880 The article notes that “use of a shaman has proved successful in communities in British Columbia, Arizona and Mexico,” and that while “Indians comprise only one-sixth of the Kenora area’s total population,” in 1978 they accounted for “75 per cent of the patients in the pediatric ward, 70 per cent in the mental health program, and 90 per cent in the detoxification program.”881 As hospital assistant administrator Gordon Reid conceded, “[t]he problem in the past is that we have imposed the white man’s culture on natives. This will be an attempt to integrate the two cultures.”882 By 1979, The Indian News reported that the province’s health minister, Dennis Timbrell, had indeed approved “a $26,000 grant to hire the man,” explaining that “Indians needing help will be visited in their homes,” suggesting that the job would quickly pay for itself as the healer “would prevent people from coming into the hospital and that could mean a big saving.”883 In her study of health services in Peguis, MB, Benita Cohen notes that in the 1980s, “there was a slow but steady increase in the number of people who approached health centre staff requesting access to traditional healers.”884 According to nurse-in-charge Kathy Bird, staff approached MSB for support in getting patients access to a traditional healer, as one was not available in the community. Bird, a Peguis band-member of Cree-Dakota heritage, originally from Norway House,885 reported that Peguis staff used MSB’s “mission statement [1979 Indian

879 The Indian News 19, no. 7 (November 1978), 1. 880 The Indian News 19, no. 7 (November 1978), 1. 881 The Indian News 19, no. 7 (November 1978), 6. 882 The Indian News 19, no. 7 (November 1978), 6. 883 The Indian News 20, no. 5 (September 1979), 6. 884 Benita Cohen, “Health Services Development in an Aboriginal Community: The Case of Peguis First Nation,” Paper prepared as part of the Research Program of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples (1994), 88. 885 Jean Cuthand Goodwill, “Indian and Inuit Nurses of Canada,” Canadian Woman Studies/Les cahiers de la femme 10, no. 2-3 (Summer/Fall 1989): 122.

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Health Policy] … to justify why our people should go to see traditional healers or why traditional healers should come here.”886 In her study of Indian Hospitals in Canada, Maureen Lux identifies the work of healers, “those best able to communicate with the spirit world,” as individuals who “view illness as a loss of balance between mind, body, and spirit.”887 Their methods or “cures vary from herbal treatments for commonplace ailments to community-wide spiritual rites of healing and regeneration,” for example Sun Dances or Potlatch. She includes midwives and Midewiwin in this network of “Aboriginal healing complexes that reflect the diversity of indigenous cultures in Canada.” Moreover, Lux reminds that nurses, CHWs, and other Indigenous healthcare workers, such as those performing “poorly paid domestic chores” in hospitals, “also provided comfort and advocated for children and elders in their own language.” She writes: “Their presence as cultural brokers and interpreters for patients blunted the hospitals’ colonizing impulses, reminding us to look beyond acts of resistance as the sole manifestation of subordinate power.”888 Thus, while primarily non-Indigenous experts continued to study, survey, and debate the best way forward for Indigenous health and nutrition in Canada, Indigenous peoples and communities, in a range of ways, continued to forge their own paths and assert authority over their individual and collective well-being. In spite of the dominant state discourse on food and nutrition, Indigenous peoples in different parts of the country were also both reclaiming ‘traditional’ or ‘country’ foods, while often reinventing and modernizing them. The editors of The Indian News, as part of their ‘Women’s Page’ section, showed this movement towards Indigenous foods being reclaimed and reinvented, even modernized, particularly by Indigenous peoples. In 1973, they introduced a feature called ‘The Cooking Pot’ that invited “all its native readers to share with others their special recipes.” The selections printed in the April 1973 issue shared four dishes from Traditional Indian Recipes, which they indicate was a booklet from Fort George, PQ, published

886 Cohen, “Health Services Development in an Aboriginal Community,” 88. 887 Maureen Lux, Separate Beds: A History of Indian Hospitals in Canada, 1920s-1980s (Toronto, Ontario: University of Toronto Press, 2016), 5. See also Drees, Healing Histories; Kristin Burnett, Taking Medicine. 888 Lux, Separate Beds, 4.

232 in 1971. The paper ran five recipes: Long Duck Cooking and Cooking Goose in the Oven from Sally Matthew, a mother of five who enjoyed dressmaking; White Bird Pancakes and Fish Soup from Juliette Iserhoff, a mother of six who attended St. Philip’s [Residential] School and whose husband was the church translator; and Cooking Porcupine from Martha Pachano, a mother of six who expressed an interest in attending upgrading classes if “given the opportunity.”889 The following issue also printed recipes from the Traditional Indian Recipes booklet. These included Rabbit Stew and Pemmican from Maryann Sam, who was born in Kanniapscow-inland and first visited Fort George to be baptized before returning later “to live and attend school”; Making Beaver Stew… In the Bush from Lily Pepabino, a mother of five who “spent seven years in the south at Moose Factory and Hamilton Hospitals,” and whose preferred “home duty” was “putting her baby to sleep”; and Cooking Goose on a String from Edna Matthew, a mother of eight who enjoyed “berry-picking and chopping wood,” could speak a bit of English and write in Cree Syllabics.890 In July that same year, the page featured Roast Ptarmigan, Joe’s Fried Tomatoes, Rose Petal Jelly, and Uncooked Blueberry Jelly, which were selected from “recipes edited and compiled into a book, Northern Cookbook, by Eleanor A. Ellis, and published through the Department of Indian and Northern Affairs.”891 They explain that the publication, which is discussed in the previous chapter, includes recipes “gathered from housewives, homemakers, and individuals residing in Canada’s northern areas and from various Canadian and American organizations, schools, companies, and government departments,” though whether these contributors were Indigenous or non-Indigenous is not entirely clear, and is not the stated intention of the Northern Cookbook itself. The August 1973 Indian News Women’s Page also shared Ellis’ recipes, including Chocolate Bread, Oatmeal Cookies, Salmonberry Jam, Whitefish Soup, and so-called Indian pudding – a concoction of flour, baking powder, raisins, fat, and salt – printed accompanying a piece on Norway House, MB, Chief Jean Folster’s appointment to magistrate.892

889 The Indian News 15, no. 9 (April 1973), 11. 890 The Indian News 16, no. 1 (May 1973), 11. 891 The Indian News 16, no. 3 (July 1973), 9. See also Ellis, ed., Northern Cookbook. 892 The Indian News 16, no. 4 (August 1973), 12.

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While recipes that aimed to highlight northern and Indigenous foods continued to be a somewhat regular feature of The Indian News throughout the decade, the Women’s Page was no longer their designated space, as they instead appeared rather randomly placed and often near the end of many issues. By 1978, the editors re-introduced the section: Savoury Moose Steaks… Rabbit Stew with Dumplings… Braised Partridge…Fried Prairie Chicken…Poached Arctic Char… Baked Stuffed Salmon… Roast Venison with Herbs… Toss in a few fresh garden vegetables, a golden brown bannock, a piping-hot pot of coffee or tea and you’ve got yourself a genuine feast of Indian soulfood. 893

“Starting with this issue” they wrote, “the Indian News will feature a brand new cooking column on wild game and fish” that “will be made up with recipes from Northern Cookbook.” Again, readers were invited to contribute recipes to be printed in the column. At year-end, ‘The Cooking Pot’ featured Venison Mincemeat – prepared with apples, currants, raisins, juice, and sweet spices – and Fried Beaver Tail.894 As the paper moved towards increased bilingual articles, published in French and English, the recipes as well were often translated, as were the Venison Mincemeat (Mincemeat de venaison) and Fried Beaver Tail (Queues de castor frites). In 1979, recipes like Sweet-Sour Rabbit, seasoned with pineapple chunks and juice, were printed in the English section, while the then-regular French recipe section featured an entirely different rabbit-based meal, Lapin en sauce barbecue with an accompanying Sauce barbecue loaded with spices and Worcestershire sauce.895 Though initially a section specifically written for an imagined audience of women readers, the inclusion of recipes began to take on a less gendered appearance as the stories of women contributors disappeared and the accompanying images also featured male figures. In 1978, for example, the last page of the paper includes a recipe spread for Woodchuck Meat

893 The Indian News 19, no. 1 (1978), 2. As the paper became increasingly and overtly radical in its political leanings, that then editor, Howard Bernard, used the term ‘soulfood’ suggests a reference to, or even alignment with, the Black Power movement of the period. For histories of soul food, see Frederick Douglass Opie, Hog and Hominy: Soul Food from Africa to America (New York : Columbia University Press, 2008); Michael Twitty, The Cooking Gene: A Journey Through African American Culinary History in the Old South (New York: Amistad, 2017). 894 The Indian News 19, no. 8 (December 1978), 10. After the initial mention in 1978 of Ellis’ Northern Cookbook, recipes were printed without an acknowledgement of a published source or who created them. 895 The Indian News 20, no. 7 (December 1979), 12-13.

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Patties with Tomato Sauce and Smothered Muskrat and Onions (Croquettes de marmotte à la sauce tomate; Rat musqué à la crème), which depicted a distinctly male cartoon character sitting on grass beside a small lake. The character is holding a pot while cooking over a fire, summoning with a hand gesture a muskrat sitting atop a patch of grass in the lake who asks, “Who me?/Qui moi?”896 Many of the issues continued to draw heavily or entirely from Ellis’ Northern Cookbook, including the 1978 Muskrat recipe and accompanying cartoon.897 Thus, shifting approaches to food and nutrition were accompanied by changing notions of these concerns as not solely the purview of women and homemakers, as many Indigenous peoples adopting pan-Indian identities crossed gendered categories and boundaries to assert ownership over their foodways, culture, and bodies. By the 1980s, one of the ways Indigenous women asserted their authority over both their children’s health and their own bodies was through embracing and, eventually, taking charge of the MSB’s breastfeeding campaign. The breastfeeding project began to take shape in the late 1970s, and preliminary studies on breastfeeding were published in Jean Steckle and Otto Schaefer’s Dietary Habits and Nutritional Base of Native Populations of the Northwest Territories.898 As part of their research into nutrition in the Northwest Territories, Steckle and Schaefer were also studying changes in breastfeeding by Inuit women in Canada’s north, which they concluded had a measurable impact on children’s health. Their extensive study of diet and nutrition in Northwest Territories populations highlights ‘Infant Feeding of Inuit’ in the mid- to late-twentieth century.899 In “traditional Inuit society,” Schaefer and Steckle write, “breastfeeding was usually prolonged,” lasting “generally until the birth of the next infant, spaced at an average of three years later.”900 Inuit mothers are noted for traditionally premasticating their children’s food supplemental to breast milk at four to six months of age, which was also

896 The Indian News 19, no. 4 (1978), 8. 897 The Indian News 19, no. 4 (1978), 8; also in Ellis, ed., Northern Cookbook, 79-80. Here again, the Northern Cookbook is not credited in The Indian News’ reprinting of the content. 898 Jean Steckle and Otto Schaefer, Dietary Habits and Nutritional Base of Native Populations of the Northwest Territories (Yellowknife, NWT: Health and Welfare Canada Medical Services Branch, 1980). 899 Schaefer and Steckle, Dietary Habits and Nutritional Base, 5. 900 Schaefer and Steckle, Dietary Habits and Nutritional Base, 5.

235 documented amongst other Native American communities.901 Such a process, however, “was considered unhygienic by the invading culture and the practice was abandoned.”902 Building in part on a longstanding cultural practice, the authors recommend various support mechanisms to encourage breastfeeding in Inuit communities, including that “[j]obs employing women in the North should allow mothers to breast-feed their children by establishing appropriate local arrangements.”903 Moreover, Steckle and Schaefer’s Canadian study, along with the 1983 National Database on Breastfeeding Among Indian and Inuit Women: Survey of Infant Feeding Practices from Birth to Six Months, challenges experts who published contrary advice only a few decades earlier, and thereby illustrates the changing medical knowledge surrounding breastfeeding and, consequently, Indigenous women’s bodies.904 While still the embodiment of conflicting roles framed by responsibility and blame, pathologization and commendation, Indigenous mothers by the late 1970s were suddenly supposed to be breastfeeding their children for optimal

901 Schaefer and Steckle, Dietary Habits and Nutritional Base, 5; M. Pijoan and C. A. Elkin, “Secondary Anemia Due to Prolonged and Exclusive Milk Feeding Among Shoshone Indian Infants,” Journal of Nutrition 27 (January 1944), 74. 902 Pijoan and Elkin, “Secondary Anemia,” 67. 903 Schaefer and Steckle, Dietary Habits and Nutritional Base, 28. 904 Paula J. Stewart, National Database on Breastfeeding Among Indian and Inuit Women: Survey of Infant Feeding Practices from Birth to Six Months Canada, 1983, Final Report (Ottawa: Health and Welfare Canada, Medical Services Branch, 1985). For an example of an earlier study, see Pijoan and Elkin, “Secondary Anemia,” 67-74. See Introduction for further discussion. Based on a 1943 study of only eleven Shoshone women and their children conducted by the U. S. Indian Service Nutrition Laboratory in New Mexico, issues of childhood anemia linked to ‘prolonged and exclusive milk feeding’ were expressed by white researchers as one of “numerous vicious circles of disease [which] occur in many Indian children.” Children of one to two years old were studied, based on blood samples, and their mothers “kept in the hospital for a period of investigation,” during which it was found the mothers were, indeed, breastfeeding with “little supplementary feeding, if any, of vegetable purees, eggs, or meat.” As the authors indicate, these deviant women and their consequently anemic children were measured against a supposedly standard level of iron found in “four normal, healthy white women.” The problem for these researchers was not simply the exclusive feeding of breastmilk to Native children, but also Shoshone mothers’ diets, purportedly “high in refined cereal carbohydrate and fat and low in meat and vegetable proteins and iron containing foods,” that encouraged researchers to declare it was the “maternal milk,” low in iron, that was making malnourished children.

236 nutritional health. The National Database on Breastfeeding survey project well-illustrates the shift towards promotion of breast- over bottle-feeding by 1980. According to the Final Report, with the exception of Quebec, women from all regions of the country participated in the study, which, similar to Nutrition Canada (NC), involved an earlier “1982 survey of non-native women in Canada,” followed by the separate Indian and Inuit survey project a year later.905 With an advisory committee that included Jean Goodwill (Indian and Inuit Nurses Association of Canada), Jeela Moss-Davis (Inuit Women’s Association of Canada), and Marlyn Kane (Native Women’s Association of Canada), as well as community health nurses, CHRs, and community participants, the study appears in many ways a departure from studies like NC. In some ways, it is an example of a study from the period that involved Indigenous guidance and leadership in its process. Yet, the intent of such a study – to quantify breastfeeding practices, educate and normalize on breastfeeding as the preferred practice, and to create a formalized database as a means of surveillance on Indigenous mothers and their infants – presents different possible readings of a project that, overall, was intended as a means to promote breastfeeding. The project surveyed mothers in regions designated as Pacific, Alberta, Saskatchewan (with seven communities abstaining due to the perception such a study was not necessary), Manitoba, Ontario, Atlantic, Yukon, and Northwest Territories.906 Stewart, a physician with the Department of Epidemiology and Community Medicine at University of Ottawa, reported that the project was initiated by DNHW and MSB, with the assistance of Indigenous organizations and communities. It grew out of concern “among health care professionals working with native mothers in the southern regions of the country,” who expressed that breastfeeding was being done in small numbers and for short periods, contrary to the newly established DNHW and MSB goals that would have the majority of infants breastfed for the first six months.907 Because “breastfeeding makes such an important contribution to a positive, healthy start to life,” and “bottlefeeding may have affected the native babies more adversely than other babies because infection is a greater cause of infant morbidity and mortality,” while breastmilk provides some

905 Stewart, National Database on Breastfeeding Among Indian and Inuit Women, ii. 906 Stewart, National Database on Breastfeeding Among Indian and Inuit Women, 1. 907 Stewart, National Database on Breastfeeding Among Indian and Inuit Women, 1.

237 protection against infections, the survey also served as an entrée into discussing and promoting breastfeeding amongst Indigenous women.908 So-called traditional methods were, therefore, commended, while the departure from breastfeeding towards formula bottle-feeding – which, less than a decade prior to this publication, was touted as the proper choice of the wise northern mother and ‘young homemaker’909 – became the new site of nutrition reform. This was also evident in the reports submitted to the MSB by Home Economics student researchers, including Sharon Parker, who wrote after meeting with nurses stationed in Nelson House, Manitoba, in 1971: “mothers are reluctant to wean their infants and introduce solid food or pablum to their infant’s diet.” Further, she noted that the “wife of the United Church minister related that one mother fed her baby on milk only up to the age of five months,” which is now less than the recommended minimum age of six months of exclusive breastfeeding before weaning or introducing other foods.910 These contemporary guidelines were established by the 1983 National Database on

908 Stewart, National Database on Breastfeeding Among Indian and Inuit Women, 1. 909 Eleanor A. Ellis, ed., Northern Cookbook (Ottawa: Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development, 1971); Canada, The Pre-Schooler. See also Kristin Burnett, Travis Hay, and Lori Chambers. “Settling the Table: Northern Food Subsidy Programs and the (Re)Colonisation of Indigenous Bodies,” Critical Race and Whiteness Studies 11:1 (2015): 1-18. “The White Man’s Burden ‘After Race’,” 9. They explain, “Under the Family Allowance program, ‘such foods as milk, tomatoes and Pablum, largely unknown prior to Family Allowances, are now familiar in the far North [and came to] constitute a large percentage of Family Allowances expenditures’,” according to the Department of Mines and Resources in 1949. They write that in the postwar period, “Notices for Pablum and milk posted at HBC forts expressed thinly veiled warnings and open claims of paternal ownership of Indigenous children by an imperial monarch,” and that “this aggressive program concentrated on introducing strict daily feeding routines, altering what kinds and when supplementary foods were to be introduced to infants in addition to changing the time-period when breast-feeding should be terminated.” Guidelines “were distributed at HBC posts, nursing stations, at treaty payment time, and by medical officers,” while “instructions for ‘feeding Indian babies’ were also circulated by the Indian agent, which gave the guidelines an unstated authority.” As with other nutrition guidelines, “‘Health Rules for Feeding Indian Babies’ outlined strict instructions regarding the appropriate length of time to breast feed infants and when and how to bottle feed.” 910 Sharon Parker, Memorandum to the Regional Nutritionist, July 22, 1971, “Community Nutrition Profile,” 2, RG 029, ACC: W84-85/458, Box 11, File 144-2-4 vol. 1 Nutrition Surveys – Reserves (1970-12-01 to 1971-12-31), MSB, DHW, LAC, Winnipeg, MB. For contemporary recommendations, see “Nutrition for Healthy Term Infants: Recommendations from Birth to Six

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Breastfeeding Survey, which indicated “health promotion programs can be developed which will encourage women to choose breastfeeding and to continue for at least six months.”911 As Schaefer and Steckle assert, the “Beneficial effects of breast-feeding are not limited to the provision of all essential nutrients in ideal composition, perfect cleanliness and digestibility but most important, human milk contains very important immune bodies against specific and non- specific infectious agents.”912 No longer the diseased anemic milk of the 1940s, suddenly breastmilk was nutritionally perfect. A further benefit of breastmilk these Canadian experts entertained was bodily intolerance towards dairy milk. “Early hypersensitization to foreign proteins contained in cow milk and other artificial infant formulae absorbed by the relatively immature gut of newborns or older infants after intestinal infections,” they argue, is “more frequently encountered in unhygienic conditions in the absence of mother milk.”913 This acknowledgement marks an important departure from the insistence that dairy milk or formula (with added corn syrup for sufficient calories, no less)914 is the ideal food for infants. It does, however, only consider very young infants as potentially sensitive, and also ignores the cultural significance of dairy milk as a non-Indigenous food. However, a study on milk intolerance in Indian children in St. Theresa Point, Manitoba sought to address the “suitability of school milk programs” for Indigenous children, some of whom demonstrated a symptoms of lactose-intolerance and self-reported not regularly consuming dairy products “except ice cream.”915 The team concluded that most

Months,” an extensive online resource for health professionals, https://www.canada.ca/en/health-canada/services/food-nutrition/healthy-eating/infant- feeding/nutrition-healthy-term-infants-recommendations-birth-six-months.html. Accessed 26 August, 2018. 911 Stewart, National Database on Breastfeeding Among Indian and Inuit Women, ii. 912 Schaefer and Steckle, Dietary Habits and Nutritional Base, 6. 913 Schaefer and Steckle, Dietary Habits and Nutritional Base, 6. 914 Sharon Parker, “Report: Brochet Food Price Data and Food Availability,” 2. According to Parker, MSB nurses stationed in Brochet were concerned with infant caloric intake, in addition to the sanitary preparation and storage of powdered milk, and promoted canned milk rather than powdered milk “as it is more convenient to use in baby formulas.” 915 J.J. Ellestad-Sayed, Michael D. Levitt, and John H. Bond, “Milk intolerance in Manitoba Indian school children,” The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition 33 (October 1980): 2198-2201.

239 children did not have lactose-intolerance and that school milk programs should continue, but advised that providers “should also be prepared to meet the needs of the minority who are intolerant to milk.”916 By linking the problem of infant formula and dairy milk for Indigenous children to ‘unhygienic conditions’, mothers are simultaneously pathologized for their inability to provide the ideal sterile conditions for child and family health, while commended for within their bodies housing the perfect hygienic nourishment for their children. As the National Database on Breastfeeding survey indicates, promoting breastfeeding as a logical option for both economic and health reasons supported the choices and practices of many Indigenous women and children, often celebrating traditional childrearing practices and bonds between generations. It should however be noted that, not unlike those criticizing mothers for breastfeeding, by demonizing other feeding methods that might have been more practical (or even necessary) for some, overly enthusiastic breastfeeding advocates in their own right likely generated mother- blaming and shaming, which seems not to have been considered or addressed by well-meaning experts. The longstanding impact of this project, however, is illustrated through the MSB’s 1988 special issue Nutrition Newsletter on ‘Breast-Feeding’, which indicates some Indigenous women and mothers were finding empowerment through breastfeeding and sharing their experiences with other women, but also beginning to take ownership of both the practice and the project itself. The Newsletter highlights personal stories from Indigenous women, including some CHRs, about their experiences breastfeeding, often in contrast to their previous choice to bottle-feed older children.917 Mothers like Marie Kent (Little Black River, MB), a mother of two young children, shared:

916 Ellestad-Sayed et al, “Milk intolerance in Manitoba Indian school children,” 2200. This study is noteworthy both for its recommendation, to make special considerations for children with different dietary requirements in Indigenous communities, as well as for its clearly outlined research methods and subjects acknowledgement, having received approval from the University of Manitoba’s early medical research ethics committee and the St. Theresa Point band Chief and Council (2198). 917 Canada, Nutrition Newsletter 9.

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I breast-fed them both and it’s a good feeling. When you’re nursing, you feel closer to your baby. That way your baby knows that she or he is loved by the mother. I find it a lot easier and often the baby doesn’t get sick that often, not like bottle-fed babies. You don’t have to get up in the middle of the night to make bottles and to warm them up. The milk in your breast is warm enough for your baby and it’s a lot cheaper. You don’t have to worry about running out of milk. You have all the milk in your breast.918 Mother of six, Lillian Kent, also from Little Black River, breastfed all of her children who she adds “are all well and healthy.” She writes, “I was on social assistance part of the years when I was raising the kids. And now that all my kids are in school, I have worked as a welfare administrator for six years.” In her “list of good things about breast-feeding,” Kent highlights the choice as good for infant health, concluding, “I encourage all mothers to breast-feed their babies. A breast-fed baby is loved, healthy and happy.”919 Charlene Flett (Shoal Lake, SK) shared that after bottle-feeding her first two daughters because she “didn’t know very much about breastfeeding,” with her third child she had a “whole different outlook” due to conversations with the local health nurse.920 Although these stories read like pamphlets promoting breastfeeding, these women’s experiences and their willingness to attest to the MSB campaign’s promises is an important part of recognizing Indigenous women’s work as mothers and their contribution to Indigenized approaches to nutrition, health, and wellness. What is interesting in many of the accounts is, despite problems with bottle-feeding older children that led some of the women to try breastfeeding, their way of sharing their experiences tends towards a more honest discussion rather than all-out demonizing of formulas. After bottle-feeding her first two children, Flett avoids negative comment on the experience, instead focusing on the positive experience of her new perspective. Her experiences breastfeeding began with her daughter requiring a blood transfusion and hospitalization for five days. She writes, “I continued to pump my breasts so I could have milk for my baby when we were together.” Despite this task, she felt “glad [she] decided to breast-

918 Canada, Nutrition Newsletter 9, 3. 919 Canada, Nutrition Newsletter 9, 4. 920 Canada, Nutrition Newsletter 9, 12.

241 feed this one.”921 In addition, some are clear that breastfeeding, while beneficial, was not always easy. As Marie L. Jebb (The Pas, Manitoba) shares of her breastfeeding experience, I remember during the first three months, I experienced cracked and bleeding nipples. I felt like quitting. It was very painful, but after the first month this pain went away. I understand that not all women have this problem. Some are fortunate and do not have any problems with their nipples.922

She explains that she entered the paid workforce when her son was seven months old, describing her feeding schedule and how she returned home for lunch each day to feed him.923 Jebb regretted that her first two sons “missed out on this beautiful experience,” particularly since she began to attribute feeding and health problems they experienced, particularly recurring chest infections, as related to formula feeding. Although she herself embraced the wisdom of breastfeeding, Jebb also shares her critical impression of some expert advice for breastfeeding mothers: Some women are told that they do not have enough milk; that they do not produce enough; that their baby is starving. I don’t believe that this is possible. If you keep your baby sucking at the breast, the milk will flow according to the suckling of your baby. Also, babies have growth spurts where it seems they are not getting enough to eat. Again, this is all a part of the process and baby and you will overcome all the hurdles.924 CHR Jackie McPherson, again from Little Black River, shares her opinion on bottle-feeding in an article she prepared advising the safest methods for preparing formula. She writes, “I’d like to write an article on bottle-fed babies even though I’m not in favour of bottle-fed babies myself. I find it causes a lot of extra work and problems.”925 McPherson then details the elaborate process of sterilizing and filling bottles, then best practices for feeding baby, including always holding baby and providing the bottle, burping baby, and not letting baby fall asleep with a bottle in her or his mouth. “This can cause bottle syndrome,” she warns, and “[b]y the time the baby is two or three years of age, he/she will have to see the dentist and have his/her teeth

921 Canada, Nutrition Newsletter 9, 12. 922 Canada, Nutrition Newsletter 9, 2. 923 Canada, Nutrition Newsletter 9, 3. 924 Canada, Nutrition Newsletter 9, 2. 925 Canada, Nutrition Newsletter 9, 13.

242 capped. I know,” she adds, “because this has happened here on my reserve. This is why I always tell my postnatals about this.”926 This article debating bottle-versus-breastfeeding is cheekily situated above a comic titled “Brunner’s World: Another Opinion,” in which a cartoon mother cow is telling her young calf, “Most doctors would agree that cow’s milk… is best for cows!”927 The critique of bottle- feeding for some might have included a critique of the importance of cow’s milk for their infants and children. More significantly, though, some of the women documented in the MSB Nutrition Newsletter were engaged in a global movement of Indigenous and non-Indigenous mothers and health professionals actively boycotting Nestle formula and questioning the interests of companies producing and marketing infant formula. During this period, many health professionals and individuals were participating in the boycott of Nestle, after deplorable marketing campaigns convinced mothers living in impoverished Third World countries to accept formula samples contributed to the deaths of (according to UNICEF in 1982- 83) up to one million infants annually “from diarrhea and starvation due to improper bottle feeding.”928 In particular, “millions of mothers [who] found their own breast milk had dried up as a result of early bottle feeding” were left with no choice “but to stretch and dilute the formula (often with filthy water) to make a week’s supply last a month.” That some mothers living in communities outside of urban centres were engaged with something outside of their community might have given greater purpose to their choices, connected them to women from other communities (and even countries), and emboldened their activism through motherhood and breastfeeding. In many ways, this movement of mothers finding empowerment through sharing their experiences and wisdom of motherhood, particularly their relationship to feeding their infants and young children, reflects a type of Indigenous maternalism. As Verna St. Denis explains, “some Aboriginal women claim that one important difference between Aboriginal and Euro-western cultures is the distinct valorizing of

926 Canada, Nutrition Newsletter 9, 13. 927 Canada, Nutrition Newsletter 9, 13. 928 See Michele Landsberg, “Free Formula for Newborns an Immoral Practice,” Canada, Nutrition Newsletter 9, 11-12.

243 maternalism and motherhood in Aboriginal cultures.”929 St. Denis explains that maternalism, “the concept that refers to one way in which women have advocated for political authority,” was embraced by Victorian-era ‘first-wave’ feminists, and includes “‘a wide range of women’s public activism, either as mothers or for the sake of children and families… articulating a powerful defense of female difference as a source of political authority’.”930 For Indigenous women in the 1970s and 1980s in Canada, however, maternalism spoke to the personal and political issues at hand. For example, the Native Women’s Association of Canada “strategically employed the concept of traditional motherhood in their political struggle for equal rights with Aboriginal men” in their work to modify the Indian Act, arguing on the basis of cultural connection between motherhood and nationhood to convince Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal governments that it was not in the interests of Aboriginal people to disenfranchise Aboriginal women and their children.931 St. Denis explains the historical underpinnings of an Indigenous-maternalist perspective, which is useful in understanding the work of the 1980s breastfeeding movement documented in MSB literature: ‘It is commonly known that the future of our nations depends upon the strength of our women… we must be the hearts of our people… We do not want to become part of a movement which seeks equality with men… Women are at the center. We are the keepers of the culture, the educators, the ones who must instruct the children to respect the Earth, and the ones who ensure that our leaders are remembering and ‘walking’ with their responsibilities demonstrably in mind’.932 Thus, this gendered division that some Indigenous women claim is historically rooted in longstanding cultural traditions and socio-political organizing could create contemporary

929 Verna St. Denis, “Feminism is for Everybody: Aboriginal Women, Feminism and Diversity,” in ed. Joyce Green, Making Space for Indigenous Feminism, 33-52 (Winnipeg: Fernwood, 2006), 38. 930 St. Denis, “Feminism is for Everybody,” 35. Here she is largely paraphrasing and quoting from Freedman’s No Turning Back: This History of Feminism and the Future of Women (New York: Ballantyne Books, 2002). 931 St. Denis, “Feminism is for Everybody,” 38. St. Denis is interested in Krosenbrink- Gelissen’s “Caring is Indian Women’s Business, But Who Takes Care of Them? Canada’s Indian Women, the Renewed Indian Act, and its Implications for Women’s Responsibilities, Roles and Rights,” Law and Anthropology: International Yearbook for Legal Anthropology 8 (1994). 932 St. Denis, “Feminism is for Everybody,” 38. Emphasis added. Quoting M.E. Turpel(- Lafonde), “Patriarchy and Paternalism: The Legacy of the Canadian State for First Nations Women,” Canadian Journal of Women and the Law 6 (1993).

244 confusion. St. Denis explains through Patricia Monture-Angus’ assertion that, “if she were to locate herself within the women’s movement, that would mean that she would have to be ‘willing to accept less than the position accorded to women of [her] nation historically’.” In sum, “given the Mohawk culture and tradition of valuing women and the fact that a gender hierarchy in the traditions of her people is absent,” Monture asserts that “‘the idea that a feminist wants equality with men is a strange idea for Mohawk women’.”933 That Indigenous women in communities in Manitoba, for example, were advocating for themselves and their children through a form of maternalism was not only engaging with contemporary currents of feminism, but also drawing on a deep legacy of women’s historical positioning within their traditional communities. Embracing this position thus works to reclaim cultural traditions and, inherently, challenge colonial power structures that attempted to colonize Indigenous food, diet, health, and healing. Like others working to take ownership of their health and the health of their communities, women offering support to other mothers and sharing their intimate stories and feelings about how bottle- and breast-feeding impacted their lifestyle, work schedule, and children’s health worked to claim space for Indigenous healing methods in Canada’s health care system. The message from Indigenous mothers, healers, and CHRs, as well as non-Indigenous experts working towards improved services and educational models for Indigenous health and nutrition, thus paints a rather positive picture of a trajectory towards cooperative and collaborative programs, on a path towards modernization that included incorporation of Indigenous foodways and cultural practices. This is visible in other pieces included in the MSB’s Breast-Feeding special issue newsletter. For instance, 1987 MSB summer student, Vicki Hibbert, reported on having “visited 25 mothers in St. Theresa Point and Garden Hill [First Nations communities in Manitoba] to talk with them about their breast- and bottle-feeding experiences.”934 She explains that this was done in hopes “that in-person conversations with mothers would provide additional information to supplement the Infant Nutrition Records.” The survey was done through interviews, which the MSB deemed most appropriately

933 St. Denis, “Feminism is for Everybody,” 38. See Patricia Monture-Angus, Thunder in My Soul: A Mohawk Woman Speaks (Halifax: Fernwood, 1995). 934 Canada, Nutrition Newsletter 9, 4.

245 conducted by someone local, known, and respected in each community. Further, the interview questions “were developed in consultation with local health workers or other community members who were familiar with the issues surrounding breast-feeding in their communities.”935 The survey resulted in recommending that “[a]ll women in the community should be targeted for infant feeding education and promotion to ensure mothers receive accurate information from family and friends,” which was noted as the primary source of feeding information by mothers.936 By embracing and reclaiming (and often reconceiving) culture and tradition as part of contemporary Indigenous models of eating, feeding, and healing, many Indigenous peoples in 1970s and 1980s Canada were engaged in the work of decolonization. These were not simply pockets of organizing but were part of a larger and longer history that engaged with contemporary local issues, and also with global movements who shared related histories of colonial rule. As the structures of power that did the work of colonization were fixated on the everyday, so often were the acts of resistance that sought to break them down. Women and mothers organizing to advocate for breastfeeding as a means to take ownership of their bodies, as well as their families’ health and nutrition, is as significant as the more visible political movements described in the introduction of this chapter, in their shared efforts at claiming Indigenous rights and working to decolonize Canada’s Indigenous peoples. Moreover, the work of Indigenous nurses, CHRs, healers, community leaders, and others advocating for Indigenous methods of nutrition and healing contributed to changing perspectives that began to reshape Indian Health Policy in Canada in the period, which will be discussed in the following chapter.

935 Canada, Nutrition Newsletter 9, 4. 936 Canada, Nutrition Newsletter 9, 4.

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CHAPTER SEVEN

‘NEW PERSPECTIVES’: SHIFTING THE DIALOGUE FROM INDIVIUALIST TO STRUCTURALIST APPROACHES TO NUTRITION

“…when some of the data were reanalyzed in terms of the individual family income reported in the survey, an effect of income on nutritional status was found...”937

As detailed in the previous chapters, nutritional status of Indigenous peoples in Canada was a focused field of study in the 1960s and 1970s, when the Canadian government established the Medical Services Branch and undertook a spate of studies on the nutritional status of ‘Indian’ and ‘Eskimo’ children, youth, and adults. The consensus by many of these experts was that Indigenous people were struggling to succeed nutritionally due to a lack of adequate knowledge and effort, which was proposed to be overcome through the right amount and type of education to help people help themselves. This individualist approach, however, continually failed; not because experts were missing a key element to educating people, but quite simply because they continued to assign responsibility to individuals when the structural forces that created conditions of food insecurity remained largely absent from survey and study project conclusions. This chapter looks at how some nutrition and medical experts started questioning this premise, as they engaged with the possibility that the structural systems of colonizing projects were the underlying cause of compromised nutritional status. Some, like Dr. Otto Schaefer, became champions of studying Indigenous foodways and traditional healing, which led them to begin the work of promoting a hybrid nutritional science that embraced Indigenous foods and nutrition. As the chapter will show, the shifting perspectives of a small but influential group of experts, led largely by the organizing efforts of Indigenous communities detailed in the previous chapter, generated sweeping changes to the MSB and state nutrition policy and programs for Indigenous peoples in Canada. In his widely cited and reproduced 1971 article, “When the Eskimo Comes to Town,” Schaefer reports on his ongoing research into the impact of quickly changing eating habits,

937 Nutrition Committee “The Nutrition Canada Survey,” 775-776.

247 which tend to privilege western dietary staples while demeaning traditional or ‘country foods’, through the process of colonization.938 Though prone to dramatic declarations, romanticizing, and generalizations, Schaefer reveals his passion regarding the negative impact of colonialism as an ongoing model in the state’s attempt to ‘solve’ the ‘Indian – and now Inuit – problem’. A critic of methods used by other nutrition and health experts, such as those leading the Nutrition Canada project, Schaefer sought to champion Indigenous foodways in a period when western, store bought foods were becoming the stated norm and standard amongst nutritionists, including those employed by MSB who worked with and in Indigenous communities. Schaefer was particularly concerned with what he saw as the rapid changes to Inuit communities who were “giving up [a] nomadic life” and moving into settlements where, with increased reliance on highly processed, sugar-laden, high carbohydrate, and fatty foods, ‘civilization’ diseases were quickly taking hold. In witnessing a marked and sudden increase of gallbladder disease, dental carries, diabetes, accompanied by early puberty and increased height patterns in the younger generation of Inuit, Schaefer advocated for the promotion of a return to pre- settlement patterns of food and diet to counter the onslaught of diseases for these “new urbanites,” who he understood as having been “catapulted… into the modern man’s civilization.”939 Unlike many other studies during the period, Schaefer’s research focused heavily on the structural forces that influenced Inuit residents of Cumberland Sound, Holman Island, who he saw as living largely ‘nomadic’ lifestyles, as well as Coppermine and Frobisher Bay residents, who he understood as becoming increasingly urbanized. Although he and his colleagues conducted nutrition surveys, they studied material conditions – “economic basis, occupational activities,” and in particular “food consumption and eating habits” – over a period of eight years, using data from 1959 onwards.940 The studies concluded that changes in nutrition and, therefore, health status were dramatically heightened in more urbanized communities, while

938 Otto Schaefer, “When the Eskimo Comes to Town,” Nutrition Today 6, no. 6 (November/December 1971): 8-16. 939 Schaefer, “When the Eskimo Comes to Town,” 10. 940 Schaefer, “When the Eskimo Comes to Town,” 10.

248 those still engaged in more traditional foodways and lifestyles continued to see better nutrition and less incidence of ‘civilization’ diseases. Schaefer’s work with Dr. John A. Hildes at the same time also reflects an interest in Inuit health and nutrition that looks beyond individual choices to understand the structural factors that impacted shifting food choices and diets in different communities. Their study of the Inuit people of Igloolik similarly concerned the impact on health and nutrition in the process of rapid urbanization, which included examination of 422 individuals in 1969 and a follow-up in 1971.941 In spite of the problematic position of these experts as engaging in ongoing medical and nutrition studies conducted on Indigenous peoples, the findings again illustrated Schaefer’s assertions in “When the Eskimo Comes to Town,” and fundamentally challenge the colonizing methods employed by the state in creating settlements that depended on a particular model of food supply and lifestyle. These spaces, similar to Reserve lands for First Nations, were largely serviced by government-subsidized or Hudson’s Bay Company stores that provided a limited supply of easily stored and shipped foods. As detailed in Chapter Two, the more affordable of these choices were typically packaged, sugary, and starchy, while more nutritionally valuable options or traditional ‘country’ foods were either missing from store offerings or priced out of reach for many customers, who struggled with unstable and seasonal sources of income.942 Following the Nutrition Canada National, Indian, and Eskimo nutrition survey project detailed in the previous chapters, and concurrent with the beginnings of movement by some MSB experts towards Indigenous approaches to food and nutrition, not all parties involved agreed on the way forward. As indicated in the Chapter Five, Dr. Schaefer, “challenged NC’s approach to studying peoples with whom survey staff could not be bothered to meet,

941 J. A. Hildes and O. Schaefer, “Health of Igloolik Eskimos and Changes with Urbanization,” Journal of Human Evolution 2 (1973): 241-246. 942 Schaefer, “When the Eskimo Comes to Town,” 10. Schaefer reported that at the time of the study, Inuit residents of settlements were infrequent hunters and fishers, worked temporary or seasonally at ‘odd jobs’, often received welfare, or earned cash sporadically for handicraft work. “Only a minority are permanently employed,” according to his research, and with these changes he also noted many cultural changes that separated family units into individuals with more free time to figure out how to fill, which he suggests often involved consuming sugary snacks and chocolates.

249 understand, and accommodate.”943 Schaefer criticized “the confusion amongst NC staff, who were unable to distinguish between Inuit and ‘Indian’ communities, which [he] clarifies through a breakdown of regional foodways and linguistics applied in the naming of different culture groups.”944 He also questioned the methods used by NC survey teams, which he criticizes for giving “great prominence” to a “comparison of Ponderal Indices (expressed as percentages at high risk) of general Canadian population, Indians and Eskimos,” which he argues is “misleading” due to its generalizing about body shape, size, and distribution of weight. Instead, Schaefer calls for then recently privileged measures, such as skinfold thickness, expressing shock that the survey would without question classify 70-80% of Inuit adults as “high risk” or of obesity.945 Nutrition Anthropologist Norge Jerome (University of Kansas) submitted a similar critique of the NC survey, leveled particularly at the Indian and Eskimo study model, to the journal Nutrition Today.946 He calls it “the perfect example of ethnocentrism” which gave “very good reason to question and challenge [the] ‘findings’ and ‘conclusions’,” and questions the study for “lacking in objectivity and inappropriately applying what he argues are non-existent ‘universal causal relationships’.”947 As detailed in the previous chapter, Jerome asserts that Beaulieu “did not get the data. She and her team simply completed preliminary field studies – with cultural blinders intact’.”948 Others, such as the Canadian Paediatric Society (CPS) Nutrition Committee, warned that NC survey data “must be interpreted cautiously because of limitations in both the design of the

943 Otto Schaefer, “Canadian Ponderals,” letter to the editor, Nutrition Today 9, no. 3 (May/June 1974): 35. A version of this argument appears in Chapter Five of this dissertation, and directly quoted sections are indicated. 944 Schaefer, “Canadian Ponderals,” 35. A version of this argument appears in Chapter Five of this dissertation, and directly quoted sections are indicated. 945 Schaefer, “Canadian Ponderals,” 35. 946 Norge W. Jerome, “Surveyors Journal,” letter to the editor, Nutrition Today 9, no. 3 (May/June 1974): 35. 947 Jerome, “Surveyors Journal,” 35. A version of this argument appears in Chapter Five of this dissertation, and directly quoted sections are indicated. 948 Jerome, “Surveyors Journal,” 35. A version of this argument appears in Chapter Five of this dissertation, and directly quoted sections are indicated.

250 survey and our present knowledge of the implications of the findings.”949 They explain that, while the survey data “suggest that, at present, nutritional status is suboptimal among members of the general population,” they see “no evidence of clinically apparent malnutrition,” making it “difficult to judge the immediate health significance of this finding.”950 They appreciate that findings in the Inuit survey related specifically to Vitamin C shortages “may be sufficiently low to approach the level causing clinical problems,” and argue for state funding to further investigate this exception to the survey’s outcomes. Like Schaefer and Jerome, the CPS questions “defects in the design and outcome of the study.” For example, they feel data relied on too few children and pregnant women to adequately analyze findings. Further, they criticize the lack of follow-up with pregnant women in particular, whose infants could have provided data to “relate nutritional status in pregnancy to the health and size of the infant.”951 A significant critique presented by CPS is aimed at the NC survey’s lack of recognition for economic status as a factor in nutrition and diet. They write, The national report suggested that low dietary intakes and evidence of tissue depletion were not restricted to particular segments of the population characterized by geographic region or socioeconomic classification. However, when some of the data were reanalyzed in terms of the individual family income reported in the survey, an effect of income on nutritional status was found… [with certain deficiencies] significantly more prevalent in low-income groups.952 They assert, however, that the survey is not evidence of “clinically apparent malnutrition,” and instead could be described as “suboptimal nutrition” as “clinical signs recorded by [NC] were usually not diagnostic” but “were usually seen in isolation in a particular subject.”953 The CPS review also raises concerns over other factors they consider important, including: the impact of Vitamin D from direct sunlight and its effect on the amount required through foods and supplements; the related discrepancies in national nutrition standards and ‘validity’ of the 24- hour recall data; as well as the “apparent overinterpretations that have been applied in some

949 Nutrition Committee, Canadian Paediatric Society, “The Nutrition Canada Survey: A Review,” Canadian Medical Association Journal 115 (October 23, 1976): 775-777. 950 Nutrition Committee “The Nutrition Canada Survey,” 775. 951 Nutrition Committee “The Nutrition Canada Survey,” 775. 952 Nutrition Committee “The Nutrition Canada Survey,” 775-776. 953 Nutrition Committee “The Nutrition Canada Survey,” 776.

251 presentations to the public” when, instead, “[c]aution should be exerted in describing the results.” They conclude with a recommendation that government funding “be made available to permit analysis of the [NC] data” to “assess the health significance of the findings of the [NC] survey and similar studies… before any new nationwide surveys are undertaken.”954 The critiques presented by Jerome, Schaefer, and the CPS Nutrition Committee all point to the significance of including structural factors in studies on nutrition, as cultural, social, political, economic, and historical factors cannot be tidily removed from studying diet and nutrition. As outlined in Chapter Four of this thesis, NC erased these critical distinctions in the survey design and public reports, but the 1975 publication of the Health and Protection Branch Report on the Relationship between Income and Nutrition Based on Analysis of Nutrition Canada Data reconsidered the significance of income on NC’s conclusions.955 The follow-up study critiqued NC’s assertion that income levels have little to no relation to nutrition,956 which affirms that a lack of access to affordable fresh food in many northern communities is a determinant of Indigenous peoples’ nutritional status.957 This revised analysis, which serves as a dramatic contrast to NC’s original assertions, “provides evidence that nutritional deficits should be directly linked to income: as the report clearly states, ‘for most physiological groups a relationship does exist between income and nutritional status’.”958 In spite of its critics, state nutrition policies in this period were heavily reformed based on the data collected by NC, largely due to then Minister of National Health and Welfare Marc Lalonde’s trust in the survey’s outcomes. His 1974 paper, “A New Perspective on the Health of Canadians,” saw a shift towards recognizing the impact of personal decisions over physical health.959 Lalonde recognizes structural forces, or “counter-forces… at work to undo progress in

954 Nutrition Committee “The Nutrition Canada Survey,” 777. 955 Canada, DNHW, Health Protection Branch Report on the Relationship between Income and Nutrition Based on Analysis of Nutrition Canada Data (Ottawa: Minister of National Health and Welfare, 1975). 956 Canada, Nutrition, 111. 957 A version of this argument appears in Chapter Four of this dissertation. 958 Canada, Health Protection Branch Report, ‘Summary of Report,’ 1. A version of this argument appears in Chapter Four of this dissertation. 959 Marc Lalonde, “A New Perspective on the Health of Canadians: A Working Document.” (Ottawa: Government of Canada, Minister of National Health and Welfare, 1974).

252 raising the health status of Canadians” – factors, which he writes, “constitute the dark side of economic progress – including “environmental pollution, city living, habits of indolence, the abuse of alcohol, tobacco and drugs, and eating patterns which put the pleasing of the senses above the needs of the human body.”960 In spite of this clear pronouncement that some external factors beyond individual or collective control were shaping the health of the population, he pushed forward a program that increased pressure on individuals to be responsible for their health. This shift might have served as a step towards disassociating biology as the primary factor in determining disease, particularly since Lalonde points to high death rates “due to human factors, including carelessness,” emphasizing the impact of motor vehicle accidents, cigarette-smoking related cancers, and other “self-imposed risks” as some of the main causes of adult deaths.961 Consistent with the already established discourse of his field, to encourage Canadians to do the work of personal uplift, Lalonde introduced his document declaring: “A nation of healthy people can do those things that make life worthwhile, and as the level of health increases so does the potential for happiness.”962 “A New Perspective” thus attempted to simplify a “Health Field Concept” to facilitate movement forward in streamlining and better clarifying health issues and services in Canada. This centred on four proposed ‘elements’: “HUMAN BIOLOGY, ENVIRONMENT, LIFESTYLE and HEALTH CARE ORGANIZATION.”963 Lalonde’s focus on individual prevention over treatment as both a cost-saving measure and a tool of self-empowerment did offer a new perspective, but its aim was to place much of the responsibility and blame on individuals when they took ill or died. While he provides a compelling argument that personal choice in automobile accident injuries and deaths can often be attributed to chosen risks (not wearing a seatbelt, speeding, consuming alcohol, and so on), ‘personal choice’ factors don’t hold up as well when attributed to illnesses caused by malnutrition, poverty, and lack of access to clean drinking water, which are not circulated as examples in his document. By dismissing these structural factors, which have been consistently present in First Nations and Inuit

960 Lalonde, “A New Perspective,” 5. 961 Lalonde, “A New Perspective,” 14-15. 962 Lalonde, “A New Perspective,” 5. 963 Lalonde, “A New Perspective,”31. Emphasis in original.

253 communities and experienced more frequently by Indigenous peoples in both urban and non- urban spaces, Lalonde sees no issue with attributing a poor lifestyle, for instance, to “bad habits” that have been so deeply ingrained that they are beyond choice or self-will.964 In entertaining this argument, he briefly acknowledges that structural or environmental factors do affect lifestyle and limit choices; however, he asserts that “this deterministic view must be put aside in favour of faith in the power of free will.”965 Absent from his discussion of contributing factors and personal or individual ‘choices’ – such as excessive alcohol or drug consumption or addiction, poor diet and exercise, and suicide – is an understanding of the range of structural factors that limit or influence these so-called choices. Much like the NC survey, issues identified as structural and often beyond individual control, such as poverty, location, and lack of access to healthy and affordable food options, are flattened and dismissed through Lalonde’s view of a neutral experience of life in Canada. It appears, then, that the modest effort at introducing the impact of income on nutritional status, which was presented by NC as an afterthought, was less compelling than the survey reports, with what Schaefer and Jerome called out for their ethnocentrism and CPS criticized as “apparent overinterpretations” of data. According to Love and Kalnins, proponents to these different, often antithetical approaches to nutrition evaluation, guidelines, and education programs – ‘individualist’ and ‘structuralist’ – were beginning to promote and distinguish their perspectives during this period.966 Individualists like Lalonde focused on the role of “lifestyle change,” while the structuralist view “emphasizes change in socio-political perspectives.”967 Through their comparative analysis of the two approaches within a nutrition education context, Love and Kalnins show that the individualist approach “has led health educators to focus attention on surveys of children’s nutrition knowledge, attitudes and behaviours; studies of the influence of family on nutrition; and studies of children’s concepts of health and

964 Lalonde, “A New Perspective,”35-36. 965 Lalonde, “A New Perspective,”36. 966 R. Love and I. Kalnins, “Individualist and Structuralist Perspectives on Nutrition Education for Canadian Children,” Social Science and Medicine 18, no. 3 (1984): 199-204. 967 Love and Kalnins, “Individualist and Structuralist Perspectives,” 199.

254 motivation.”968 As this and previous chapters here have demonstrated, this model has consistently dominated the perspective and outcomes of nutrition education programs in Canada. As the authors note, the value of such an approach is ‘unclear’, particularly when considered through a structuralist perspective. This view sees nutrition and “nutrition-related health problems as something which individual children experience but which originates less from lifestyle than from social structures and situations which determine lifestyle.” Therefore, structuralists hold that the role of “complex social phenomena” and the “limitations of lifestyle change as a solution for health problems” on children’s nutrition would require “examination of the effects of poverty, the food industry and advertising strategies directed toward children.”969 Love and Kalnins conclude through their analysis that the best way forward would be through a synthesis of these perspectives, as if one group maintains a “monopoly on the truth,” they assert that there cannot be a solution to the problems of nutrition in children. Lalonde’s “New Perspective” document, and his work as Health and Welfare Minister, had an impact on public health policy, educational materials, and particularly nutrition programs, which would include a thoroughly revised Canada Food Guide and a new Indian Health Policy focused heavily on nutrition and individual responsibility. While it could have served as a step towards disassociating biology with disease, instead it increased pressure on individuals to be responsible for their health, ignoring the growing divide between urban middle-class and Reserve community access to resources. Increased diagnoses of diabetes in Indigenous populations from the 1980s to the present serve as clear evidence that health and nutrition experts have largely ignored structural factors, and instead clung to racializing arguments that Indigenous bodies are more likely to become ill from certain diseases due to their biological inheritance.970 An appreciation that structurally-rooted issues and the legacies of colonialism have an ongoing impact on the health of Indigenous people is yet to be fully realized, but the ongoing attention to food (in)security and issues of access on First Nations and in northern

968 Love and Kalnins, “Individualist and Structuralist Perspectives,” 200. 969 Love and Kalnins, “Individualist and Structuralist Perspectives,” 201. 970 Travis Hay, “The Science of Settler Colonialism: The Thrifty Gene Hypothesis and The Persistence of Nutrition Experimentation on Indigenous Peoples,” Transverse, Issue 15 (Spring 2016).

255 communities is increasingly pointing to political, economic, and environmental issues that race- based biology cannot explain.971 It is thus important to understand that Lalonde’s individualist perspective, which Love and Kalnins noted less than a decade after his “New Perspective” was presented, was “strongly supported within the liberal ideology dominant in Canada,” despite its shortcomings with respect to factors beyond ‘free will’.972 Moreover, written with Nutrition Canada’s data summaries, which Lalonde identifies as “reliable” contrary to serious concerns voiced by leading nutrition and medical experts, “A New Perspective” makes only vague and brief mention of this and myriad other investigations into Indigenous health and nutrition. For example, he lists Indian and Northern Health Services amongst other DNHW ‘areas’ of ‘activities’, explaining with respect to Lifestyle: The Department has undertaken some activities to encourage Indians and Northern residents to pursue lifestyles conducive to good health; health stations and centres have been engaged in teaching public health practices. Included are special programs for training native persons as health educators, for alcohol abuse and for fitness and recreation.973 He includes more explanation regarding the Department’s relationship to Health Care Organization with respect to Indian and Northern Health Services, which in this section are separated into two distinct categories. Here Lalonde carefully outlines his interpretation of the state’s responsibility to Indigenous peoples in Canada: Section 91 (24) of the British North America Act places legislative responsibility for Indians and lands reserved for the Indians with the parliament of Canada. Although the Indian Treaties mention specific matters affecting the lives of Indians, only one mentions medical care. Treaty Number 6, covering Indians in part of West Central Saskatchewan and East Central Alberta, provided “that a medical chest shall be kept at

971 Kristin Burnett, “From Food Mail to Nutrition North Canada: Reconsidering federal food subsidy programs for northern Ontario,” paper presented at the 2015 Canadian Association for Food Studies (CAFS) Annual Assembly, Ottawa, ON, June 1, 2015. See also Burnett, Travis Hay and Lori Chambers. “Settling the Table: Northern Food Subsidy Programs and the (Re)Colonisation of Indigenous Bodies.” Critical Race and Whiteness Studies 11:1 (2015) “The White Man’s Burden ‘After Race’.” 972 Love and Kalnins, “Individualist and Structuralist Perspectives,” 203. 973 Lalonde, “A New Perspective,”49.

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the house of each Indian Agent for the use and benefit of the Indians at the discretion of such Agent.”974 Lalonde elaborates that “Judicial decisions have concluded that the Treaty does not vest in the Indians covered by it a legal right to be served by free medical services.”975 “Nonetheless,” he adds, “the Federal Government through the Appropriations and other Acts has provided various services affecting the general welfare of Indians, including hospital and medical care.” In addition, the provinces have also “provided certain services to Indians as Canadian citizens and residents of the Provinces.” Not to be set into policy, he notes that the “nature of these services and the responsibility for providing them is constantly under review.” Lalonde makes a commitment to “Neglected segments of the Canadian population” – those he identifies as “chronically ill, the aged, the mentally ill, the economically-deprived, the troubled parents, and others who either are at high risk or are receiving insufficient health” – who he says “can look forward to getting more of the attention they deserve” through programs that “will increasingly recognize and respond to their needs.”976 Indeed, in 1978, the MSB Program Development Directorate’s Health Data Book confirms the impact of Lalonde’s individualist movement towards health and nutrition self-management in a section outlining policies on Health Education and Promotion: Health education activities and health promotion are important components of the Indian Health Activity. Health priority areas are stressed and increasing emphasis is being placed on the role the individual can play in the improvement of his personal health.977 The same document explains the MSB’s “overall goal of nutrition programs” was “to provide for effective nutrition services in the community and to improve the nutritional health of the Indian, Inuit and northern residents.”978 They report that the aim of the new Nutrition Program Committee, formed in 1977, was to “serve as an advisory group on nutrition problems and the food and nutrition concerns of native people.”

974 Lalonde, “A New Perspective,” 50-51. 975 Lalonde, “A New Perspective,” 51. 976 Lalonde, “A New Perspective,” 64. 977 Canada, Program Development Directorate, Medical Services Branch, Health Data Book (Ottawa: Government of Canada, Minister of National Health and Welfare, 1978), 6. 978 Canada, Health Data Book, 9.

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The guidelines outlined in the 1979 MSB Nutrition Program Manual grew out of this committee’s work, which drew on input from a membership comprised of “regional staff, members of other government departments, professional agencies concerned with nutritional health, Native organizations, food distributors and concerned groups.”979 In this decade of changing approaches to MSB nutrition programs, it is significant to note that the “objectives for an effective nutrition service in the community” identifies foremost to “Establish liaison with Native organizations and other agencies and branches of government (Federal, Provincial and Territorial) concerned with improving Nutrition programs.” Opening dialogue and working with Indigenous community leaders was becoming a priority, as government agents and experts began to recognize the role of Indigenous voices and perspectives in planning programs and educational materials. By 1979, a new Indian Health Policy was being created out of this collaborative work with Indigenous leaders and organizations across the country, including the NIB and women involved in the RNCIA, and the impact of the new policy would have a significant impact on bringing Indigenous perspectives, cultures, and foodways to the forefront of MSB nutrition programs. Because of the role it played in reshaping nutrition programs, and the fact that the 1979 policy “continues as the federal government’s guiding statement on health care,”980 this chapter details the movement towards the new policy. This radical shift was marred in controversy, and in the months leading up to the announcement of the revised policy, much uncertainty and fluctuating decisions circulated amongst government officials, which was reflected in regular conflicting reports in The Indian News. In November of 1978, included in the small regular sidebar section ‘Names in the News’, a small note read: “Joe Dion, president of the Indian Association of Alberta, said the association has received a confidential copy of a policy directive which indicates the federal government will no longer pay the medicare premiums of all Indians.”981 History seemed to be repeating itself as, only a decade after the

979 Canada, Health Data Book, 9. 980 Maureen Lux, Separate Beds: A History of Indian Hospitals in Canada, 1920s-1980s (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016), 194. 981 The Indian News 19, no. 7 (November 1978), 6. Emphasis removed.

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Medicare debacle,982 The Indian News reported that Liberal Minister of National Health and Welfare, Monique Bégin, “has refused to amend reductions planned for medical and dental services to reserve Indians.”983 These cuts, it turned out, had taken effect in August of 1978, and reportedly were made to “contain sharings costs… in line with Federal spending restraint policies,” and required Indians to provide payment for health services including “eye care, dental work, drug costs and transportation.”984 According to the paper, a “national Indian delegation tried in vain during private meetings to persuade Bégin to halt the cuts.” NIB was vocal on the issue, arguing that “Indians should not have ‘to shoulder further hardship’ to help the Health Department cut costs.” NIB president, Noel Starblanket, noted that “Indians receive poorer health care treatment than any other group in Canada,” which is “borne out in the death rate statistics for Indian children which is three to four times the national average.”985 The DNHW similarly reported that year that, for Indigenous people receiving services through the MSB, “[i]nfant mortality remains high at more than double the Canadian experience.”986 Starblanket further charged, “We continue to be the worst served and the first cut back in times of crisis.”987 An example of this from the same year as the health cuts is of the Fox Lake, AB, nursing station with ‘unacceptable’ conditions, including a design that made it impossible to fit stretchers through the doorway,

982 See Lux, Separate Beds, 194-196. Lux writes, “A cherished social program for a Canada that embraced liberal notions of social and political equality as the basis for good health, Medicare damaged the aspirations of many First Nations.” She explains that, while “Canadians remain eminently satisfied with Medicare, proudly proclaiming its values of equity, fairness, and solidarity as ‘intimately tied to their understanding of citizenship’,” for First Nations peoples, “Medicare bestowed its benefits unevenly.” As ‘Aboriginal status’ determined whether Canadians received health care through treaty rights to Medicine Chest clauses or by force from provincially provided benefits, and “remains one of the key social determinants of health that includes other primary factors such as income, education, housing, and employment.” 983 The Indian News 19, no. 9 (January 1979), 1. There was nothing mentioned on the topic in the issue between the note on Joe Dion and this piece. 984 The Indian News 19, no. 9 (January 1979), 1. 985 The Indian News 19, no. 9 (January 1979), 1. 986 Canada, Department of National Health and Welfare Annual Report, for the Fiscal Year Ended March 31, 1979 (Ottawa, ON, Minister of Supply and Services Canada, 1979), 11. 987 The Indian News 19, no. 9 (January 1979), 1.

259 with patients having to be “rolled onto a blanket on the floor and pulled through the doorway” when needing to be “carried to a treatment room.”988 Further, the examining room sink was not functional, with waste water having to be “collected in pails and hauled outside,” leaving staff and patients with nowhere to wash their hands, while the “chemical toilet for patients does not work properly and smells.” MSB employee Dr. Alan Murdock toured the community station with the Indian Association of Alberta “to view housing and health conditions on northern reserves following an outbreak of respiratory illness among infants in the area,” which was “thought to be the cause of the recent deaths of two children.”989 Fox Lake was a community in crisis due to the impact of colonialism and consequent social issues, but they were in the company of many Indigenous communities with lack of adequate health services, as well as housing, affordable food, safe water, and ready access to natural resources. At the time, Starblanket’s assistant Dave Monture believed that, “despite denials by Bégin, there is no doubt the government is ‘moving to get out of Indian health’.”990 However, after a series of demonstrations held by Indigenous peoples across Canada, including those in Edmonton and “a toll on an international bridge between Massena, N.Y., and Cornwall, Ont. [“on Indian land”991], Begin [sic] announced in January a six-month moratorium” on the removal of coverage.992 She indicated at the time, “Indian health services cut last fall will be restored for six months while Indians and government study groups establish better guidelines for determining who is eligible for free services.”993 Indigenous leaders reluctantly agreed with the decision, and Starblanket noted the moratorium “has ‘only bought time’ in the dispute,” and “gave us this delay to buy themselves time through and election.” As indicated in The Indian News, up until September of 1978, “all status Indians received free hospital and medical premiums payments, ambulance transportation, eyeglasses, prescription drugs and dental

988 The Indian News 20, no. 1 (May 1979), 1. 989 The Indian News 20, no. 1 (May 1979), 1. 990 The Indian News 19, no. 9 (January 1979), 1. 991 Gilbert Oskaboose, “Health cuts suspended for 6 months,” The Indian News 19, no. 11 (March 1979), 1. 992 Bill Levitt, “Indian health policy expected,” The Indian News 20, no. 5 (September 1979), 1. 993 Oskaboose, “Health cuts suspended for 6 months,” 1.

260 care,” but under the new guidelines, “Indian people earning 50 per cent above the provincial cutoff lone for welfare assistance would no longer be eligible for these services.” In addition, “Indians who have lived off the reserves for more than a year would also be disqualified…”.994 NIB and other Indigenous leaders argued against the revisions, stating that provision of free health care is a treaty right, while Bégin and the government disagreed, countering that “only those too poor to pay for services should receive help, as a kind of social assistance.”995 To impress the point of urgency upon Bégin, B.C. Indian leader George Manuel donated the gift of a blanket to be presented to the Health Minister, which he hoped would ‘sensitize’ her to the issue. As The Indian News reminds in a caption accompanying a photograph of the blanket presentation, “In the old days thousands of Indian people died after they were deliberately given small-pox infected blankets from whites.”996 During the brief period when Bégin’s cuts were effective, through fall and early winter of 1978, she had put ‘guides’ in place “on uninsured health benefits, such as eye glasses, dental care, ambulance service and some drugs,” under which “Indians were forced to pay for services previously provided for free.”997 Moreover, as Bill Levitt reported, when the Progressive Conservative Government under Joe Clark defeated Pierre Trudeau’s Liberals with a minority government in the 1979 federal election, incoming Health Minister David Crombie overturned Bégin’s program, and extended her moratorium until the new policy was disclosed.998 According to Clark’s campaign promise, “to unilaterally restore uninsured health benefits to reserve Indians,” and without revealing details, Crombie’s aide shared: “It will be comprehensive, new and complete,” essentially, “different from what we’ve ever known.” Further, she explained that the policy had been prepared in consultation with Indian leaders, and discussion was ongoing. Levitt made clear that the policy would apply to the 300,000 status Indians in Canada covered under the Indian Act, but would “not apply to an additional 100,000 Metis (of white

994 Oskaboose, “Health cuts suspended for 6 months,” 1. 995 Oskaboose, “Health cuts suspended for 6 months,” 1. 996 Oskaboose, “Health cuts suspended for 6 months,” 1. 997 Levitt, “Indian health policy expected,” 1. 998 Levitt, “Indian health policy expected,” 1.

261 and Indian blood) and non-status Indians, not covered by federal legislations,” but instead receiving “benefits from the provincial governments.”999 By the close of the 1970s, the MSB had moved towards what they frequently refer to in Annual Reports and Nutrition Newsletters as ‘Indian’ or ‘Native Involvement’ in planning of policies and programs for the communities MSB serviced. As the Branch reported in 1983, on what they termed the “Evolution of Policy on Indian Health Services,” the “current Indian Health Policy was announced by the Minister of National Health and Welfare on September 19, 1979.” The policy recognized “three ‘pillars’ on which the shared responsibility for Indian and Inuit health are based”: “community development”; “the traditional relationship of the Indian people to the federal government”; and “the Canadian health system with interrelated elements which may be the responsibility of federal, provincial or municipal governments.” As McCallum explains, with the new policy unveiled, the federal government arranged for Justice Thomas Berger to head an Advisory Commission on Indian and Inuit Health, which argued “that Indigenous control over Indigenous health programs was necessary to improve the health status of First Nations people.” Further, it advised that the Minister of DNHW should “convene a conference on Native health comprising predominantly Native people ‘with representation from organizations such as [RNCIA].”1000 A central shift in the policy concerned the “gradual transfer of responsibility to Indian control for a majority of the preventive health programs” for ten reserves incorporated into an Indian Health Board in Saskatchewan’s Battleford District.1001 This transfer project was under development in the late 1970s, and was seen as a model other communities might follow in the coming years. By the time the DNHW Annual Report was published for 1979, no mention was made of any health spending cuts specific to Indian Medicare. However, after she returned to her position as Health Minister, Bégin’s 1980 Annual Report was careful to clarify the policy put through during the brief reign of Clark’s PC government: “Although closer native involvement in all aspects of planning and delivering health services has been a Medical Services Branch

999 Levitt, “Indian health policy expected,” 1. 1000 McCallum, Indigenous Women, Work, and History, 185. 1001 Canada, Medical Services Branch Annual Review 1978 (Ottawa: Department of National Health and Welfare, 1978) 14.

262 priority for many years, the events of 1979 gave increased emphasis to this thrust area.”1002 As Lux explains, the new policy included a “$2.5 million commitment to an Indian Health Care Commission to ‘promote and encourage native self-determination’ in the delivery of health services,” but Medicare as non-Indigenous Canadians enjoyed it, lauded as a bastion of citizenship, officially “excluded Aboriginal people.”1003 Bégin reminded that the new Indian Health Policy announced by Crombie in September of 1979 “clearly stated that only Indian communities themselves, with the support of the federal government and the larger Canadian community, can change the root causes of their poor health status.” In sum, reflecting Marc Lalonde’s influential document, the policy asserted that “an increased level of health must be generated and maintained by Indian communities themselves.”1004 To clarify, Bégin references the 1979 MSB “Indian Health Discussion Paper,” which she indicates is “a draft document exploring new frameworks that will give Indian Health policy and programs the flexibility to evolve that will meet changing requirements.” According to Bégin, the MSB paper “strongly endorses native involvement and the broader government policy of self-determination for Indian and Inuit people.”1005 The draft document itself grew out of the 1979 NHW policy statement on Indian Health, identifying the “current goal of Federal Indian Health Policy” being “described as the achievement of ‘an increasing level of health in Indian communities, generated and maintained by the Indian communities themselves’.”1006 Noting the ‘three pillars’ outlined above, the paper recognized that “One of the principal, though by no

1002 Canada, Department of National Health and Welfare Annual Report, for the Fiscal Year Ended March 31, 1980 (Ottawa, ON, Minister of Supply and Services Canada, 1980), 10. 1003 Maureen Lux, Separate Beds: A History of Indian Hospitals in Canada, 1920s-1980s (Toronto, Ontario: University of Toronto Press, 2016), 159. For more on the history of medicare, specifically its context within global efforts at socialized medicine, see Esyllt Jones, Radical Medicine: The International Origins of Socialized Health Care in Canada (Winnipeg: ARP Books, 2019). 1004 Canada, Department of National Health and Welfare Annual Report… March 31, 1980, 10. 1005 Canada, Department of National Health and Welfare Annual Report… March 31, 1980, 10. 1006 Canada, Department of National Health and Welfare, Medical Services Branch, Indian Health Discussion Paper (draft) (Ottawa: Department of National Health and Welfare, 1979) 1.

263 means the only, Indian study currently in progress is the [NIB’s] Commission Inquiry on Indian Health.” The project, initiated in 1977, “Called on the Federal government to set aside its unilateral approach to the development of Indian Health Policy and to support Indian efforts to contribute meaningfully to such efforts.” With representatives from provincial and territorial Indigenous organizations, the Commission Inquiry “intended to provide government with a ‘clearly defined, comprehensive statement of the position, concerns and priorities of Indian people across Canada, respecting all known aspects of Indian health, health care programs and delivery systems’.”1007 The language of the paper contrasts against that in DNHW Annual Reports in its discourse on Indian health. For example, to “reinforce its commitment to the need for a basic review of its approach to Indian Health,” MSB was authorized to carry out an internal study “designed to sensitize itself to the contemporary perspectives and aspirations of Indian people and to the urgent requirement for better and more flexible frameworks within which policy and program can evolve to meet changing requirements.” The paper clarifies that it should “not be misunderstood” as “an attempt to establish unilaterally a new policy but rather a contribution to a dialogue with Indian and Inuit leaders to which the Department is now committed.” DNHW expressed hope this new approach would “lead to a policy more acceptable to Indian people, realistic in terms of modern health delivery systems, capable of addressing the urgent health needs of Indians,” while also being “supportive of the broader government policy of self- determination for Indian and Inuit people.”1008 This move included the appointment of RNCIA co-founder, Jean Goodwill, as Special Advisor on Indian Health to the Minister of National Health and Welfare, Monique Bégin, with RNCIA member Madeleine Dion-Stout replacing her before returning to her position with the MSB.1009 In the wake of this somewhat sudden and striking redirection towards a collaborative health policy, dramatic changes to educational approaches and materials, incorporation of Indigenous foodways into formal nutrition standards and guidelines, as well as the beginnings of nutrition research methods and teams that included Indigenous perspectives mark a shift in DNHW, MSB, and other state programs.

1007 Medical Services Branch, Indian Health Discussion Paper (draft), 1-2. 1008 Medical Services Branch, Indian Health Discussion Paper (draft), 2. 1009 Goodwill, “Indian and Inuit Nurses of Canada,” 121-122.

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These changes will be explored in Chapter Eight, which illustrates the possibility of an Indigenized nutrition model with increased dialogue and inclusion of Indigenous leaders and community members in forming state policy and procedure.

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CHAPTER EIGHT

CENTERING INDIGENOUS FOODWAYS: THE NEW INDIAN HEALTH POLICY AND INDIGENOUS APPROACHES TO NUTRITION, FEEDING, AND EDUCATION

“Education programs, emphasizing the nutritional value of native food resources and traditional nutrition habits, should be developed or if existing, be reinforced.”1010

In exploring the immediate outcomes of the Indian Health Policy announced in 1979, as introduced at the closing of the previous chapter, this chapter centres on the tension between a concerted effort by some Indigenous peoples and nutrition experts towards greater use of Indigenous or ‘country’ foods, and the increased contamination of Indigenous lands, waters, and resources that threatened to poison the fish and sea mammals that so many communities relied on for sustenance. It also looks at the related food and nutrition curriculum implemented for Indigenous school children, and how these reflected the shifting perspectives on Indigenous foodways. Chapter Six, as well as the Introduction of this dissertation, highlight Indigenous political organizing because I am interested in how materials were beginning in the 1970s to reflect a shift from non-Indigenous expert-driven nutrition education based on western dietary standards and the four food groups of the Canada Food Guide, to increasingly include Indigenous foods and foodways through Indigenous peoples’ involvement in MSB projects. The ultimate goal of the state, however, continued to be integration, as modified food guides and educational materials served to replicate western nutrition in Indigenous communities, but with indigenous dietary staples added into the lists of ‘healthy foods’. Yet, it is important to see that the changes to state materials also reflected the opinions and approaches of long-time medical and nutrition experts working among Indigenous peoples, such as Dr. Otto Schaefer and Dr. Jean Steckle. Moreover, as this chapter also illustrates, most of the formalized nutrition education materials, school curriculum, and community food events at this time had moved from a top-down project to a conversation that centered Indigenous

1010 Jean Steckle and Otto Schaefer, Dietary Habits and Nutritional Base of Native Populations of the Northwest Territories (Yellowknife, NWT: Health and Welfare Canada Medical Services Branch, 1980) 24.

266 voices and interests. While still largely a project of the state, shifting relations between some Indigenous peoples and organizations with government officials or representatives generated overtly hybridized materials for teaching and evaluating nutrition. Thus, changes to government policies and programs began to reflect more consultation with Indigenous peoples, as factors like terminology were changed to reflect Indigenous perspectives. For example, in 1978, DIA changed their program name from Indian and Eskimo Affairs to the Indian and Inuit Program. This move to Inuit, “the people,” by then DIA Minister J. Hugh Faulkner was reportedly a response to Inuit leaders who had begun “generally” voicing “a preference for this term rather than ‘Eskimo’.”1011 In 1983, MSB reported that “the activities of the Medical Services Program reflect the priorities set out in the Indian Health Policy in terms of promoting self-determination and self- reliance.” According to the MSB 1978 Annual Report, this ‘evolution’ was being realized in northern communities, as “Community based and planned projects have received increased attention.”1012 Projects included “an extensive program to develop community nutrition awareness so that the community might participate in the selection of products to be made available through the Hudson Bay Store.”1013 The Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC) thus launched an educational program in 1978, its “Nutrition upgrading Program,” developed by their Merchandising Division of the National Stores Department. The role of HBC community stores continued to be significant at the time. For example, as The Indian News reported in 1979, residents of Pukatawagan, MB (roughly 950 km northwest of Winnipeg) were faced with “300- kilometre shopping trips” by train to The Pas when their local HBC store closed unexpectedly due to a supposed staff shortage.1014 In recognizing that “poor diet contributes to health problems and inhibits economic development in communities where the Company is based,” the HBC saw its local stores being “in a position to modify food orders for the purpose of

1011 The Indian News 19, no. 1 (1978), 1. 1012 Canada, Medical Services Branch Annual Review 1978, 11. 1013 Canada, Medical Services Branch Annual Review 1978, 11. 1014 The Indian News 20, no. 5 (September 1979), 7. Band Chief Pascal Bighetty reported that the Bay store was the community’s main source of food, clothing, hardware, and gasoline, which as earlier chapters here indicate was fairly standard in many northern communities.

267 exerting a positive influence on dietary habits.”1015 While some locally owned independent or Federated Cooperative grocers generated competition for HBC stores through providing a community-based consumer alternative, HBC stores reaffirmed their efforts at meeting community health needs in the period and some communities welcomed the changes, along with the educational opportunities the new nutrition program offered. The substantial changes in approach and practices that came with the 1978 Indian Health Policy directly impacted the new direction of MSB nutritionists working with Indigenous peoples and communities, who likely they impacted it in turn. Evidence of this includes a nutrition program run at Pangnirtung, Northwest Territories, which the Report noted as a “successful example and experience.” Funded by a Canada Works Program, the Pangnirtung Health Committee hired three workers for the project, who were provided with training and support by the Regional Nutritionist (Carol Huggett) and the Home Management Consultant (Joanna Patterson) for Baffin Region.1016 The project then proceeded with the purpose of developing “an awareness of the relationship between good food and good health,”1017 which involved a range of initiatives. These included “a slide presentation on food and health… developed and used for community group discussions” and a system of colour-coded labeling of food on HBC store shelves according to the Canada Food Guide, which were carried out by community members.1018 Using the HBC nutrition education model that promoted “mak[ing] every day a 4 colour day,” with each of the four food groups assigned a colour and job – blue for milk and milk products to “keep smiling”; red for meat and alternatives, “for strength”; orange for bread and cereals for “energy”; and green for fruits and vegetables, for “great looks, good feelings” – the project in Pangnirtung reported that all five colour-coded labels were represented on HBC store shelves by Christmas (with black representing the fifth food group, ‘other’ or ‘junk’ foods).1019 Community groups then presented lists of “which foods they wanted ordered, and which were to be discontinued” to the HBC store manager, who “responded to

1015 Canada, Nutrition Newsletter 1 (Autumn 1979), 19. 1016 Canada, Medical Services Branch Annual Review 1978, 11; Canada, Nutrition Newsletter 1 (Autumn 1979), 15. 1017 Canada, Nutrition Newsletter 1 (Autumn 1979), 15. 1018 Canada, Medical Services Branch Annual Review 1978, 11. 1019 Canada, Nutrition Newsletter 3 (Summer 1982), 21.

268 these requests.”1020 The group measured their success in part by the store having “ordered half the usual amount of pop” for the year’s sea lift order.1021 An example of multiple models of education aimed at children, yet expected to spread to family and community, is the community Food Festival or Nutrition Fair. For example, a fair held in West Bay, Manitoulin Island, for Nutrition Month in June 1981, was organized to “be fun as well as useful in promoting good eating habits,” demonstrating “healthful living through healthful eating amongst all community families.” Displays demonstrated what this would look like for community members, asserting that “good food and good food habits were possible for all families in West Bay.”1022 Reflective of the MSB’s efforts at incorporating Indigenous foodways into their services and materials, displays included: “gardening, meat alternates, preserves, edible wilds, breastfeeding, home baking and packed lunches, as well as posters, books and pamphlets on all aspects of nutrition.” Local women organized displays and booths at the Fair, alongside organizations such as La Leche, Department of Agriculture, and Ojibwe Cultural Foundation.1023 Food fairs organized by communities and local schools often encouraged students to participate in nutrition education and promotion through poster, poetry, or essay contests on good eating. In West Bay’s 1981 Nutrition Fair, a poster contest asked children to submit on the theme “Nutrition is…,” which included entries by “two young artists” of “tempting fruit snacks,” specifically a painting of a partially-eaten apple and another depicting a banana in mid-peel hovering over a bowl of fruit.1024 The same event’s “Prize Winning Food Essay,” written by a student in seventh grade, was titled “A Nutritious Guide.” In identifying “protective foods” that meet all the nutritional requirements for growing young people, the student listed “milk, meat, poultry, fish, eggs, vegetables, and fruits” in his winning entry. He also warned, “some foods you should not eat are junk food and fattening foods,” which “could very well ruin your

1020 Canada, Medical Services Branch Annual Review 1978, 11. 1021 Canada, Nutrition Newsletter 1 (Autumn 1979), 15. 1022 Canada, Nutrition Newsletter 3 (Summer 1982), 53. 1023 Canada, Nutrition Newsletter 3, 53. 1024 Canada, Nutrition Newsletter 3, 55. The names of students, who were at the time children, have been omitted to respect their privacy.

269 health.”1025 Manitoba’s Nutrition Month “Go With Nutrition” poster contest also focused on preventionist models promoted by MSB, with activities and commitments including a “No Junk Food Day.”1026 As with other initiatives, the Hudson’s Bay Company was involved, specifically the HBC’s nutritionist, who collaborated in planning the province-wide poster contest for students in grades 1-9 in ‘Native communities’.1027 Junk food here was not identified in these documents as anything specific, but presumably would have been referred to in those terms in school curriculum and understood by those reading the reports and related materials at the time.1028 Similar health-related poster contests in schools were in place by the 1940s, particularly classroom Tuberculosis poster contests that aimed to have students educate each other and, through their work, “fight Tuberculosis.”1029 Like later contests that focused instead on nutrition and were regularly sponsored by local Bay grocery stores, children in BC schools were asked to create posters to help spread the message of the anti-TB program. Sponsored in 1956 by the provincial Tuberculosis Society in concert with the Indian and Northern Health Services Branch of Health and Welfare, twelve-year old male contest winner, a fifth grade student from Lower Post Residential School, won a prize that promoted healthy activity: “a brand new

1025 Canada, Nutrition Newsletter 3, 59. 1026 Canada, Nutrition Newsletter 3, 61. 1027 Canada, Nutrition Newsletter 3, 61; Canada, Nutrition Newsletter 4 (Summer 1983) (Ottawa: Department of National Health and Welfare, Medical Services Branch), 32. 1028 On junk food, see Thiessen, Snacks, 4-5. Thiessen’s discussion of so-called junk food positions it as part of a moral reform narrative. She writes, “The temperance movement was often about the social control and moral judgement of the lower classes by their “betters.” In the same way, popular discussion of snack foods is too often about control and judgement of others.” She quotes food historian Sara Davis: “When we talk about the junk food habits of Other People in a way that depicts these Other People as thoughtless, addicted eating machines, that’s dehumanizing. And elitist. Because let’s be honest, when we worry about the junk food habits of Other People, we usually mean Fat People or Poor People or High School Kids, right? And it suits us to think of these groups of people as being unable to make decisions for themselves, just as it suits us to jokingly cast our own entirely human desires as uncontrollable urges.” See Sara Davis, “Your Junk Food Preference Is Probably Not an Addiction,” Scenes of Eating blog website, 17 January 2013, http://scenesofeating.com/2013/01/17/your-junk-food-preference-is-probably-not-an- addiction/. 1029 The Indian News 2, no. 3 (March 1957), 5.

270 bicycle.”1030 This particular contest had been running annually for fourteen years, showing the importance the state places on uplifting families on matters of health and wellness through educating children in schools. By the mid-1960s, these contests shifted to focus on nutrition and observation of “good health rules,” as seen in a “Good Health, Good Fun” contest held in Eden Valley Indian Day School in Alberta.1031 These earlier contests provided a model for later educational projects that incorporated the state agenda for health and nutrition reform into classroom curriculum. Educators in schools that fell within the MSB’s purview reported on their efforts at promoting nutrition in the classroom. This included various nutrition workshops with children and youth, which involved education through experience. For example, in Manitou Rapids, Ontario, CHR Leona McGinnis organized an afternoon with a nutritionist for thirty-two children aged four to eight. Activities included food games and making snacks of healthy foods, such as uncooked peanut butter ‘cookies’ and raw fruits and vegetable platters.1032 Similarly, Kindergarten children at Bear Island and Kindergarten to grade two children at Dokis, both in Ontario, were introduced to ‘nutritious snacks’ in the form of fresh raw fruits and vegetables. Both programs were dependent on funding, so while the Dokis program was expected to continue, it would include “fewer and less variety in foods since funding [was] down.”1033 Other initiatives rewarded children for their healthy choices. While it’s not clear what the prizes were, children at Godfish Lake, Saskatchewan, were awarded for the “best lunches.” Initiated by a teacher promoting a Lunch Program at the community school, the project seems to have involved students being interviewed by the CHR and nurse, who ultimately chose the winners

1030 The Indian News 2, no. 3 (March 1957), 5. 1031 The Indian News 8, no. 1 (March 1965), 6. 1032 Canada, Nutrition Newsletter 3, 46. As detailed in earlier chapters, Community Health Representatives (CHRs) would have been community members identified as Indian or Inuit with cultural and linguistic knowledge that enabled them to train and act as sort of intermediary members of northern healthcare teams. The position was initiated as part of a Medical Services Branch program in the 1960s, “in an attempt… to increase the amount and effectiveness of health teaching done among the Indian and Eskimo people,” with a CHR “qualified by lifetime knowledge of his community, as well as by training.” See Canada, The Community Health Worker in Indian and Eskimo Communities (Ottawa: Department of National Health and Welfare Medical Services Branch, 1970): 1. 1033 Canada, Nutrition Newsletter 3, 47.

271 based on their ability to answer nutrition-related questions. “Except for the two winners,” the MSB reported in 1981, “the students had difficulty remembering the food groups, why they were important, and why variety was necessary.”1034 Consistent with the discourse of ‘junk food’ being popularly understood as ‘bad’ or negative, all students interviewed by the CHR and nurse “got 100 per cent on what it (sic.) should not have.”1035 It seems curious that the negative impact of ‘junk food’ was retained, but what would have been promoted as positive aspects of healthy eating were lost on children. HBC stores, as part of their Nutrition Upgrading Program, were actively involved in school nutrition poetry and poster contests.1036 This continued through the 1980s, as the MSB’s Summer/Fall 1986 Nutrition Newsletter reported on the Nutrition Upgrading Program and Nutrition Month in northern Bay stores earlier that year. According to Winnipeg, MB HBC Nutritionist, Donna Musick, “Northern Bay Stores in native communities across Canada joined in the national Nutrition Month campaign with special nutrition promotional activities targeted to both school children and the adult shopper.”1037 Students in Coppermine, NWT completed a “thematic colouring sheet,” and the winners, who were presented with “nutritious fruit baskets,” had their colouring sheets displayed in the local Bay store. In Aklavik, NWT, the HBC store manager “invited the local school children to make an in-store … display of nutritious foods,” for which they created a five-foot tall Canada Food Guide.1038 In the photograph accompanying the piece, the Coppermine store manager is shown presenting prizes to the four Nutrition Month colouring contest winners.1039 Other program materials and prizes for nutrition contests were supplied by organizations such as the Ontario Milk Marketing Board, who in 1986 provided worksheets, food models, and puzzles to Mattagami School (near Thunder Bay, ON) that “helped students identify good snacks.”1040

1034 Canada, Medical Services Branch Nutrition Newsletter 2 (Summer 1981), 38. 1035 Canada, Medical Services Branch Nutrition Newsletter 2, 38. 1036 Canada, Medical Services Branch Annual Review 1978. 1037 Canada, Medical Services Branch Nutrition Newsletter 7 (Summer/Fall 1986), 2-3. 1038 Canada, Medical Services Branch Nutrition Newsletter 7 (Summer/Fall 1986), 2. 1039 Canada, Medical Services Branch Nutrition Newsletter 7 (Summer/Fall 1986), 3. 1040 Canada, Medical Services Branch Nutrition Newsletter 7 (Summer/Fall 1986), 3.

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Nutrition contests, as shown, are some of the few moments where First Nations, Inuit, and Métis children’s experiences are documented, visible in written, artistic, and visual sources. However, it is important to think about children and histories of childhood with Mona Gleason’s analysis of what she calls “the agency trap” or “agency ideal,” which she argues may have “particular import for studies that focus on vulnerable and marginalised children.”1041 Gleason expands on cultural anthropologist David Lancy’s work on agency, in which he warns: “An uncritical focus on children’s expressions of agency entrenches an ethnocentric and middle- class view of the world and of childrearing and it problematically promotes interviews with children themselves as the most authentic source of data on young lives.”1042 Further, in exploring the ramifications of this critique for historians, she explains that he “questions a tendency to valorise social and cultural rebellion as an expression of children’s agency while ignoring or marginalising agentic expression that might involve children’s compliance with mainstream cultural traditions or adult priorities.”1043 As food historian Janis Thiessen shared with me, “I remember participating in these nutrition poster contests myself as a child,” cautioning about reading agency into such sources: “in my experience, guidance from teachers and other adults was provided in an effort to produce winning entries.”1044 I, too, recall the combined message of making these entries one’s own, while meeting the expected standard explained by the teacher, and thus frame my discussion of children’s agency and voice with these issues in mind. The awarding of health-promoting prizes at nutrition contests and fairs, both by community organizations and schools, was common in this period. In Manitoba’s 1981 ‘Go With Nutrition’ Nutrition Month poster contest, winners received “Action Snack Packs” as ‘grand prizes’, which “reinforced the contest themes.” These packs included “activity oriented prizes suitable for the age group (such as a knapsack, baseball glove, or a bicycle),” and “were coupled

1041 Mona Gleason, “Avoiding the agency trap: caveats for historians of children, youth and education,” History of Education 45 no. 4 (2016): 448. 1042 Gleason, “Avoiding the agency trap,” 446. 1043 Gleason, “Avoiding the agency trap,” 446. 1044 Janis Thiessen, personal correspondence through feedback on the proposal for this dissertation project. March 17, 2016.

273 with snacks like canned fruit juice and meat sticks for a fun prize.”1045 The following year, the Manitoba Nutrition Month contest themed ‘Grab a Bite That’s Right’ awarded classroom- oriented prizes, including a class party with healthy food, and “a nutrition education game (Nutrition Snakes and Ladders from the Home Economics Council of Alberta Teacher’s Association).”1046 Throughout the month, Indigenous communities across Manitoba held related events. These included the Pukatawagan Health Committee-sponsored Nutrition Fair, “which included poster displays, food sampling, films and a food bingo.” Again, the bingo prizes for students were food.1047 Other schools held in-class activities, “including question periods and discussions on health, films, classroom breakfasts and lunches, a nutrition snack-a-day, and conversely – abstaining from ‘junk foods’, and making ‘Wild Game’ recipe books for the parents.”1048 As the MSB reported in 1983, “children express their heritage in their posters,” with “traditional foods like moose meat, rabbit, fresh fish, bannock and berries” depicted “along with burgers, fries, bread and broccoli.”1049 Along with a host of other examples, a young student’s illustrated poster entry for the Grab a Bite That’s Right poster contest shows this expression of cultural heritage. His winning submission shows two men with feather headbands carrying a moose suspended from a log, as they head towards a teepee next to a third person preparing food over a fire.1050 At the West Bay Ontario Nutrition Fair, school children were reported to have enjoyed the game booths, “all of which had fun snacks for prizes that were also healthy snacks.”1051 This included a ‘Hoop-A-Juice’ ring-toss game, where cartons of juice were both the targets and prizes.1052 That same year, the Thanksgiving Unity Family Day event on October 11 focused on cultural celebrations, including a step-dancing contest, and a feast “served by the students of

1045 Canada, Nutrition Newsletter 4, 33. 1046 Canada, Nutrition Newsletter 4, 33. 1047 Canada, Nutrition Newsletter 4, 36. 1048 Canada, Nutrition Newsletter 4, 36. 1049 Canada, Nutrition Newsletter 4, 32. 1050 Canada, Nutrition Newsletter 4, 33. 1051 Canada, Nutrition Newsletter 3, 53. 1052 Canada, Nutrition Newsletter 3, 54.

274 the Reserve with food donations from all the mothers.”1053 The feast included roast moose- meat, roast turkey, and bannock, among other choices. The step-dancing contest winners were awarded free Roller Skating passes, with both the contest and award promoting physical activity in young people. Just over a year later, in Greenville BC, the local clinic hosted an evening of two nutrition video screenings, “The Zoosters” and “Physical Fitness and Good Health,” followed by a discussion of ‘junk foods’ and a game of nutrition bingo. The evening closed with “nutritious Hallowe’en snacks,” which “were comprised of bran muffin halves covered in cheddar cheese melted under the grill, topped with Hallowe’en faces made of peanuts; and juice.”1054 As the MSB, who provided the snacks, reported, the snack “contained something from all four food groups.”1055 The same program, led by nutritionist Charlotte Waddell, traveled to New Aiyansh BC, where a workshop for eight preschool children and their teachers included screening of nutrition videos, followed again by a nutritious Hallowe’en snack. This second event, held on the morning of October 22, featured sliced whole wheat bread covered in peanut butter, which the children “decorated with monster faces made of peanuts and dried fruit.”1056 There seemed to be competing messages about what foods should be presented as healthy, with some events providing so-called Native foods as snacks, while others served a variation of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, like the workshops in BC. Two experts actively involved in the shifting trajectory of MSB nutrition and health directives, nutritionist Jean Steckle and physician Otto Schaefer, frequently made recommendations for a greater incorporation of ‘Native foods’ into Indigenous peoples’ diets in this period. In a 1980 report focused on food and nutrition in Inuit and Dene communities, they argued “programs to be undertaken by various territorial and federal agencies are deemed useful and necessary to enhance greater use of native foods.” These included “Education programs, emphasizing the nutritional value of native food resources and traditional nutrition habits,” which “should be developed or if existing, be reinforced.” These initiatives, they asserted, “should be aimed at

1053 Canada, Nutrition Newsletter 3, 52. 1054 Canada, Nutrition Newsletter 4, 15. 1055 Canada, Nutrition Newsletter 4, 15. 1056 Canada, Nutrition Newsletter 4, 16.

275 both children and adults to counteract the adverse trends experienced to date.” Further, such an education program “should not limit itself to theoretical teaching but also include practical demonstrations such as berry picking expeditions for school children, cooking lessons for adolescent girls and women, hunting and game cleaning demonstrations for adolescents and young adults of both sexes.”1057 The authors argued that “nutrition education aims to improve the knowledge and practice of residents in the best use of available foods.”1058 In their report, Schaefer and Steckle detail the traditional local food sources of Dene and Inuit in the Northwest Territories. They emphasize the central role of, and relatively easy access to, protein-rich foods, which they argue “could be provided… from local sources without danger of depletion of that source if reasonable controls, systematic exploitation, distribution and marketing were effected.” Schaefer argued that adequate protein could be found through sea mammals alone, were “excessive hunting pressure on the large land animals,” such as caribou, a concern.1059 Unlike many MSB records from the previous decade, the authors propose inland communities concentrate on the traditional pursuits of fishing, with examples including Arctic char, grayling, and whitefish, as well as nesting birds such as geese, ducks, gulls, along with gull eggs, all of which the authors saw as nutritionally significant. They write, Marine and fresh water fish resources are very substantial in most areas of the Northwest Territories… and should continue, with proper management, to supply a substantial proportion of protein requirements for both Dene and Inuit […]. Most northern species (especially Arctic char and lake trout) will not support large-scale fishing and export operations because of slow growth and slower regeneration of depleted stocks in northern waters. 1060 Schaefer indicates that this problem “has forced abandonment of many fish co-op enterprises which were established in the 1950s and 1960s in disregard of this fact.” While there were clearly a number of initially successful Indigenous fishing cooperatives (not frequently discussed in nutrition surveys and prescriptive literature as a viable food source), according to Schaefer, by the end of the 1970s, these enterprises had already come undone due to their instability as a food source and economic base.

1057 Steckle and Schaefer, Dietary Habits and Nutritional Base, 24. 1058 Steckle and Schaefer, Dietary Habits and Nutritional Base, 27. 1059 Steckle and Schaefer, Dietary Habits and Nutritional Base, 1. 1060 Steckle and Schaefer, Dietary Habits and Nutritional Base, 15.

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Through his assessment, Schaefer also raises the cultural importance of caribou hunts, which served as a main source of food for inland communities as well as an important inter- community food sharing practice. According to Schaefer, families historically would await the arrival of seasonally migrating caribou in “strategically located points such as mountain passes or the defiles between chains of lakes where [the animals] could be taken with relative ease,” and groups in a larger region would connect to increase “chances of survival for a maximum number of family groups as long as the large and plentiful caribou herds remained without depletion.”1061 He explains, This system was decried, and harshly criticized as ‘fatalistic’ and ‘lazy’ by non- understanding white officials and traders, when in the 1940’s and 1950’s [sic] the drastically depleted caribou herds failed to appear, not only at just one crossing but often in an entire region, and the people starved while persisting in their habits of waiting patiently in one spot and relying on sharing.1062 As he summarizes, the “new and artificial situation,” which grew out of colonial projects in the region, “had turned an appropriate social and ecological adaptation into a disastrous liability, as attested by the number of famine victims in those years in the Barren Lands of the Keewatin.” While they press in part for the adoption of primarily non-Indigenous methods of food production, such as greenhouse or hydroponic gardening, the authors were interested primarily in reclaiming Indigenous foodways for their accessibility and also nutritional significance. For example, through discussion with local residents, Schaefer learned of the importance of consuming raw-frozen Arctic char, a staple in some Inuit communities, which residents understood as important for health and wellness. He writes of Aksayuk, an ‘old man’ from Pangnirtung, who told him that “the Inuit found that if they did not eat at least part of their meat and fish in the winter raw, in the spring they would have loose teeth and bleeding gums.” For Schaefer, this pointed to the “very limited [regional] supply of vitamin C and folate from land and sea flora,” resulting in majority of these nutrients being consumed through meat and fish, “but the amounts present there were too small to allow major losses by cooking.”1063 For Dene communities living further south, moose rather than caribou was the primary source of

1061 Steckle and Schaefer, Dietary Habits and Nutritional Base, 1. 1062 Steckle and Schaefer, Dietary Habits and Nutritional Base, 2 1063 Steckle and Schaefer, Dietary Habits and Nutritional Base, 2.

277 meat, and while small fur-bearing animals, including rabbits, beaver, muskrat, were consumed, their role was more supplementary when larger game were not adequate.1064 Through their account of regional foods consumed traditionally and at the time of their research, they collected data on the most commonly used local food sources and had them analyzed for nutritional value. They show that some land-based foods used by people in the James Bay region (“Commonly-Eaten Domestic Vegetables and Fruits with Edible Greens”) contain much higher nutritional value than garden and store-bought produce. For example, while spinach and carrots contain high Vitamin A levels (8,100 and 11,000 i.u. per 100 grams respectively) and green peppers provide high Ascorbic Acid levels (51 mg per 100 grams), local land sources were calculated to provide even higher concentrations of Vitamin A per 100 grams (up to 14,000 i.u. in dandelion; 11,600 in lambs quarter; and over 18,000 in fireweed and willow leaves).1065 Fireweed was also measured as providing 220 mg of Ascorbic Acid, while cloud berries could offer up to 475 mg, more than three times that of green peppers. Demonstrating the authors’ intentions to find ways to improve nutritional status with recognition of food access and costs, they conclude that “[j]udicious education as to the innate wisdom of traditional native food preferences in nutritional terms may help to counteract this trend away from nutritional health and sound economy.”1066 In encouraging ongoing or increased consumption of Indigenous foods, Schaefer and Steckle challenge a dominant discourse: Statements are often made by protagonists for ‘development’ of mineral and other non- renewable resources, and repeated uncritically by the media, by politicians and others that the growth of native populations, their movement from small hunting camps to larger settlements, and the decline of local food resources have – for all practical purposes – removed traditional food resources as a means of sustenance.1067 The authors assert that their research has confirmed “the continuing and vital importance of local food resources in the supply of protein, essential vitamins and minerals” for most NWT Inuit and Dene peoples, and argue that “with better resource exploitation, preservation and

1064 Steckle and Schaefer, Dietary Habits and Nutritional Base, 14. 1065 Schaefer and Steckle, Dietary Habits and Nutritional Base, 16. 1066 Schaefer and Steckle, Dietary Habits and Nutritional Base, 17. 1067 Schaefer and Steckle, Dietary Habits and Nutritional Base, 14.

278 distribution” they could fulfill protein requirements for both Indigenous and non-Indigenous residents of NWT.1068 In contrast, similar to the Home Economics and nutrition researchers who visited Indigenous communities in Manitoba a decade earlier, they illuminate the growing state of food insecurity due to an increased use of imported store foods with highly inflated costs. Again, as in Manitoba, data compiled from regional availability and cost surveying of grocery stores in communities (including Inuvik, Frobisher, Yellowknife, Wrigley, Snowdrift, and Rankin Inlet) demonstrated that “[a]vailability of imported food items in northern communities is dependent on existing facilities and economics of transport, preservation and storage as well as local market conditions.”1069 These factors, “in turn, are influenced by population size, local needs, taste preferences and purchasing power.” As Schaefer and Steckle conclude, “any one of these factors alone,” though “most often a combination of several or all of these factors” will significantly limit the quantity, choice, and of course cost of available food items. Here, again similar to the findings of the Manitoba research teams a decade earlier, the authors found in the NWT a “severe restriction of availability and/or horrendous cost of many food items regarded as essential by other Canadians.”1070 They, however, make a critical distinction, which should be read as an intervention, by asserting that a lack of certain food products in grocery stores, such as fresh eggs or pork, should not be understood as evidence of malnutrition. Championing Indigenous foodways and use of local resources, they argue that protein sources in particular could be found to meet nutritional needs without economic impact. While they argue for ongoing and increased use of protein-rich resources, they recognize the lack of availability of costly fresh fruits and vegetables, which are difficult to access year-round outside of stores due to harsh growing conditions. They suggest this could change through educating residents on how to best make use of store foods, referencing the role of CHRs in advocating for the nutrition upgrade program adopted by the HBC and Federated Co-operatives stores in the Territories.1071 Although plans for education and clearer

1068 Schaefer and Steckle, Dietary Habits and Nutritional Base, 14. 1069 Schaefer and Steckle, Dietary Habits and Nutritional Base, 18-19. 1070 Schaefer and Steckle, Dietary Habits and Nutritional Base, 18-19. See Tables IV, V, and VI, for a sampling of northern community food prices, at the end of this chapter. 1071 Schaefer and Steckle, Dietary Habits and Nutritional Base, 27.

279 information sharing, such as posters, labeling, in-store demonstrations, and other initiatives, all serve a purpose in facilitating informed food choices, one cannot ignore the indisputable fact of food costs, which remain high in spite of their function as a nutritional necessity. As part of their research into nutrition in the Northwest Territories, Steckle and Schaefer were also studying changes in breastfeeding by Inuit women in Canada’s north, as detailed in Chapter Six, which they concluded had a measurable impact on children’s health. Following her work with Schaefer, Steckle partnered with Judith Lawn to study and author a comprehensive set of guidelines on nutrition education for Indigenous communities. The 1985 MSB document, Handbook of Nutrition Education Methods Used Successfully in Indian and Inuit Communities, drew heavily from “actual success stories and represent the ingenuity and commitment of the regular nutritionists, nurses and Community Health Representatives across Canada during the period of 1981 to 1984.”1072 Thus, direct Indigenous input into the project was a critical shift in the approach to nutrition research and education methods, which the authors also recognize as an important change, writing, “These programs grew out of greater involvement and dialogue with native people and represent the current state of the art.” Further, they acknowledge the work of Indigenous organizations and individuals, such as the “people and staff of the Iroquois Lodge, Six Nations Reserve, Ohsweken, Ontario,” in building up a successful program of nutrition education methods for MSB personnel to draw on.1073 The authors pay careful attention to Indigenous voices and culture, noting that their hope is to help health professionals “to develop effective health education methods and that this will further the dialogue among native and non-native people towards a greater mutual understanding and better health.”1074 Though this is yet another handbook on how to educate Indigenous communities on self-improvement, it is significant in its approach and its great contrast against similar advice pamphlets and booklets produced in the two previous decades. Writing against the strain of

1072 J. Lawn and J. Steckle, Handbook of Nutrition Education Methods Used Successfully in Indian and Inuit Communities (Ottawa: Department of National Health and Welfare, Medical Service Branch, 1985) iii. 1073 Lawn and Steckle, Handbook of Nutrition Education Methods, iv. 1074 Lawn and Steckle, Handbook of Nutrition Education Methods, iii.

280 thinking that dominated earlier guiding principles, such as the 1967 “Guide to Nutrition Education in Home Visiting,” Lawn and Steckle offer a new direction that sought to promote and encourage Indigenous methods of education.1075 For example, they introduce their work with clear objectives to “highlight successful methods of teaching nutrition currently in use by Indian and Inuit community leaders”; “motivate community workers to incorporate nutrition education into their existing programs”; and “encourage innovative and effective methods of teaching nutrition which reinforce traditional values, promote health, self-sufficiency and community development.”1076 Of particular importance in drafting this Handbook was respect for Indigenous world views and belief systems, which the authors recognized through principles identified at the University of Lethbridge by the Four Worlds Development Project. They explain that “some of the traditional native beliefs concerning human nature and learning,” which have “evolved from discussions with the elders are founded on the oral teachings handed down from generation to generation.” Working to reflect these principles, they crafted a handbook which respects both traditional values in diverse communities, as well as those communities where “values are in a state of flux,” identifying that, in the mid-1980s, there was “a concerted effort by native communities across Canada to rediscover the traditional values and reinterpret them in light of today’s world.”1077 Expanding on this, Lawn and Steckle identified that “the most successful nutrition education programs have recognized and reinforced those values important to the native community,” and created the following list of values they felt critical to nutrition education programs: WHOLENESS. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Everything is interrelated… BALANCE. Optimum well-being (health) depends on a balance between the physical, emotional, intellectual and spiritual dimension of our being…

SELF-RELIANCE. Each individual has the capacity and responsibility to develop and realize his/her potential [and] this … is possible through learning and culture (interaction of the individual with his/her environment)…. The skills necessary for survival change as

1075 This document is discussed in some detail in Chapter Two of this Thesis. Metropolitan Health Service of Greater Vancouver, “Guide to Nutrition Education in Home Visiting,” May 1967. 1076 Lawn and Steckle, Handbook of Nutrition Education Methods, 3. 1077 Lawn and Steckle, Handbook of Nutrition Education Methods, 4.

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the environment changes [and…] new skills are needed to survive in today’s society [including those] related to obtaining proper nutrition….

SHARING. One has the responsibility to share with family and neighbours and to ensure that others are properly cared for.

CREATING A POSITIVE LEARNING ENVIRONMENT. Raising children in an atmosphere of love and freedom… Learning by watching and listening to the elders….

THE SPIRITUAL SIGNIFICANCE OF FOOD. Human beings exist in connection with all other aspects of creation; the mystery and sacredness of food; acknowledging and respecting the intricate balance which exists within nature; the wise use of food resources; understanding the healing power of certain herbs and plants.

THE JOY OF FOOD. Good food brings satisfaction to everyone. It is an occasion for celebration and social interaction.1078 In outlining these Indigenous-led principles, not only were the authors participating in the beginnings of an evolution towards contemporary Indigenous research methods, but more immediately addressing concerns around change in access to foods alongside respect for the attachments people hold to their traditional diets. Rather than pathologizing anxiety felt amidst criticisms or threats to traditional foodways, the authors assert that these feelings are a “perfectly normal response to a threat (uncertainty),” which, “unless resolved, can interfere with communication and learning.”1079 Further distancing themselves and their methodology from previous nutrition expertise, they re-evaluate and identify the role of the nutrition educator in stark contrast to those described in the 1967 “Home Visiting” guide. Instead of asserting their authority in a highly classed and gendered hierarchical order of trained expert over racialized mother, Lawn and Steckle position the nutrition educator as “an agent of change,” who should: “be aware of his/her own attitudes concerning nutrition and health”; “respect the experience and feelings of each member of the group”; “create a problem-posing environment by assisting the learner to clarify his/her traditional values, better understand his/her world…”; “care about the health and well-being of the learner”; “have confidence in the learner’s ability to resolve his/her own problems”; and “be a good listener [who attempts] to understand a situation from the learner’s

1078 Lawn and Steckle, Handbook of Nutrition Education Methods, 4-5. Emphasis as in original. 1079 Lawn and Steckle, Handbook of Nutrition Education Methods, 5.

282 perspective.”1080 These suggestions present critical differences in positioning from those previously used, which were widely held guiding principles behind the nutrition surveys conducted in Manitoba in the late 1960s, and also in the much larger Nutrition Canada survey, which are detailed here in previous chapters. They encourage communities to determine their health and nutrition needs and wants, and present suggestions for community members and leaders to undertake the appropriate project desired rather than have outsider experts interfere in community operations without invitation to do so. Through these initiatives that focused on learning from Indigenous mentors – leaders, mothers, CHRs, nurses, hunters, gardeners, and community members – nutrition advocates had an opportunity to become allies as they worked to understand how to better advocate with and through, rather than for, a diversity of Indigenous communities in Canada. In spite of this, experts continued to work within the existing framework that focused on fitting Indigenous knowledge and world views into the state’s agenda. In the handbook, for example, the authors employed Indigenous learning to outline how communities might operate various educational programs, including: hosting health fairs; organizing diabetic self-support groups; designing community food guides; sponsoring nutrition poster contests; writing community cookbooks; storytelling to teach nutrition; and cooking with community Elders. They detail how communities can access funding or fundraise for their project, as well as how they might evaluate the success of their project. Many of the projects outlined reflect “the current trend towards self-care,” such as popular health fair events, which present a “festive environment” that provides “a safe ground for dealing with controversial issues and presenting differing points of view.”1081 The authors suggest the events found popularity in part due to the move towards self-care as fairs have served as a fun way to educate community members on health services while “informing and motivating people to take responsibility for their own health.” This illustrates the somewhat complicated relationship to self-care, which was frequently linked to movement towards self-

1080 Lawn and Steckle, Handbook of Nutrition Education Methods, 7. 1081 Lawn and Steckle, Handbook of Nutrition Education Methods, 17.

283 government by the state as well as Indigenous leaders.1082 However, the authors also sought to understand Indigenous health and healing as well as the structuralist forces at play in the lives of the people they served. Further, it is important to recognize that, in the moment of movement towards what many Indigenous communities were actively working, self- empowerment initiatives continued to be embraced as part of an overall process of self- governance. Fairs in particular serve as a useful example of Indigenous community-led initiatives, according to the handbook, as the goals of the event will reflect a community’s “needs, interests and resources,” and fairs tend to be organized by the CHR and a committee of local people. Drawing on the experiences of Indigenous communities, such as those detailed earlier in this chapter, the authors recognize the importance of community involvement and support for such an initiative. For example, the Spanish River Health Fair involved the community’s Recreation Committee, who organized fitness activities including bike races and horseshoe throwing, while the Band Council and Police Committee organized a lunch a supper with assistance from the Community Health Nurse.1083 They write that once the community has identified goals, a theme, and other operational aspects, outside groups might be invited to participate where appropriate (such as the Canadian Diabetes Organization or Cancer Society). The authors recommended fairs be planned for a time convenient to the community, such as early spring before ‘breakup’, or in agricultural communities during the fall harvest.1084 In designing a health fair, they suggested including successful and popular activities such as workshops, health screening or assessments and fitness testing, food and entertainment, as well as nutrition displays and demonstrations. They identify successful displays as those that “focus on nutritious foods, traditional food, gardening and food preservation; the advantages of breastfeeding; infant feeding, diabetes, making nutritious lunches and wok cooking.”1085 As

1082 The Handbook often embraces the individualist approach to nutrition and health promoted by Lalonde’s “A New Perspective on the Health of Canadians” working document, and Bégin’s policies that take up this language in introducing the revised Indian Health Policy, See previous chapter. 1083 Lawn and Steckle, Handbook of Nutrition Education Methods, 18. 1084 Lawn and Steckle, Handbook of Nutrition Education Methods, 19. 1085 Lawn and Steckle, Handbook of Nutrition Education Methods, 20.

284 shown in the examples of fairs earlier in this chapter, games “like Nutrition Bingo with fun prizes such as vegetable seeds, herbal teas, or samples of wild rice are very popular.” The “most informative and popular” display, according to the authors, was the Traditional Food exhibit. This could include posters, bar graphs, as well as cooking and preserving demonstrations that feature, for example, “bannock, corn soup, ooligan grease drying fruit, fish, fish chowder,” along with the distribution of native food samples like berries, nuts, fruits, roots, and so on. As with so much nutrition literature, the authors conclude, “[a]lways remember to keep it fun so that it will generate good feelings in the community,” as happiness and good nutritional health continued to be equated in this period.1086 One of the interesting opportunities the authors explore, and which illustrates what communities themselves found a useful and engaging project, is the writing of a community cookbook. In the early 1980s, as the authors share, “a number of native groups have published community cookbooks. For some, like the Native Women’s Association of the Northwest Territories, a cookbook served a very special need.” They explain that while many of the older women in the community wished to bake breads and other items to save on food costs, they were unable to learn these skills due to limited ability to read English. Thus, the Association “designed a unique cookbook using very simple English and symbols to represent different ingredients and steps in food preparation.”1087 Other groups at the time were engaged in such projects as a means to preserve “traditional recipes and methods of food preservation.” As Lawn and Steckle explain, the Native Women’s Association of the NWT received funding from the Summer Canada Student Employment program, and costs of publishing the finished cookbook ($3,000) were covered by DIAND. They reported that the cookbook was “being sold at $5.00 a copy to help recover some of the expenses.”1088 Another project that works to promote a social and cultural connection in communities is the proposed Cooking With the Elders project, which is illustrated through a program started on Six Nations Reserve (Ohsweken, Ontario), where youth interact with elders in the community, helping with errands, reading to them, playing games together, and accompanying

1086 Lawn and Steckle, Handbook of Nutrition Education Methods, 21. 1087 Lawn and Steckle, Handbook of Nutrition Education Methods, 37. 1088 Lawn and Steckle, Handbook of Nutrition Education Methods, 37.

285 them on walks. According to the authors, “the activity they enjoy most is working side by side with the residents as they prepare the weekly meal for the staff,” through which “residents are eating better and the youngsters are learning about cooking, particularly about traditional native foods.”1089 They explain: The elders represent a valuable and, at times, an untapped resource in any nutrition education program. Their knowledge of traditional foods, how they were harvested or hunted, the special methods of food preparation and preservation should not be lost to the next generation. Their knowledge is based on thousands of years of experience, and the skills they developed still have meaning today.1090 In another Indigenous-led program, storytelling is part of the process of educating youth in food and nutrition through sharing traditional stories. The authors show how the tale of Nanabash [sic] and the Stranger by John McLeod can be “a fine example of teaching nutrition through storytelling,” as through Nanabush, “the mythical figure of Ojibway legends, the diabetic learns that he can control the stranger ‘diabetes’.”1091 In developing this program, the handbook asserts that community members who are storytellers should be approached as an important resource in educating other community members. More formal efforts at generating hybrid models of good nutrition that married Indigenous foodways to Canadian nutritional science were also being structured into teaching curriculum. In 1981, the Medical Services Branch published Nutrient Bar Graphs: A Teaching Aid to learn the Value of Native Foods, as “teaching materials for Indian and Inuit nutrition education programs.”1092 The Branch Nutrition Newsletter reported in 1982 that the bar graphs, “showing the nutrient value of native foods, have been published to use in comparison with nutrient bar graphs for store foods, produced by the Ontario Milk Marketing Board and Fédération des Producteurs de lait du Québec.” The package, available as of 1981, “includes bar graphs and nutrient values of native foods, bar graphs for store foods, known nutrient values of

1089 Lawn and Steckle, Handbook of Nutrition Education Methods, 49-50. 1090 Lawn and Steckle, Handbook of Nutrition Education Methods, 49. 1091 Lawn and Steckle, Handbook of Nutrition Education Methods, 51. On Nanabush, also Nanabozho or Nenaboozhoo, and Anishinaabe creation stories, see Isaac Murdoch, The Trail of Nenaboozhoo: and Other Creation Stories, Christi Belcourt, ed. (Neyaashiinigmiing, ON: Kegedonce Press, 2019). 1092 Canada, Nutrition Newsletter 3, 39.

286 native foods and their sources,” as well as “teaching notes to use the bar graphs and supplementary teaching notes for native foods, together with Canada’s Food Guide.”1093 Indigenous nutrition and diets, not unlike now, were understood and treated as separate from those of ‘Canadians’. The newsletter continues: “this package has been designed for the use of Community Health Representatives working with the nurses in Indian and Inuit communities and for school teachers in native communities.”1094 The project, completed by a graduating student hired out of the Masters of Human Nutrition program at the UBC by the Medical Services Pacific Region, used graphs “modeled after those used by the Dairy Bureau of Canada and the B.C. Dairy Foundation.”1095 The pages, or ‘cards’, “provide graphic illustration of the percentage of the Recommended Dietary Allowances of the various nutrients in each food.”1096 The teaching aid consists of colour-coded sections that correspond closely to the Canada Food Guide food groups – Meat, Vegetables/Fruit, and Cereals/Fats – with Fish inserted where Milk appears in the Food Guide. The pages are printed and punched to enable easy access from a three-ring binder or similar package.1097 According to MSB, “Nutritionists from regional offices across Canada have been requested to add foods common to the diets of the Native people in their region,” which facilitated creating graphs intended for national use.1098 The Nutrient Bar Graphs 1984 published version has a cover page that includes images of Indigenous foods – such as a beaver, trout, pan of bannock, and dandelions – and simple, black and white, illustrated imagery is used throughout. Additional examples of food choices from the four sections with suggested preparation methods that appear alongside some of the options include: from Meats, moose, black bear, deer, and animal blood; eel, clams, haddock, and fish head soup from the Fish group; vegetables like cabbage, carrots, and fiddleheads, or fruits such as crabapples, red currants, and canned tomatoes; along with the additional Fats

1093 Canada, Nutrition Newsletter 3, 39. 1094 Canada, Nutrition Newsletter 3, 39. 1095 Canada, Nutrition Newsletter 2, 34. 1096 Canada, Nutrition Newsletter 2, 34. 1097 Canada, Nutrient Bar Graphs: A Teaching Aid to Learn the Value of Native Foods (Ottawa: Health and Welfare Canada, Medical Services Branch, 1984). 1098 Canada, Nutrition Newsletter 2, 34.

287 category to include nutrient-rich goose fat, ooligan grease, and seal fat. The MSB intended the package to “provide nutrient information so that informed choices can be made in the selection of either store foods or native foods, or both, for a well-balanced diet.”1099 The Branch invited an evaluation of the Nutrient Bar Graphs and shared some responses from Manitoba in their Nutrition Newsletter. Of those surveyed, only four had used the materials as teaching aids, while seven had not. Of those who used the package, one reported using it “in the Nutrition part of a community Health Workshop”; one reported referring other professionals to the materials “as a resource aid – they were unaware of existence of these”; “Field staff were shown the bar graphs and made aware of the fact that they were available and useful in remote communities”; and lastly, they were shared with teachers who found the package ‘fascinating’.1100 Despite this, some reported that the other educators were using the materials in community schools, while others were presently studying the package to implement using it in the future. In addition, the survey invited suggestions for bar graphs on an additional ten foods. Reponses included “Pemmican (dried meat pounded with melted fat),” Porcupines, Cheez Whiz Spread, Baby foods in jars, V-8 Juice, and Pilot Biscuits.1101 Like the nutrition contests of 1983, the Nutrient Bar Graphs package presents a hybrid model of Canada’s nutrition model as prescribed in the omnipotent yet ever-changing Food Guide, where Indigenous diets and community foods were fit into the scientific model of nutrition demanded by MSB. Here, Indigenous foods were given legitimacy by being scrutinized and manipulated into measurable nutrient-based data. Other evidence in Lawn and Steckle’s handbook that the shift towards Indigenous-led nutrition education programs was being taken seriously by the MSB is the section on designing community food guides. The impact of the handbook on Indigenous educational materials has continued to be evident in the ongoing production of community food guides, many in Indigenous languages, as well as the more recent formalization of a national Indigenous food guide that has its roots in this period.

1099 Canada, Nutrition Newsletter 3, 39. 1100 Canada, Nutrition Newsletter 4, 12. 1101 Canada, Nutrition Newsletter 4, 12.

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Informed by literature and experiences from the early to mid-1980s when it was first compiled, the Native Foods and Nutrition reference manual, published first in 1985 then revised by DNHW in 1995, takes the handbook’s suggestion of collaboratively compiling a food guide relevant to community members.1102 The illustrated manual, the cover of which depicts Indigenous world views through a watercolour painting by artist Richard Hill, includes extensive materials and photographs outlining Indigenous foods, their availability and traditional use by region and community, and their nutritional value as calculated for the also updated Nutrient Bar Graphs. Resources, both national and regional, for nutrition and support, charts and graphs, menu suggestions, histories of traditional foods, promotion of breastfeeding, and an extensive bibliography present a thorough manual for those involved in educating Indigenous and non- Indigenous peoples in the range of cultures and foodways across Canada. Accompanying photographs throughout the manual depict women, men, and children of all ages engaged in food preparation, including collecting berries, gardening, catching and preparing fish, hunting, harvesting wild rice, as well as Indigenous CHRs, nutritionists, and others in meetings or consultations concerning nutrition education. Other images show people at grocery stores or food cooperatives, at community events like powwows, or in teaching and learning moments in different communities. In the guide, in addition to contributions from Indigenous community leaders across the country, it comes as no surprise that MSB thanks Judith Lawn for her “research and revision of the manuscript,” while also recognizing Dr. Jean Steckle “for her continued leadership in the field of native nutrition.”1103 Although their influence and work on realizing these projects was appreciated by community leaders and members, and making Indigenous resources part of the recognized and legitimized nutrition education standards was and remains an important project, it is curious that these MSB employees continued to be so heavily involved in what were presented as Indigenous community projects. The impetus for such initiatives – conceived

1102 Canada, Department of National Health and Welfare, Medical Services Branch, Native Foods and Nutrition Rev. Ed. (Ottawa, ON: Minister of Supply and Services Canada, 1995). 1103 Canada, Native Foods and Nutrition, 3.

289 of in the handbook as community-driven but carried out here as part of the national nutrition agenda – thus becomes unclear when MSB continued to take the lead in these projects. By the end of the 1970s and into the 1980s, while experts like Schaefer placed increased emphasis on the role of Indigenous foodways, communities increasingly found their resources contaminated. According to the DNHW 1978-79 Annual Report, mercury contamination in Indigenous foods was under investigation. They reported that “Health education programs have continued in native communities, to alert Inuit and Indian people, where applicable, to the potential danger of consuming certain traditional foods, and to assist the community in modifying eating patterns.”1104 Mercury poisoning occurs in individuals and communities when fish from contaminated waters are consumed, with contamination introduced primarily from pulp and paper industries. For example, near Dryden, in northwestern Ontario, mercury- contaminated industrial effluents released into the Wabigoon-English River system transformed into easily absorbed methyl mercury.1105 While no longer used by 1970, elevated levels of the metal continue to contaminate waterways. DNHW elaborate that McGill University had undertaken an “extensive epidemiological survey of the effects of mercury on the health of northern Quebec Cree,” which was carried out with DNHW funding with support from the Ministére des affaires sociales du Québec and the Donner Canadian Foundation. Through this and other surveys and research, they hoped to “define the health hazard due to environmental methylmercury in the unique exposure pattern seen in native people in Canada.”1106 In 1978, The Indian News reported: “Nearly one-third of 1,289 persons tested in 33 communities, mainly Indian reserves, for February and March had abnormally high levels of methyl mercury in their bloodstream.”1107 They elaborated to share that “404 persons had mercury blood levels of 20 parts per billion (PPB) or higher. Zero to 19 PPB is considered the normal range,” and NIB researchers “consider continuing levels of 50PPB or higher critical,” as irreversible mercury poising, or Minimata Disease, “attacks the brain and nervous system.”

1104 Canada, Department of National Health and Welfare Annual Report, for the Fiscal Year Ended March 31, 1979 (Ottawa, ON, Minister of Supply and Services Canada, 1979), 10. 1105 The Indian News 21, no. 4 (July 1980), 1. 1106 Canada, Department of National Health and Welfare Annual Report, for the Fiscal Year Ended March 31, 1979 (Ottawa, ON, Minister of Supply and Services Canada, 1979), 10. 1107 The Indian News 19, no. 4 (1978), 3. Reporting on data from DNHW.

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Sixteen of these individuals had levels in excess of 100PPB, while five were above 210PPB, primarily from Grassy Narrows, Ontario.1108 A $300,000 federal/provincial study of contamination in the Wabigoon-English River System, begun in 1978 and projected to continue through 1984, tentatively proposed possibly damaging methods of removal of the mercury- contaminated Clay Lake and river system, recommending that “fish with mercury concentrations over 1.5 parts per million should not be consumed in any amount.”1109 By 1980, over a decade after “mercury poisoning was identified as a serious health hazard,” The Indian News reported that residents of Whitedog and Grassy Narrows continue to eat contaminated fish.”1110 According to a federal report, blood levels of 100PPB methyl mercury continued to be recorded in residents of Grassy Narrows. Whitedog’s Chief argued that, although everyone knows the problem exists, “no doctor has said this person or that person has a disease as a result of mercury,” making residents “apathetic about the whole thing.” Residents like Bill Fraser also point to the economic ramifications of having industry decimate an essential source of food, questioning why tourists to the region were allowed to catch and eat fish while Indigenous locals were warned against doing so: “When we were fishing we never drew welfare. Now we have to.”1111 In spite of the warnings and measured data on mercury contamination, Indigenous communities in this and other regions continued to include ‘country foods’ in their diets, while some health and nutrition experts continued to advocate for Indigenous foodways. For example, Native Foods and Nutrition promotes the nutritional value of fish, highlighting the many varieties consumed both traditionally and amongst contemporary Indigenous communities, and illustrating through the Nutrient Bar Graphs that fish and shellfish are good sources of protein, vitamins, and minerals while “generally low in fat.”1112 With this

1108 The Indian News 19, no. 4 (1978), 3. On the impact of mercury exposure and contamination, see also Brittany Luby, “From Milk-Medicine to Public (Re)Education Programs: An Examination of Anishinabek Mothers’ Responses to Hydroelectric Flooding in the Treaty #3 District, 1900-1975,” Canadian Bulletin of Medical History 32, no. 2 (2015): 363-89. 1109 The Indian News 21, no. 4 (July 1980), 1. 1110 The Indian News 21, no. 1 (April 1980), 3. 1111 The Indian News 21, no. 1 (April 1980), 3. 1112 Canada, Native Foods and Nutrition, 35.

291 recommendation, however, comes a warning: “In some areas of Canada where the lakes and rivers have been exposed to industrial pollution, certain varieties of fish (particularly large fish, bottom-feeders) may contain high levels of mercury or other toxic chemicals.”1113 Drawing on environmental studies published in 1987, the guide explains that those living in such regions “are generally advised to cut down on eating fish and pregnant women may be advised not to eat fish from these areas.” The guide also encourages ‘Traditional Use and Nutritional Value of Game’, especially organ meats, comparing them to “modern domestic animals such as beef and pork, or their products,” and asserting that “most wild game is approximately 50% higher in most other nutrients.”1114 As with fish, the guide warns of possible contamination: “The liver of wild game in some regions of Canada (eg. Quebec and Ontario) may be contaminated with heavy metals such as cadmium and no longer safe to eat.” Further, “Polychlorinated biphenols (PCB’s [sic]), an industrial waste product, which may be cancer-causing, have now been detected in the fat of whale and seal in the Arctic region.”1115 Steckle and Schaefer’s research in particular argued strongly against the “[u]nfortunate publicity, including inaccurate, exaggerated and misleading statements in the media about mercury levels found in sea mammals and in Inuit hair,” which they lamented “have contributed to the trend of diminished consumption of seal meat and organs by Inuit.”1116 They explain that the issue “has also raised moral questions in the minds of many concerned agency officials as to the advisability of embarking on schemes to encourage greater consumption of sea mammals,” in the midst of government warnings “being issued against more than occasional consumption of such food; and when commercial enterprises such as the muktuk cannery at Rankin Inlet have been shut down, albeit without sound reasoning.”1117 Steckle and Schaefer view this as an overblown public health crisis response by a culturally unaware government:

1113 Canada, Native Foods and Nutrition, 36. 1114 Canada, Native Foods and Nutrition, 34. 1115 Canada, Native Foods and Nutrition, 34. This again draws on environmental studies from 1987. See ‘Bibliography’, 114. 1116 Steckle and Schaefer, Dietary Habits and Nutritional Base, 24. 1117 Steckle and Schaefer, Dietary Habits and Nutritional Base, 24.

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Epidemiological and experimental research conducted by ourselves and others failed to find any clinical or morphological evidence of mercury toxicity from consumption of seal meat and liver in much larger amounts than used in recent or even historical times; and there is ample evidence that mercury concentration in Arctic water and sea life may have been essentially unchanged since ancient times when sea mammal consumption by Inuit was manifold that of today!1118 As Schaefer notes, most older Inuit in the period, “upset by premature warnings issued in recent years against consumption of sea mammals,” shared a ‘common sense reaction’ that, if seals have not changed their diet, and eating them in much larger numbers did not harm the previous generation, they questioned “how could it harm us?”1119 While not a scientific response, and part of a controversial debate in the period, Schaefer and Steckle respect the “long-term experience and convictions” of the Inuit, which “contradict premature assumptions that mercury in seal meat would constitute a potential health hazard.”1120 They do so with the aim of working towards healing the ‘social, mental and physical ill health’ damaged by the impact of colonialism. In addition to contamination concerns, Geographer Robert Bone’s study of “Changes in Country Food Consumption,” prepared for DIAND as part of the monitoring program connected to the Norman Wells Oilfield and Pipeline Project, highlights the continuing impact of natural resource extraction and development on Indigenous lands and peoples. Concurrent with research and education programs led by leading nutrition experts like Schaefer, Steckle, and Lawn, along with Indigenous efforts at working towards food security often through an Indigenous approach to foodways and healing, the Norman Wells and other similar projects, including hydroelectric dams in Manitoba, were shaping Indigenous access to foods and health services. Highlighting these issues of access and consumption, and how peoples in regions under natural resource development were engaging with newly introduced consumer options, Bone’s extensive study provides further evidence of Schaefer and Steckle’s conclusions, indicating increased consumption of, and even reliance on country foods. By surveying the Northwest Territories communities of Norman Wells, Fort Norman, Wrigley, and Fort Simpson

1118 Steckle and Schaefer, Dietary Habits and Nutritional Base, 24. Emphasis in original. 1119 Steckle and Schaefer, Dietary Habits and Nutritional Base, 25. 1120 Steckle and Schaefer, Dietary Habits and Nutritional Base, 25.

293 for country food consumption in 1982, 1984, and 1985, Bone attempted to assess the socioeconomic impact of the Oilfield expansion project by collecting comparative data on the pre- construction phase, construction phase, and finally post-construction phase.1121 Bone quickly concluded that Indigenous households in the region consumed considerably higher amounts of country foods than their non-Indigenous neighbours, noting a “wide variation in the use of country food” that most Indigenous households used in equal amount to store-bought foods.1122 While some families surveyed used very little country food, with others having it account for nearly all of their dietary makeup, Bone echoed former NWT Minister of Renewable Resources Nellie Cournoyea’s assertion that it was “at the base of the economy for local people,” but also recognized that social and cultural reasons impacted the ‘popularity’ of country foods in the region’s Dene, Inuit, and Métis families. Key factors expressed by Indigenous survey participants included: 1. harvesting country food … is a traditional activity with powerful cultural connections; 2. a preference for wild game and fish … over similar store products; 3. the satisfaction and sense of independence derived from being in command of a useful enterprise; 4. the high cost of fish, meat and poultry products in the local stores coupled with low incomes for the average native family; 5. the practice of living off the land when trapping or residing at a bush camp; 6. the central role of country food in the practice of ‘sharing’; and 7. the pleasure and prestige of hunting big game/mammals.1123 Similar to Schaefer’s research, the role of country foods in social and cultural exchanges, as well as the sense of emotional and community well-being these exchanges generate, cannot be overlooked, as food is more than simply its nutritional value. Moreover, in hearings leading up to the government’s approval of the Oilfield project, local Chiefs expressed concerns that “the land had to be protected since it was ‘their bank’ and ensured their survival.”1124 According to Bone, the federal and territorial governments both recognized the importance of country

1121 Bone, Changes in Country Food Consumption, iii. 1122 Bone, Changes in Country Food Consumption, 1. 1123 Bone, Changes in Country Food Consumption, 1-2. 1124 Bone, Changes in Country Food Consumption, 2.

294 foods, and during the period offered support and subsidies to, for example, purchase snowmobiles for hunting or trapping, as well as the “building of community freezers” and “organizing of caribou hunts by bands.”1125 Further government support was available through the NWT outpost camp program, the GNWT community harvesters assistance program, which provided financial support for Indigenous resource harvesters. Like Schaefer, he asserts the centrality and significance of sharing and exchange for harvesters within the community. Through his study, Bone explored local leaders’ concerns over whether the Norman Wells project would have ‘potentially disruptive effects’ on traditional harvesting activities. In each of the household surveys, he asked the identical question: “How much of your household food is country food?” for which he reports an ‘excellent’ response rate (92.9% in 1982, and 99.8% in 1985).1126 Statistically, he reports that based on the responses “from 318 heads of household,” the majority of respondents (52.5%) indicated that their diets were comprised of at least forty percent country food.1127 Of interest in his study is that, overall, there was an ‘upward shift’ reported in country food use from 1982 to 1985, particularly evident in the percentage of low consuming households, which declined by 6.2 percent, while the responses in the range of medium use categories each increased.1128 It is also important to note the distinctions Bone clarifies between the four differently composed and situated communities. For example, Norman Wells residents were the lowest users of country foods, while Wrigley’s use was exponentially higher.1129 Bone’s conclusion, that “the higher percentage of native people in a community, the greater should be the use of country food in the diet of all the residents,” is supported by his statistics on Norman Wells low use of country foods, where there was a high population of non-Indigenous people and where “most of the native peoples are involved in the wage economy.”1130 He identifies Norman

1125 Bone, Changes in Country Food Consumption, 5. 1126 Bone, Changes in Country Food Consumption, 7-8. 1127 Bone, Changes in Country Food Consumption, 9. 1128 Bone, Changes in Country Food Consumption, 10-11. See Figure I at the end of this chapter. Note that Bone’s data reflects both Indigenous and non-Indigenous consumers in the region. 1129 Bone, Changes in Country Food Consumption, 14. 1130 Bone, Changes in Country Food Consumption, 15.

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Wells’ unique makeup as “a southern style community”: much rapidly developing infrastructure, a newly arrived and largely non-Indigenous population (roughly eighty-percent non-Indigenous residents), and high accessibility to store foods and fast-food or restaurant outlets.1131 Bone also makes an important and striking distinction between the response rate of Indigenous households in the different surveys of Norman Wells residents: “a much larger number of native families participated in the 1985 survey than in the 1982 one (6 households to 33).”1132 This begs the question of why so many people actively participated in 1985, after so few responded in 1982, the year the project was just getting underway. Were respondents participating, increasing their use and consumption of Indigenous foods, or possibly claiming to do so, to indicate a commitment to keeping resources safe? Bone neglects to query this striking difference in response rates, which reads as a form of political engagement or even protest against a feared impact on essential foodways and cultural practices. Beyond a brief mention of concerns voiced by local Chiefs, Bone also ignored the contemporary debates, active land claims, and vocal protests led by George Erasmus of the Dene Nation, who in 1980 “issued a warning that the proposed Norman Wells pipeline in the [NWT] will be ‘built over Dene bodies’.”1133 According to The Indian News, Erasmus implored Marc Lalonde, then Energy Minister: “People are going to die if that pipeline is built.” At the time, the Dene Nation of the Mackenzie Valley included roughly 12,000 people, and Erasmus argued that building the pipeline to connect oil found in the Beaufort Sea to Norman Wells “would hurt Aboriginal claims the Dene will soon be negotiating with Ottawa.” Further, he explained that the Dene had “spent a lot of time and energy getting this project delayed until Aboriginal rights are protected in a land claims settlement,” for which talks between the Dene and Indian Affairs Minister John Munro had recently resumed after being stalled for two years.1134

1131 Bone, Changes in Country Food Consumption, 16. 1132 Bone, Changes in Country Food Consumption, 18. 1133 The Indian News 21, no. 2 (May 1980), 9. 1134 The Indian News 21, no. 2 (May 1980), 9.

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Erasmus’ claims were not isolated, nor were the Dene’s concerns new. For example, in 1979, representatives from the Dene Nation, Kitikmeot Inuit Association, Manitoba Indian Brotherhood, and Grand Council of Treaty 9 in Ontario were forming an alliance to oppose a Polar Gas pipeline proposed to encroach on Dene, Inuit, and First Nations peoples of Saskatchewan, Manitoba, and northwestern Ontario.1135 Like the Dene in the Norman Wells dispute, the allied nations were in the process of land claims settlements with the Federal Government, and asserted that their position was firm: “no major development projects can go ahead on our lands until lands claims settlements are signed and implemented.”1136 The alliance asserted collective opposition to “any development project that ignores the legitimate rights of all our people,” arguing that, “as the original inhabitants of our traditional lands, [we] must be full participants in any decision on whether any pipelines will be built, and on what terms and conditions”; further, that the state has an obligation to fund Indigenous research into the impact of such projects, as “it is ludicrous to expect Polar Gas to protect our interests in these areas”; and that a public inquiry like the Berger Inquiry be held to provide a “chance for all the communities involved to make their views known.”1137 The alliance saw that, as with the Mackenzie Valley project, the proposed route changed, and promises of benefits such as employment for residents were “nothing in comparison to the environmental damage” and “social costs that our people will be paying off long after the pipeline is in place.”1138 As pipelines continue to be built through traditional and Indigenous lands, so do the debates about rights of use and access, particularly over the impact of such projects on safe food and

1135 The Indian News 20, no. 3 (July 1979), 1. 1136 The Indian News 20, no. 3 (July 1979), 1. 1137 The Indian News 20, no. 3 (July 1979), 1. See also The Indian News 21, no. 1 (April 1980), 1-2. In 1973, the Liberal minority Government appointed Justice Thomas Berger of the British Columbia Supreme Court to head the Mackenzie Valley Pipeline Inquiry. Berger’s Report deemed the proposed route unfeasible, recommending a ten-year moratorium on the project; however, with a revised route and ongoing negotiations, and in spite of concerns voiced by Indigenous communities and leaders, the pipeline was approved in 1981. 1138 The Indian News 20, no. 3 (July 1979), 5.

297 water resources for Indigenous peoples, which at present prove divisive positions amongst many Indigenous communities in Canada.1139 Thus, while Bone’s study provides useful evidence and details of country food use in the region, the overarching issues of land claims and usage that seem to have determined Indigenous participation in his survey project are neglected. Instead, his conclusions conveniently present a tidy approval of the project by its framing as a survey of whether or not the pipeline project has impacted the use of country foods. Through this framing, Indigenous responses suggest the impact was nil as those surveyed claimed increased use of country foods, which does not accurately show whether their availability was in fact affected in this short period studied. Through a different reading of the response rates than Bone offers, the study suggests an organized effort by Indigenous residents of the Mackenzie Valley to assert their culture and land rights through a formal and familiar means of state information and data gathering. While approaches and perspectives had in many ways changed, the persistence of nutrition surveys conducted by student researchers from outside of the communities being studied – even those that followed new MSB directives to work collaboratively with Indigenous community members – demonstrates that history is not a tidy, progressive trajectory from ‘bad’ to ‘good’ for Indigenous peoples. The 1987 breastfeeding surveys discussed in Chapter Six are an example of increased Indigenous participation in shaping what nutrition surveying might look like; however, scrutinizing the habits of Indigenous mothers continued to be considered by MSB experts a useful means of instilling ideas about ‘proper’ nutrition, eating, feeding, and wellness, which held to the language of ‘targeting’ mothers to accurately educate them, and counter the presumed misinformation provided by friends and family. A superficial reading of

1139 For further discussion, see the Conclusion of this thesis. While many contemporary news agencies in Canada and globally have regularly been reporting on these issues, for scholarly analysis see Audra Simpson, “Whither Settler Colonialism?” Settler Colonial Studies 6:4 (2016), 440-441; The Kino-nda-niimi Collective, The Winter We Danced: Voices from the Past, the Future, and the Idle No More Movement (Winnipeg: ARP Books, 2014); Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom through Radical Resistance (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017); Adele Perry, Aqueduct: Colonialism, Resources, and the Histories We Remember (Winnipeg: ARP Books, 2016).

298 the materials makes the Medical Services Branch and Department of National Health and Welfare in this period look like their employees are making some good decisions by including Indigenous people and communities into their programming; however, it seems odd to suggest including Indigenous peoples in decision-making over their bodies, their children’s bodies, and the bodies of their community members is anything other than a given. That this had to be discussed and laid out as part of the ‘evolution’ of the MSB after 1978 is evidence of the pervasiveness of colonialism and the Indian Act in not only policies but also perceptions. It is important, then, to note how remarkably similar some of the comments made by Steckle and Schaefer seem to the guiding principles behind Residential and Industrial school models only a few decades earlier. While countering the removal of Indigenous culture by instead embracing it, this was largely accomplished by fitting Indigenous foods and foodways into western scientific models. The paternalism present in previous examples of education and community health initiatives thus continued in the 1980s moment. Essentially, movement towards an Indigenous-led curriculum for children (and also adults) conveniently masks colonialism and its legacies of Reserves, flooding, starvation, as well as the Indian Act, which defines by law the very people who fall under care of the MSB. The work of the Branch into the early 1980s reflects a moment in Canadian history when the possibility of movement towards Indigenous self-governance in all areas of life seemed to be coming together. This was reflected in the movement towards transfer of health services in Indigenous communities on the prairies, along with the organization of Indigenous nurses who formed the Aboriginal Nurses Association of Canada (ANAC) during this same period. Possibility, however, was soon experienced as another case of empty (and to many, duplicitous) promises.1140 As some have argued, the project of transferring

1140 On ANAC, see McCallum, Indigenous Women, Work, and History; also discussed in the previous chapter of this dissertation. On the 1979 new Indian Health Policy and consequent transfers, see Maureen Lux, Separate Beds: A History of Indian Hospitals in Canada, 1920s- 1980s (Toronto, Ontario: University of Toronto Press, 2016), 194-195. As Lux writes, “The 1979 Indian Health Policy continues as the federal government’s guiding statement on health care. Drafted in response to the determined resistance by First Nations to the state’s continued attempts to shift responsibilities to the provinces, the policy pledged to preserve the federal government’s ‘special relationship’ with Aboriginal people.” She explains that the policy

299 control over health services to Indigenous communities, which involved state withdrawal of funding couched in terms of promoting self-governance and self-sufficiency, in reality meant releasing Treaty obligations into the hands of ill-funded and under-prepared communities who, rightly, saw this as an opportunity to improve the health of their people.1141 These are some of the issues we have to reckon with when we apply history to contemporary studies, which otherwise might appear to be moving progressively forward while, really, they are embedded in and with histories of colonialism that permeated MSB directives and continue to deny the possibility of real change.

“employs the language of self-determination in its laudable goal ‘to achieve an increasing level of health in Indian communities, generated and maintained by the Indian communities themselves’.” As noted in the conclusion to Chapter Seven of this thesis, Dave Monture believed that through this new policy, despite their denials, “there is no doubt the government is ‘moving to get out of Indian health’.” The Indian News 19, no. 9 (January 1979), 1. At the time, Monture was assistant to Noel Starblanket, then President of the NIB. 1141 See Maureen Lux, Separate Beds: A History of Indian Hospitals in Canada, 1920s- 1980s (Toronto, Ontario: University of Toronto Press, 2016), 194-195; Benita Cohen, “Health Services Development in an Aboriginal Community: The Case of Peguis First Nation,” (Paper prepared for Research Program of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, 1994); Medical Services Branch, Ten Years of Health Transfer: First Nation and Inuit Control (Ottawa: MSB, Health Canada, 1999); also the Sub-Committee on the Transfer of Health Programs to Indian Control, Interim Report (Ottawa: Medical Services Branch, March 1986), which the authors indicate was submitted to MSB in November 1985, and which provides explanation of the committee and their recommendations.

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Table IV: Sampling of Imported Food Availability and Cost, Fort Smith Region (Winter 1978-79)1142

Cost per Serving and Availability Serving Product Size Hay River Fort Smith Coppermine Trout Lake Pelly Bay

Milk, 250 ml .16 .18 .44 N/A N/A fresh homo Trimilk 250 ml .10 .11 .19 N/A N/A (83 ml undiluted) Evaporated Milk, 250 ml .34 .38 .42 O/S N/A Whole (undiluted) Skim milk, 250 ml .09 .09 .09 O/S N/A powdered (25ml powder) Dry, whole milk 250 ml N/A N/A .25 N/A .37 (25ml powder) Oranges, fresh 1 orange .27 O/S .45 .25 each N/A (180 g) Potatoes, baked 100 g .04 .03 .13 .07 N/A Potatoes, cooked 100 g .04 .03 .13 .07 N/A with peel Potatoes, cooked 100 g .04 .03 .13 .07 N/A without peel Cabbage, raw 74 g .07 .23 .23 N/A “Perishable every two months” Green pepper, raw 74 g .22 .32 .32 N/A “Perishable every two months” N/A = Not Available O/S = Out of Stock

1142 Steckle and Schaefer, “TABLE XVII: Availability, Cost and Nutritional Value of Imported Foods, Fort Smith Region (Winter 1978/79), Dietary Habits and Nutritional Base, 21.

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Table V: Sampling of Imported Food Availability and Cost, Baffin Region (Winter 1978-79)1143

Cost per Serving and Availability Serving Product Pond Inlet Pond Inlet Resolute Cape Size Pangnirtung (HBC) (Co-op) Bay Dorset Milk, 250 ml .70 N/A N/A .71 .68 fresh homo Trimilk 250 ml N/A N/A .24 N/A N/A (83 ml undiluted) Evaporated Milk, 250 ml .43 .43 .67 .43 .44 Whole (undiluted) Skim milk, 250 ml .07 .09 .17 .06 .10 powdered (25ml powder) Dry, whole milk 250 ml N/A N/A .17 .17 .17 (25ml powder) Oranges, fresh 250 ml N/A .60 each .45 each .69 each .49 each (25ml powder) Potatoes, baked 1 orange .33 .34 .18 .22 .20 (180 g) Potatoes, cooked 100 g .33 .34 .18 .22 .20 with peel Potatoes, cooked 100 g .33 .34 .18 .22 .20 without peel Cabbage, raw 100 g N/A O/S N/A .21 N/A Green pepper, raw 74 g N/A O/S O/S .16 N/A N/A = Not Available O/S = Out of Stock

1143 Steckle and Schaefer, “TABLE XVIII: Availability, Cost and Nutritional Value of Imported Foods, Baffin Region (Winter 1978/79), Dietary Habits and Nutritional Base, 22.

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Table VI: Sampling of Imported Food Availability and Cost, Keewatin Region (Winter 1978-79)1144

Cost per Serving and Availability Serving Product Rankin Coral Whale Eskimo Size Repulse Bay Inlet Harbour Cove Point Milk, 250 ml .40 O/S N/A N/A O/S fresh homo Trimilk 250 ml N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A (83 ml undiluted) Evaporated Milk, 250 ml N/A .36 .36 N/A .44 Whole (undiluted) Skim milk, 250 ml .09 N/A .06 N/A .10 powdered (25ml powder) Dry, whole milk 250 ml .16 .16 N/A .18 .15 (25ml powder) Oranges, fresh 250 ml .37 each .60 each .60 each N/A O/S (25ml powder) Potatoes, baked 1 orange .11 .16 .23 N/A O/S (180 g) Potatoes, cooked 100 g .11 .16 .23 N/A O/S with peel Potatoes, cooked 100 g .11 .16 .23 N/A O/S without peel Cabbage, raw 100 g .10 .22 .24 N/A .13 Green pepper, raw 74 g .64 each .30 1.00 each N/A .63 N/A = Not Available O/S = Out of Stock

1144 Steckle and Schaefer, “TABLE XIX: Availability, Cost and Nutritional Value of Imported Foods, Keewatin Region (Winter 1978/79), Dietary Habits and Nutritional Base, 23.

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Figure I: Comparative Percentages of Country Food in Diet ( N.W.T. Households, Indigenous and non-Indigenous: 1982 and 1985)1145

Percentage of Households of Percentage 10

0 Low Medium High

1982 1985

1145 Bone, “Figure 2: Country Food in Diet, 1982 and 1985,” Changes in Country Food Consumption, 10-13. As indicated earlier in this chapter, the figures represent consumption by both Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples in the communities of Norman Wells, Fort Norman, Wrigley, and Fort Simpson, of which Norman Wells had the lowest Indigenous population (twenty per cent) while Wrigley reported the highest (ninety-five per cent). Fort Simpson’s Indigenous population was reportedly seventy per cent of the total, while Fort Norman was ninety per cent in 1985. Bone, Changes in Country Food Consumption, 15.

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CONCLUSION

When I began work on this project, new seeds of change were being planted with respect to Indigenous-state relations in Canada. Much of the course of this thesis was framed by a handful of bittersweet political events, upheavals, and movements. For example, the Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement was signed in 2007, marking my first year of doctoral studies at the University of Toronto. When I took a short hiatus, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) began the critical work of documenting Residential School Survivor stories in 2010. Both inspired and reminded of why this project mattered to me, and after the birth of my daughter, I returned to studies at the University of Manitoba. I was fortunate to have witnessed some of the TRC’s Closing Events, including the Walk for Reconciliation, while presenting my own research at the University of Ottawa in 2015, the same year that the TRC published its Calls to Action. Later in 2015, when the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation was established at the U of M, I officially began writing this thesis, all the while informed by the work of the TRC, the survivors and their stories, and the Calls to Action.1146 While the TRC works directly to address and redress the history and legacy of Residential Schools in Canada, with which my own research only peripherally and irregularly engages, it became clear as I wrote that the magnitude and impact of the schools on Canadian history, Indigenous history, and the peoples and communities affected by this history both spanned the decades I study and shaped the lives of many people present in the histories of food and nutrition documented here. The process of actively stripping people and families of their culture and disrupting their homes and lifeways inherently meant destroying Indigenous foodways, cultural knowledge, and practices. This has created ongoing challenges not only to what is consumed, but also how food is procured and prepared, as well as what food means culturally and spiritually. For those who have sustained, and continued to share, their culture

1146 See Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, “TRC Calls to Action,” NCTR, accessed January 8, 2020, http://nctr.ca/assets/reports/Final%20Reports/Executive_ Summary_English_Web.pdf; see also http://nctr.ca/assets/reports/Calls_to_Action_ English2.pdf.

305 and traditions with younger generations, the denial and demonizing of the validity of Indigenous or ‘country foods’ by the schools and the state further generated hunger, poverty, and the current crisis of food insecurity in Indigenous communities. Understanding these issues as part of a history of colonialism as this thesis works to do responds to the TRC’s section on Health, starting with Call to Action 18: to acknowledge that the current state of Aboriginal health in Canada is a direct result of previous Canadian government policies, including residential schools, and to recognize and implement the health-care rights of Aboriginal people as identified in international law, constitutional law, and under the Treaties.1147 While this thesis is a history of food and nutrition, it can never only be exclusively about these things as they are inextricably interwoven into and of the larger settler-colonial histories of Canada (and beyond). Central to this thesis, then, is the argument that exploring food and nutrition is critical to studying colonialism and the state in Canadian history, as diet is a window into how people organize their lives and experience their cultures. Analyzing dietary histories of individuals or communities reveals the material conditions in which they live, as well as the external forces impacting what foods are available to and consumed by a given community over time. As argued, food has been inseparable from colonizing projects and related efforts at nation building, as ideas of what constitutes proper eating in Canada have historically been pushed onto Indigenous peoples, as well as newcomers, to emphasize a nutritional standard based on western foodways. Food and diet have thus also been highly political and often politicized, as the example of wild rice production from the 1970s onward well demonstrates.1148

1147 Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, “Calls to Action” (Winnipeg, 2015), 2. Accessed January 6, 2020, http://nctr.ca/assets/reports/Calls_to_Action_English2.pdf. 1148 See Chapter Three of this thesis, also Lisa Jackson, “Canada’s wild rice wars: How a conflict over wild ricing on Pigeon Lake is drawing attention to Indigenous rights and traditional foods,” last modified February 20, 2016, https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/ 2016/02/canada-wild-rice-wars-160217083126970.html; CBC As It Happens, “Wild rice harvesting causes uproar on Pigeon Lake, Ontario,” last modified August 26, 2015, https://www.cbc.ca/radio/asithappens/as-it-happens-tuesday-edition-1.3203220/wild-rice- harvesting-causes-uproar-on-pigeon-lake-ontario-1.3203499. While there are many examples of Indigenous foodways being politicized, issues of hunting, fishing, whaling, and other forms of resource extraction or harvesting by Indigenous peoples – enshrined for many in Treaty rights –

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Second, this thesis has shown that understanding the role nutrition education and standards have played historically in colonization and assimilation projects in Canada adds a new dimension to the historiography on food. Throughout this thesis, I analyze nutrition surveys of primarily non-urban Indigenous peoples conducted by non-Indigenous peoples from urban centres to explore how ideas and discourses surrounding food and nutrition have been colonized. MSB surveys conducted by summer nutrition students – who entered Indigenous communities with a set of pre-existing notions and expectations to which they held tightly – followed by analysis of the Nutrition Canada (NC) survey project – which continued on the same trajectory and seems only to have included studies of Indigenous peoples as a poorly planned afterthought – illustrate how the state worked to assimilate urban Indigenous peoples while further marginalizing those living on Reserves and in northern communities. That the MSB overlooked or dismissed Indigenous foodways as legitimate food and nutrition sources during this period also shows how they facilitated the increasingly entrenched state of food insecurity into the 1970s, particularly in non-urban Indigenous communities.1149

have been topics of heated debate, such as recent legislation related to expanded Metis fishing and hunting rights in Manitoba and northwest Ontario. See, for example, David Calverley, Who Controls the Hunt? First Nations, Treaty Rights, and Wildlife Conservation in Ontario, 1783-1939 (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2018); Paige Raibmon, Authentic Indians: Episodes of Encounter from the Late-Nineteenth-Century Northwest Coast (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005); Tina Loo, States of Nature: Conserving Canada's Wildlife in the Twentieth Century (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2007). 1149 While this project has focused largely on food in non-urban First Nations and Inuit communities, this does not preclude the crisis of food insecurity experienced by Indigenous peoples in cities. As Jaime Cidro et al write, “Access to safe, affordable and nutritious food is an obstacle facing many Indigenous people in the inner city of Winnipeg, which is known for having vast food deserts. While food security is an urgent social, economic, cultural and health issue for Indigenous people in urban areas, and particularly those living in inner city areas, there are some unique elements of food security related to cultural values.” Jaime Cidro, Bamidele Adekunle, Evelyn Peters, and Tabitha Martens, “Beyond Food Security: Understanding Access to Cultural Food for Urban Indigenous People in Winnipeg as Indigenous Food Sovereignty” Canadian Journal of Urban Research 24, no. 1 (Summer 2015): 24-43. See also Cidro and Martens, Traditional food upskilling as a pathway to urban Indigenous food sovereignty: final report (Winnipeg: Urban Aboriginal Knowledge Network Prairie Research Centre, 2015). The authors report on Winnipeg’s Urban Aboriginal Identity population in 2011: 11% (78,420) “identifies as Aboriginal, 11.5% (82,705) report having Aboriginal ancestry,” and

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Indigenous foodways and nutrition were colonized by experts seeking to fit a diversity of peoples and their cultures into a tidy survey with specific categories and questions based on western nutritional science. Documents like Andree Beaulieu’s “A Nutrition Surveyor’s Journal,” in which she casually outlines her experience leading NC’s Indian and Eskimo surveys, also reveal what one critic of such study models called “the perfect example of ethnocentrism.”1150 With the changes to food and nutrition policy tied to the new Indian Health Policy introduced in 1979, Indigenous foodways started to be taken seriously by MSB. This is evidenced by the 1981 Branch publication, Nutrient Bar Graphs: A Teaching Aid to learn the Value of Native Foods, outlining the nutritional values of a range of options identified as Indigenous or ‘country’ foods, which are evaluated alongside foods often available in northern stores.1151 Like other similar MSB projects, however, the educational guide works to effectively colonize Indigenous foodways and choices by scrutinizing and manipulating them into measurable, nutrient-based data steeped in western science. The Canadian state’s contemporary approach to nutrition policy has hardly deviated. For example, in 2007, Health Canada revised Canada’s Food Guide, and alongside the primary

breaking it down: “38.8% are First Nation, 59% are Metis, less than 1% are Inuit and 1.7% report having multiple or other Aboriginal identities.” See Traditional Food Upskilling as a Pathway to Urban Indigenous Food Sovereignty online project information, Urban Aboriginal Knowledge Network, accessed January 20, 2020, https://uakn.org/research-project/traditional-food- upskilling-as-a-pathway-to-urban-indigenous-food-sovereignty/. This is not unique to Winnipeg, but also experienced by Indigenous peoples in other Canadian inner cities with large Indigenous populations. For example, in 2016, Indigenous feminist and activist Erica Violet Lee published the piece “Feeding the Heart of the City: A Love Letter at the Closing of Our Grocery Store,” on her Moontime Warrior blog website, accessed July 12, 2018, https://moontimewarrior.com/ 2016/02/01/feeding-the-heart-of-the-city/. See also Emily Lecompte, James McKinnon, and Elizabeth Kristjansson, “Food Insecurity in Aboriginal Urban Households,” University of Ottawa, Accessed January 16, 2020, https://foodsecurecanada.org/sites/foodsecurecanada.org/ files/Aboriginal_food_insecurity_report1.pdf; Monica Sinclaire, “Barriers to food procurement: The experience of urban Aboriginal women in Winnipeg” (Master’s Thesis, University of Manitoba, 1997). 1150 Andree Beaulieu, “A Nutrition Surveyor’s Journal,” Nutrition Today 9(1) (January/February 1974). See Norge W. Jerome, “Surveyors Journal,” letter to the editor, Nutrition Today 9, no. 3 (May/June 1974): 35. 1151 Canada, Nutrient Bar Graphs: A Teaching Aid to Learn the Value of Native Foods (Ottawa: Health and Welfare Canada, Medical Services Branch, 1984).

308 document they published “A tailored Food Guide for First Nations, Inuit and Métis people recognizing the importance of both traditional and store-bought foods in contemporary food patterns of Aboriginal people.”1152 On initial examination, this presents much like the 1967 “Good Food: Good Health!” pamphlet, as well as the later Nutrient Bar Graphs project.1153 The Food Guide for First Nations, Inuit and Métis was provided in French and English like the general Guide, but also translated into Cree, Ojibwe, and Inuktitut.1154 All three of these documents include a range of foods and food preparations identified as being significant to Indigenous peoples, whether culturally or regionally based on consumption and availability. They present illustrated imagery reflecting people depicted as Indigenous in appearance carrying out activities involving harvesting food from the land, as well as animals like bison, caribou, seal, and geese that are included as nutritionally valuable Indigenous foodways in the documents.1155 Significantly, like the NC project, these separate the foodways and nutritional needs of Indigenous peoples from the rest of Canada.1156

1152 Health Canada, History of Canada's Food Guides from 1942 to 2007 (Ottawa: Health Canada, 2019), 12. 1153 “Good Food: Good Health!,” pamphlet. Canada, Nutrient Bar Graphs. 1154 Health Canada, History of Canada's Food Guides from 1942 to 2007, 12. 1155 Collecting wild rice in a canoe, cleaning a fish in front of a fish drying rack, ice fishing, and snowshoeing are some examples of the illustrations included. Health Canada, History of Canada's Food Guides from 1942 to 2007. 1156 Health Canada, History of Canada's Food Guides from 1942 to 2007, 12. While the revised 2007 Food Guide was published in English and French, and also translated into ten languages to make it more accessible, the standard Food Guide privileges and centres non- Indigenous foodways and culturally neutralizes Canadians in its depicted food options, with the exceptions that Health Canada claimed “the name of the Milk Products group changed to Milk and Alternatives to acknowledge other food sources of calcium such as fortified soy beverage for non-milk drinkers” while a “greater variety and more ethnically diverse choices of foods [were] pictured in print and web-based resources.” The cover of the printed publication depicts a rainbow image of the four food groups, still used in the 2007 publication, and shows foods such as bell peppers, broccoli, frozen bagged green beans, melon, grapes, and an eggplant; loaves of bread, boxed cereal, packaged and prepared pastas; cartons of different types of milk, yogurt, and cheese; canned beans, fresh and tinned fish, a whole roasted chicken, and eggs. The moment where this exemplifies diversity is lost on this reader, but perhaps now archived and unavailable online resources, as Health Canada suggests, included more “ethnically diverse” food choices.

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That the Department persisted in separating Indigenous peoples’ foodways from the rest of Canada for so long is confusing; however, in 2019 a dramatic change to the entire Canada’s Food Guide project and publications shifted nearly eighty years of thinking.1157 These changes reflect a significant difference in approach, as the guide is presently available in over thirty languages, including Oji-Cree and Plains Cree, Dene, Inuinnaqtun, Inuktitut, Ojibwe, and Michif, as well as Arabic, Farsi, Hindi, Korean, Spanish, Tagalog, Tamil, Vietnamese, and various other languages more representative of how Canada looks and sounds.1158 While I have criticized the state’s creation of separate food guides and literature for Indigenous peoples as an exclusionary project, the near-invisibility of Indigenous peoples in the present food guide is problematic, even irksome, in a different way. In spite of its work on being inclusionary, in many ways culture has been neutralized, with the most familiar products of a given ethnic or culture group – wild rice, quinoa, or blueberries – ignoring distinct foods, such as caribou, seal, or goose that previously featured prominently in explicitly Indigenous foodways and literature. Instead, aside from the language choices, the food guide has essentially erased all of the work done to get the separate documents produced in the first place that, although curiously treated

1157 See Health Canada, Canada’s Food Guide, accessed January 22, 2020, https://food- guide.canada.ca/en/. The previously prescribed (and barely changing) food groups, which shifted from five to four in 1977 (to incorporate the NC survey findings) simply by combining fruits and vegetables into one group, were overhauled into categories of “Food choices,” “Eating habits,” as well as suggested recipes and resources. Instead of the rigidly formed food groups, the “Food choices” are suggested through visuals, the primary image of which includes a plate filled with optimal choices shaped by their nutritional value. For example, the statement “Have plenty of vegetables and fruits” points to a grouping of fruits and vegetables – broccoli, carrots, berries, spinach, peas, potatoes, and so on – that covers half the plate. The quarter plate labeled “Eat protein foods” depicts some small chunks of prepared red meat, white meat, and fish, surrounded by nuts, seeds, lentils, beans, egg, and tofu. The final quarter of the plate is filled with “whole grain foods,” including a slice of multigrain bread, quinoa, brown rice, and at the centre is a mound of prepared wild rice. 1158 See Canada, “Food guide snapshot – Other languages,” accessed January 23, 2020, https://www.canada.ca/en/health-canada/services/canada-foodguide/resources/ snapshot/languages.html. One notable absence here is the inclusion of languages from Africa other than those of colonizing countries, thus while this change is substantial there is always room for improvement.

310 as a separate or special project, represented Indigenous voices, foodways, culture, and peoples, centering them and making them visible.1159 By making Indigenous peoples invisible in these highly used and widely circulated educational materials, which are part of school curricula as well as public health programs across Canada, the erasure of Indigeneity from the Canadian standard on food and nutrition serves in some ways to further integrationist (or assimilationist) ideology, reading as a form of colour-blindness. At a moment when the TRC is leading many initiatives towards reconciliation through recognizing and remembering the legacies of colonialism, particularly imbued with food and its many functions, the new Food Guide does the work of forgetting.1160 It also speaks

1159 The 2019 Food Guide suggestions are also summarized on Health Canada’s online resource, accompanied by a different set of visuals that link directly to information on their importance, such as “highly processed foods” linked to the benefits of limiting these and what impact each has on our bodies. Available online at https://food-guide.canada.ca/en/healthy- food-choices/ Accessed January 23, 2020. Another divergence from previous prescriptive literature and older food guides, which I make much of in previous chapters of this thesis, includes the removal of standard meal times. Instead, the suggestion that “Healthy eating is more than the foods you eat. It is also about where, when, why and how you eat” advises, “Be mindful of your eating habits. Take time to eat. Notice when you are hungry and when you are full. Cook more often. Plan what you eat. Involve others in planning and preparing meals. Enjoy your food. Culture and food traditions can be a part of healthy eating. Eat meals with others.” Under the following suggestion, to “Make a habit to eat a variety of healthy foods each day,” Health Canada explains: “Eat plenty of vegetables and fruits, whole grain foods and protein foods. Choose protein foods that come from plants more often. Choose foods with healthy fats instead of saturated fat. Limit highly processed foods. If you choose these foods, eat them less often and in small amounts. Prepare meals and snacks using ingredients that have little to no added sodium, sugars or saturated fat. Choose healthier menu options when eating out. Make water your drink of choice. Replace sugary drinks with water. Use food labels. Be aware that food marketing can influence your choices.” Finally, having done away with intensive milk marketing influence on the guide, for which Health Canada was criticized for being too heavily guided by various agricultural industries rather than the science behind nutrition, the present guide (which also has its critics) suggests to “Make water your drink of choice.” See also Daniel Schwartz, “The politics of food guides: First guide, Canada's Official Food Rules, released 70 years ago,” CBC News, last updated August 3, 2012, https://www.cbc.ca/news/health/the- politics-of-food-guides-1.1268575; also The National, “The politics behind Canada's revamped food guide,” CBC News, last updated January 7, 2019, https://www.cbc.ca/news/thenational/it- s-been-politicized-beyond-belief-the-politics-behind-canada-s-food-guide-1.4969476. 1160 While Ian Mosby and Tracey Galloway speak to only a small part of the picture, their point regarding the long-term impact of Residential Schools in particular should not be ignored:

311 to the ongoing issue outlined throughout this thesis, which raises a series of questions, including: who is generating Indigenous nutrition policy, who is carrying out nutrition programs, who is benefitting from nutrition expertise, and whose voices are being recognized in state nutrition projects? These types of questions, which many Indigenous peoples have long been pressing, must continue to be part of the discussion of Indigenous peoples’ and state nutrition programs. In exploring how nutrition has impacted the colonization of food, this thesis highlights a moment of possibility in Canada’s nutrition history in the late 1970s and especially the 1980s. When, in the late 1970s, Indigenous peoples began asking these types of questions, communities mobilized behind the National Indian Brotherhood’s 1977 Commission Inquiry on Indian Health, which “Called on the Federal government to set aside its unilateral approach to the development of Indian Health Policy and to support Indian efforts to contribute meaningfully to such efforts.”1161 Through this radical shift towards Indigenous representation and leadership consultation in state policies and procedures relating to Indigenous health, from which the new Indian Health Policy developed, nutrition policies and programs also reflected the possibility of an Indigenous approach to, or even overhaul of, the MSB’s work. As discussed, this included extensive remodeling of nutrition education programs and associated materials,

“The possibility that generations of health practitioners and researchers may have overlooked childhood malnutrition in residential schools as one of the most important factors influencing Indigenous health in Canada should be a call to action. What does it mean when the disproportionate disease burden currently faced by Indigenous communities is, in large part, the product of a residential system that the TRC has found was nothing short of a cultural genocide?” Their argument works to undermine the focus on the racialized biology of disease, focusing instead on the material conditions created by Schools that have contributed to ongoing crises of Indigenous food and nutrition insecurity in Canada. See Ian Mosby and Tracey Galloway, “‘Hunger was never absent’: How residential school diets shaped current patterns of diabetes among Indigenous peoples in Canada,” Canadian Medical Association Journal 189, no. 32 (August 14, 2017): E1045.

1161 Medical Services Branch, Indian Health Discussion Paper (draft), 1-2. As discussed in Chapter Seven of this thesis, the Commission included representatives from provincial and territorial Indigenous organizations, and “intended to provide government with a “clearly defined, comprehensive statement of the position, concerns and priorities of Indian people across Canada, respecting all known aspects of Indian health, health care programs and delivery systems’.”

312 of which the 1985 MSB document Handbook of Nutrition Education Methods Used Successfully in Indian and Inuit Communities, compiled by Judith Lawn and Jean Steckle, presents a useful and comprehensive example.1162 While this moment was never fully realized, presently some communities have embraced the Indigenous teachings presented in MSB materials from the period. One example is the implementation of various gardening techniques to address the state of food insecurity in many Indigenous communities. For example, the Northern Village of Cumberland House Market Garden Farm and Learning Centre launched in 2012 with the “goal… to grow, process, and store quality fruits and vegetables, while introducing and managing the initial working model of a ‘High-grow’ tunnel-based garden for the community.”1163 Tunnel production, like that advocated for by Elsie Bushey in the early 1980s as documented by Steckle and Lawn, had reportedly “proven successful for 14 years on Gray's farm in Aylsham, Saskatchewan.”1164 Thus, embracing new technologies and opportunities continues to empower communities whose food costs constantly increase, while availability of foods continues relatively unchanged from fifty years ago.1165

1162 J. Lawn and J. Steckle, Handbook of Nutrition Education Methods Used Successfully in Indian and Inuit Communities (Ottawa: Department of National Health and Welfare, Medical Service Branch, 1985) iii. As I write in Chapter Eight of this thesis, the Handbook “drew heavily from ‘actual success stories and represent the ingenuity and commitment of the regular nutritionists, nurses and Community Health Representatives across Canada during the period of 1981 to 1984’.” Further, “… Indigenous input into the project was a critical shift in the approach to nutrition research and education methods, which the authors also recognize as an important change: ‘These programs grew out of greater involvement and dialogue with native people and represent the current state of the art’.” 1163 Jessica Valois and Daeran Gall, “Cumberland House grows own produce on road to self-sufficiency,” Eagle Feather News, April 08, 2015, https://www.eaglefeathernews.com/ news/index.php?detail=1191. 1164 The authors explain, “High tunnels are a metal frame covered with a single layer of greenhouse-grade plastic. The high ceilings allow gardeners to comfortable enter and tend to plants even when it's raining. Plants are grown in biodegradable mulch in the ground. Produce grown in mulch in high tunnels has extended growing seasons, more frequent harvests, higher yields, and better tasting fruits and vegetables.” Valois and Gall, “Cumberland House grows own produce.” 1165 While factors that would impact and could change costs and availability were identified in the MSB and other studies in the late 1960s and 1970s, such as those Nutrition

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The experience of colonizing food and nutrition for both Indigenous and non- Indigenous peoples remains highly classed, gendered, and emotional. As demonstrated, the workers on the ground in nutrition surveying and educational programs, as well as the majority of community members targeted as recipients of information and education, were women, specifically pregnant women and mothers with their young children and infants. Much of the health and nutrition activism in Indigenous communities was also led by women, as CHRs legitimized their work, nurses professionalized, and a range of women – from mothers and grandmothers to young women and community leaders – collaborated with predominantly female, non-Indigenous nutrition experts. Further, Indigenous peoples often found themselves voicing their activism as women, men, or young people around emotionally-fueled issues. For example, in 1968, the Native Women’s Conference Women’s Delegation, identifying itself as 210 “Indian wives and mothers,” asked that “medical services for Indian people be continued as before with the federal government assuming full financial responsibilities,” an action which culminated in a march to Edmonton’s Legislative Buildings.1166 Similarly, during the 1979 The

North Canada (NNC) and the previous Food Mail Program (FMP) were created to address, the cost and availability of foods remains high in northern communities. According to Burnett, Hay, and Chambers, The Nishnawbe-Aski Nation “commissioned its own study in 2000,” asserting that “the monthly cost of feeding a family of four in Fort Severn, located on the shores of Hudson's Bay, is $1,397.09 compared to $589.09 in Burlington [in southern Ontario].” The authors identify this as “an umbrella organisation representing 49 First Nations communities in Northwestern Ontario that are mainly fly-in or winter road access only.” Burlington, they note, reported a population of 175,779 as of the 2011 census. In 2011, when “the federal government officially replaced FMP with NNC,” which “services fewer communities and subsidises less food and other essential goods” than FMP. This, they argue, reflects “an alleged effort to target subsidies towards healthy foods under the assumption that ill-health in Indigenous communities is a function of bad food choices.” NNC, thus, “only subsidises a select list of foods deemed healthy according to ‘scientific knowledge’,” as the program has cut diapers, dental hygiene products, toilet paper, and shampoo, as well as “fishing nets, boat motor parts, ammunition, gas (things necessary to pursue hunting and fishing activities) and the rather large and ambiguous category of ‘medical devices’.” Burnett, Hay, and Chambers, “Settling the Table,” 10-11. See also Enrg Research Group, “Northern Food Retail Data Collection & Analysis by Enrg Research Group” (Nutrition North Canada, Fall 2014), https://www.nutritionnorthcanada.gc.ca/eng/1424364469057/1424364505951, last modified March 6, 2015. Again, this issue is regularly reported on by Canadian and global news agencies. 1166 Kainai News 1, no. 3 (April 15, 1968), 8. As discussed in Chapter Six of this thesis, “the Kainai News printed a protest telegram from the Native Women’s Conference Women’s

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Native Women’s Walk, whose efforts were not supported by NIB leaders in spite of their simultaneous work on health and education policies, highlighted the “problems [walkers] faced as Indian women: Housing, health, discrimination and the Indian Act.”1167 Contemporary activism that has grown from this historical moment has been similarly experienced through these intersectionalities.1168

Delegation, which challenged the government’s “meddling” in health service provisions for Indigenous peoples.” The women warned that “If we the Indian women are ignored by government we promise that extreme dissatisfaction will be organized and demonstrated within the near future.” Home Economist, Bernice Fox, reported to readers that the women delegates marched “to confront Premier Manning” about the MSB’s policy: “No doubt our show of strength was meaningful and contributed to the restoring of our health services.” 1167 The Indian News 20, no. 5 (September 1979), 1, 7. This is discussed in more detail in Chapter Six of this thesis. 1168 Amongst many recent examples, including the INM and Water Protectors movements, one that engages with the literature on anger as activism and a response to colonization, including Audre Lorde’s writing and Frantz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth, is Indigenous feminist activist Erica Violet Lee. Lee details her experience at the 2014 People’s Climate March, where she was an invited speaker. She recounts, “How frustrating to realize that this march had turned into – or forgive my naïveté, perhaps it was this way since the beginning – an event organized by liberal elites and corporate funders as a way to provide a non-threatening, controlled outlet for the anger of millions. A small steam vent for a pot on the verge of boiling over.” Moontime Warrior, “Uses of Anger: Reflections from the Indigenous Frontlines of the People’s Climate March,” accessed January 6, 2020, https://moontimewarrior.com/2014/09/24/words-actions-and-uses-of-anger-reflections-from- the-indigenous-frontlines-of-the-peoples-climate-march/. See also Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom through Radical Resistance (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017). See also Audre Lorde, “The Uses of Anger,” Women's Studies Quarterly Vol. 25, No. 1/2, Looking Back, Moving Forward: 25 Years of Women's Studies History (Spring - Summer, 1997), 278-285. Lorde writes, “My response to racism is anger. (283)” She explains: “Any discussion among women about racism must include the recognition and the use of anger. It must be direct and creative, because it is crucial. We cannot allow our fear of anger to deflect us nor to seduce us into settling for anything less than the hard work of excavating honesty; we must be quite serious about the choice of this topic and the angers entwined in it, because, rest assured, our opponents are quite serious about their hatred of us and of what we are trying to do here. (281)” She argues that anger is not the same as the hatred that fuels racism: “Hatred is the fury of those who do not share our goals, and its object is death and destruction. Anger is the grief of distortions between peers, and its object is change.” Therefore, “Anger is an appropriate reaction to racist attitudes, as is fury when the actions arising from those attitudes do not change. (282)”

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As this thesis argues, much of the formalized nutrition education material, school curriculum, and community food events by the 1980s were shifting from a top-down project to a conversation that actively centered Indigenous voices, approaches, and interests. The success and continuity of this moment was relatively contained to Indigenous-led projects in communities with large Indigenous populations, both urban and on Reserve. These successful initiatives were not the result of a return to top-down, state-driven approaches, but instead demonstrate the importance of Indigenous-led projects and approaches to food security. At present, the Council of Canadian Academies (CCA) panel on Aboriginal Food Security in Northern Canada, consequently, reported that “Aboriginal households across Canada experience food insecurity at a rate more than double that of non-Aboriginal households (27% vs. 12%, respectively).”1169 The Panel “concluded that lasting solutions require collaboration

1169 Council of Canadian Academies (CCA), 2014, Aboriginal Food Security in Northern Canada: An Assessment of the State of Knowledge (Ottawa: CCA, 2014), xxv: “Food security ‘exists when all people, at all times, have physical, social, and economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food to meet their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life’ (FAO, 1996, rev. 2009). It is based on the various pillars of access, availability, use, stability, acceptability, adequacy, and/or agency (Myers et al., 2004; FAO, 2006; RCSFS, 2012).” “Food insecurity is the converse of food security. It is an outcome of inadequate or uncertain access to an acceptable amount and quality of healthy food. It refers to the immediate inability to secure an adequate diet, as well as the risk of being unable to do so in the future.” “Food sovereignty can be understood as the ability and the right of people ‘to define their own policies and strategies for sustainable production, distribution and consumption of food that guarantee the right to food for the entire population’ (WFFS, 2001).” CCA, Aboriginal Food Security in Northern Canada, accessed January 8, 2020, https://cca-reports.ca/wp- content/uploads/2018/10/foodsecurity_fullreporten.pdf. Further, they inform: “Recent data indicate that Canadian households with children have a higher prevalence of food insecurity than households without children. A 2007-2008 survey indicated that nearly 70% of Inuit preschoolers aged three to five lived in food insecure households, and 56% lived in households with child-specific food insecurity. Preliminary evidence also indicates that more women than men are affected. See also Food Insecurity presents a serious and growing challenge in Canada’s northern and remote Aboriginal communities, finds Expert Panel,” CCA, accessed January 8, 2020, https://cca-reports.ca/food-insecurity-presents-a-serious-and-growing- challenge-in-canadas-northern-and-remote-aboriginal-communities-finds-expert-panel/.

316 and the continued involvement of those most affected by food insecurity: people living in the North.”1170 In recent years, activists have brought issues of food insecurity for Indigenous communities to the fore. In relation to the work of the Idle No More (INM) movement, a six- week hunger strike held by Chief Theresa Spence in Attawapiskat, ON in 2012-2013 raised attention to First Nations food, housing, and water security issues.1171 INM and Chief Spence’s hunger strike invoked at its core the significance of food as a tool of both colonizers and colonized to shift the balance of power, harkening to recent and much longer histories of the role of food and nutrition in colonial processes and programs.1172 Along with food insecurity, as Spence and others have demonstrated, many First Nations are in an ongoing struggle for clean water. Members of the Shoal Lake 40 First Nation, in Southeast Manitoba and Northwest Ontario, have been under a boil water advisory since 1997, “hauling in drinking water from Kenora” while they live on the Lake that provides tapwater to the city of Winnipeg.1173 The

1170 CCA, Aboriginal Food Security in Northern Canada, xxvii. Giving special attention specifically to nutrition security in their study, they explain that based on the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization, “nutrition security exists ‘when secure access to an appropriately nutritious diet is coupled with a sanitary environment, adequate health services and care, in order to ensure a healthy and active life for all household members.” Nutrition security, moreover, “‘differs from food security in that it also considers the aspects of adequate caring practices, health and hygiene in addition to dietary adequacy’.” 1171 While this protest was widely covered by news media, for context, see Audra Simpson, “Whither Settler Colonialism?” Settler Colonial Studies 6:4 (2016), 440-441; The Kino- nda-niimi Collective, The Winter We Danced: Voices from the Past, the Future, and the Idle No More Movement (Winnipeg: ARP Books, 2014); Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom through Radical Resistance (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017). Spence would again take up a hunger strike in defense of her community in 2018. See Jorge Barrera, “Former Attawapiskat chief Theresa Spence begins hunger strike over state of community,” CBC News, last updated July 16, 2019, https://www.cbc.ca/news/indigenous/theresa-spence-attawapiskat-hunger-strike-1.5213622. 1172 Lux provides one such example when in 1988, “five men from Sandy Lake First Nation,” located in the same Kenora (northwest Ontario) district as Attawapiskat, “went on a hunger strike at the Indian hospital to draw attention to years of worsening health care and deteriorating relations between First Nations communities and the Department of Health and Welfare.” See Lux, Separate Beds, 195. 1173 See Adele Perry, Aqueduct: Colonialism, Resources, and the Histories We Remember (Winnipeg: ARP Books, 2016). See also Shoal Lake #40 First Nation’s website, accessed February

317 issue of access to clean water, already present for many communities in the 1960s and 1970s, has been and continues to be inseparable from the state of food insecurity for Indigenous peoples in Canada. Because much of the focus of food security in Indigenous initiatives has included resource extraction, including hunting and harvesting wild foods and animals, the issue of food contamination that has undermined nutrition guidelines related to Indigenous foodways should be a priority for those working on food security.1174 At present, struggles over land rights and usage continue to position Indigenous peoples in a precarious state, as provincial and federal governments eschew treaties, reconciliation, and Indigenous laws in favour of economic

27, 2020, https://www.sl40.ca. The community, whose own water is contaminated with cryptosporidiosis, “a disease caused by microscopic parasites,” awaits a new water treatment facility, as “truckloads of clean water are brought into the community from Kenora.” According to a piece on the APTN online news site, “The community spends anywhere from $80,000 to $100,000 per year on water, and then gets reimbursed by the department of Indigenous Services Canada.” Martha Troian, “Waiting for a century: Shoal Lake 40 celebrates Freedom Road,” June 4, 2019, https://aptnnews.ca/2019/06/04/waiting-for-a-century-shoal-lake-40- celebrates-freedom-road/. APTN reported in 2019, “With Freedom Road also comes a new water treatment facility expected to be completed by December 2020.” Freedom Road was constructed in 2019, and finally provided Shoal Lake 40 a connection out of the community by land. See Ashley Brandson, “Shoal Lake 40 First Nation celebrates the official opening of Freedom Road”, June 7, 2019, https://aptnnews.ca/2019/06/07/shoal-lake-40-first-nation- celebrates-the-official-opening-of-freedom-road/. As Burnett, Hay, and Chambers note, under NNC, “bottled water is no longer subsidised, whereas of October 31st, 2013,” according to health Canada, “118 reserves were under boil water advisories.” Kristin Burnett, Travis Hay, and Lori Chambers. “Settling the Table: Northern Food Subsidy Programs and the (Re)Colonisation of Indigenous Bodies,” Critical Race and Whiteness Studies 11:1 (2015): 1-18. “The White Man’s Burden ‘After Race’,” 11. 1174 See CCA, Aboriginal Food Security in Northern Canada, xxv: “Food security ‘exists when all people, at all times, have physical, social, and economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food to meet their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life’ (FAO, 1996, rev. 2009). It is based on the various pillars of access, availability, use, stability, acceptability, adequacy, and/or agency (Myers et al., 2004; FAO, 2006; RCSFS, 2012).” “Food insecurity is the converse of food security. It is an outcome of inadequate or uncertain access to an acceptable amount and quality of healthy food. It refers to the immediate inability to secure an adequate diet, as well as the risk of being unable to do so in the future.” “Food sovereignty can be understood as the ability and the right of people ‘to define their own policies and strategies for sustainable production, distribution and consumption of food that guarantee the right to food for the entire population’ (WFFS, 2001).”

318 pressures and corporate interests.1175 Concerns over the ongoing development and expansion of natural gas and oil pipelines across western Canada, for example, has led to years of protest and protection by Indigenous peoples and non-Indigenous allies, as the potential for the destruction of land and waterways from these pipelines has been well established, and their placement infringes on Indigenous lands.1176 Moreover, as Raymond Obomsawin presents in his short history of plant use and availability, plants should be recognized as both food and medicine, which for he and others are synonymous.1177 At present, some communities, including File Hills Qu’Appelle (FHQ), have been working towards food security for their community with this approach. In 2019, with support from Farm Credit Canada, the community was in the construction phase of a greenhouse project intended for both food production and growing traditional herbal medicines. The project also sought “to provide job training, create jobs, and generate a revenue from the sale of the produce to local stores and restaurants.”1178 FHQ Tribal Council Chief, Edmund Bellegarde, recognized this as an “important step towards reconciliation as traditional medicines and ways of life are finally being recognized.”1179

1175 See Sarah Rotz, Daniel Rück, and Sean Carleton, “The Settler Playbook: Understanding Responses to #ShutDownCanada in Historical Context,” Active History, February 18, 2020, http://activehistory.ca/2020/02/exposing-the-settler-playbook-responses-to- shutdowncanada-in-historical-context/. 1176 For example, see Nick Estes and Jaskiran Dhillon, Eds., Standing with Standing Rock: Voices from the #NoDAPL Movement (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019); Simpson, As We Have Always Done. 1177 Raymond Obomsawin, “Traditional Indian Health and Nutrition: Forgotten Keys to Survival into the 21st Century,” The Indian News 19, no. 11 (March 1979), 4. See also his condensed version, “Traditional Indian Natural Tradition,” Canada, Medical Services Branch, Nutrition Newsletter 2 (Spring 1981): 6-9. Obomsawin, who had attended Kingsway College in Oshawa, ON, and Southern Missionary College in Tennessee, USA, completed post-graduate studies in herbal and traditional therapies, and was at the time of publication the NIB’s Health Coordinator and Chair of the National Commission Inquiry on Indian Health. 1178 Kaitlynn Nordal, “FCC, FHQ grow partnership for food security, herbal medicines,” Eagle Feather News, last update July 31, 2019, https://www.eaglefeathernews.com/health/fcc- fhq-grow-partnership-for-food-security-herbal-medicines. 1179 Bellegarde speaks to the discussion raised in Chapter Six of this thesis, surrounding the need to preserve access to medicines, both those from foods and other plants: ”Our traditional medicine people have been noticing through the years that with industry practice,

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This approach is consistent with the current movement in Indigenous approaches to health and healing, which nurse Benita Cohen identifies in her 1994 case study of the state health transfer of Peguis Health Services (PHS) to Peguis First Nation.1180 In addition to exploring “examples of some new ways of organizing and delivering health information and services in Peguis that had previously (at one point or another) been provided” by the MSB, Cohen writes that “[p]erhaps the most interesting developments” have been the “innovative programs” introduced after the transfer that the Branch historically did not offer.1181 These included a ‘Traditional Program’, which Cohen notes “was not unique to Peguis but was part of a widespread resurgence of traditional Aboriginal health care practices throughout Canada over the past decade.”1182 The early development of traditional or Indigenous medicine and healing,

agricultural practice, (and) some of the chemicals used in those processes the environmental contamination from that ... are having an impact on the natural medicines in this territory, where we gather and get those medicines. So, those medicines are not as potent in what they are supposed to be able to do in their healing aspects and that was something that was a concern for our elders and our medicine keepers. We need a space, a greenhouse. We need to innovate and adapt our traditional ways so that we can protect and preserve the healing properties of many of the plants we use in our traditional healing practice.” Nordal, “FCC, FHQ grow partnership.” 1180 Discussed throughout this thesis, the community of Peguis in Manitoba, was studied and surveyed by MSB summer nutrition students, as well as by the Nutrition Canada Indian Survey, and was also a successful farming community funded by the DIA, and highlighted by The Indian News. According to their website, “Peguis First Nation is located 190 km north of Winnipeg,” and “is the largest First Nation community in Manitoba, with a population of approximately 10,000 people of Ojibway and Cree descent.” Peguis First Nation, accessed January 16, 2020, https://peguisfirstnation.ca/about/. 1181 Benita Cohen, “Health Services Development in an Aboriginal Community: The Case of Peguis First Nation,” (Paper prepared for Research Program of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, 1994), 87. 1182 She writes: “In Manitoba it is evident that, despite a long period of active suppression of the traditional Aboriginal medical system, these practices have persisted and/or are now being revitalized in certain areas.” Further, she explains, “it appears that the increasing demand for and active use of traditional medicine is putting pressure on the western medical system to form a new relationship with traditional healers.” Cohen, “Health Services Development in an Aboriginal Community,” 87.

320 and the impact of the movement to forge new relationships between Indigenous and western medicine, has continued to make gains.1183 As communities, leaders, and the state work to find solutions to food insecurity for Indigenous peoples, it needs to be recognized that no amount of surveys, pamphlets, programs, and handbooks generated to ‘elevate’ Indigenous peoples’ nutritional status can erase the fact that the present state of Indigenous food insecurity hinges on a colonial framework that assumes everyone desires, has access to, or is working towards the same material outcomes. As this thesis has argued, not only is this simply not the case, but this misconception has guided Canada’s nutrition experts into the murky waters of cultural imperialism throughout the latter half of the twentieth century. The persistence of communication barriers in, for example, Nunavut, remain. These reflect concerns detailed earlier in this thesis, such as lack of clear labeling in stores.1184 This continues to be accompanied by inflating prices and lack of access to

1183 As the CCA reports, “Traditional knowledge has always guided the lives of northern Aboriginal peoples, and a growing number of Canadian and international community-based programs and participatory research projects are making valuable contributions to food security research.” According to the CCA, “Several Indigenous knowledge centres, networks, programs, community-based research hubs, centres for northern research, and food security organizations actively promote the integration of traditional knowledge and Western science into northern food security research. These channels, such as Food Secure Canada’s Northern and Remote Food Network, the Arctic Institute of Community Based Research (YT), the Qaujigiartiit Health Research Centre (NU), and the Nain Research Centre (NL) are important resources for current and future research and policy development related to food security and northern Aboriginal peoples.” CCA, Aboriginal Food Security in Northern Canada, xx-xxi. CCA explain: “Grassroots efforts to improve Aboriginal peoples’ health and wellness, community-led food assessments such as NiKigijavut Hopedalimi in Hopedale, Labrador; resistance to poverty and high food prices through Iqaluit-based Feeding My Family; and the national movement Idle No More, which aims to peacefully honour Indigenous sovereignty and rights and to protect the land and water. At provincial and territorial levels, Manitoba’s Northern Healthy Foods Initiative aims to build food security and food sovereignty in northern and remote Manitoba communities, and in Nunavut local, territorial, and corporate stakeholders from across the North have collaborated to draft the Nunavut Food Security Strategy. Health Canada’s Aboriginal Diabetes Initiative, the Canada Prenatal Nutrition Program, and Nutrition North Canada represent steps taken at the national level.” 1184 Canada, Northern Food Retail Data Collection & Analysis by Enrg Research Group,” Nutrition north Canada, accessed January 6, 2020, https://www.nutritionnorthcanada. gc.ca/eng/1424364469057/1424364505951#h4. As nutrition researchers asserted decades earlier, once again in 2014 experts were calling for labeling that makes clear the value for

321 safe and affordable foods in Indigenous communities, while diseases of malnutrition (especially type two diabetes and childhood obesity) are regularly declared a crisis for Indigenous peoples. Those working in food security, nutrition education, and related initiatives need to take seriously the TRC’s Call to address the history of the problem and facilitate Indigenous leaders in rebuilding the system from the bottom up to adequately and meaningfully meet the needs and demands of Indigenous peoples. For historians, this means centering Indigenous voices, writings, emotions, and research methods and ensuring Indigenous histories avoid the trap of stopping at Confederation or a modernity imagined without Indigenous peoples. Indigenous peoples, of course, have neither disappeared nor remained static over the past century, but continue to be present in their own modern lives and contemporary communities, even if these are still perceived by some as ‘unexpected places’.1185 Moreover, writing Indigenous histories as more than simply contact or culture studies complicates popular notions of agency that, while an important framework for exploring possibilities and choices, often obscures the impact of colonizing projects that undeniably shape and limit Indigenous lives. The critical 2007 adoption of Jordan’s Principle in Canada points to the importance of recognizing and rebuilding the history of colonial frameworks that for over a century shaped Canada’s health services for Indigenous peoples.1186 This stems, as Emma LaRoque succinctly

money, any Nutrition North Canada subsidy discount, food nutritional value and relationship to Canada’s Food Guide, and other relevant information regarding the items available to non- English-speaking or illiterate consumers. On earlier programs that had already established this as a barrier and even attempted to rectify the problem, see Chapter Eight of this thesis regarding the Bay Stores’ Nutritional Upgrade Program, which included a plan for clearer labeling and was initiated in 1978 in response to MSB research and recommendations. 1185 See Deloria, Indians in Unexpected Places. 1186 A “commitment that First Nations children would get the products, services and supports they need, when they need them,” Jordan’s Principle was created in honour of Jordan River Anderson of Norway House Cree Nation in Manitoba. Born in 1999 “with multiple disabilities,” he was hospitalized form birth to two years of age, when his doctors “said he could move to a special home for his medical needs.” However, because “the federal and provincial governments could not agree on who should pay for his home-based care,” Jordan remained hospitalized “until he passed away at the age of [five].” First Nations Health Authority (FNHA), “Jordan’s principle Frequently Asked Questions,” accessed January 16, 2020, https://www.fnha.ca/what-we-do/maternal-child-and-family-health/jordans-principle/faqs. See also Health Canada, “Jordan’s Principle,” accessed January 20, 2020,

322 criticized in 1978, from the state’s long-held perception and thus treatment of Indigenous peoples as ‘problems’ rather than people: Indians are not problems. We are people. The problems come from bungling, uncaring and impersonal socio-economic policies (if any) towards people who are facing unemployment, racism, poor housing, inadequate education, among other obstacles.1187 Jordan River’s story and legacy well illustrate the consequences of this approach. Creating and honouring research ethics with Indigenous peoples and communities must, therefore, ensure that any health-related projects conducted that include Indigenous peoples be Indigenous- driven and led, determined by the community rather than outside researchers, and work from an Indigenous or Indigenized model. The recent, albeit modest, gains made in the Canadian state’s approach to Indigenous health and healing thus indicate the importance of Indigenous experiences, voices, workers, and approaches to health, particularly food and nutrition, which are at the core of contemporary Indigenous politics.

https://www.canada.ca/en/indigenous-services-canada/services/jordans-principle.html. In sum, as outlined by the Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs (AMC): “Jordan’s Principle is a child-first and needs-based principle that applies equally to all First Nations children resident on or off reserve. It ensures there is no denial or delay for First Nations children in receiving essential public services that are available to all other children by having the government department of first contact pay for the service.” Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs, “Jordan’s Principle,” accessed January 20, 2020, https://manitobachiefs.com/policy-sectors/jordans-principle/. The AMC provides a much more detailed story of Jordan River Anderson’s life and legacy. Thus, part of the goal of transferring health services to First Nations has involved addressing the harms of a system divided in attempts to cut costs by splitting, and consequently dropping, necessary services. As the AMC note, “Implementation of Jordan’s Principle was identified as one of first five Calls to Action on First Nations child welfare in the final report of the [TRC].” 1187 Emma LaRoque, “Indians are Ordinary People Facing Most Unusual Problems,” Winnipeg Tribune, 16 October 1978.

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Caccia, Ivana. Managing the Canadian Mosaic in Wartime: Shaping Citizenship Policy, 1939- 1945. Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queens University Press, 2010.

Cahill, Cathleen. Federal Fathers and Mothers: A Social History of the United States Indian Service, 1869- 1933. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011.

Calverley, David. Who Controls the Hunt? First Nations, Treaty Rights, and Wildlife Conservation in Ontario, 1783-1939. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2018.

Campbell, Lara. Respectable Citizens: Gender, Family, and Unemployment in Ontario's Great Depression. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009.

Carlson, Keith Thor. The Power of Place, The Problem of Time: Aboriginal Identity and Historical Consciousness in the Cauldron of Colonialism. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010.

Carstairs, Catherine. Jailed for Possession: Illegal Drug Use, Regulation, and Power in Canada, 1920-1961. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006.

Carter, Sarah. Lost Harvests: Prairie Indian Reserve Farmers and Government Policy. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1990.

_____. Aboriginal People and Colonizers of Western Canada to 1900. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999.

_____. The Importance of Being Monogamous: Marriage and Nation Building in Western Canada to 1915. Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 2008.

Christie, Nancy. Engendering the State: Family, Work, and Welfare in Canada. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000.

Comacchio, Cynthia. Nations are Built of Babies: Saving Ontario's Mothers and Children 1900- 1940. Montreal, Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1998.

Cruikshank, Julie. Life Lived Like a Story: Life Stories of Three Yukon Native Elders. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1990.

_____. The Social Life of Stories: Narratives and Knowledge in the Yukon Territory. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2000.

Counihan, Carole. The Anthropology of Food and Body: Gender, Meaning, and Power. New York: Routledge, 1999.

Daschuk, James. Clearing the Plains: Disease, Politics of Starvation, and the Loss of Aboriginal Life. Regina: University of Regina Press, 2013.

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Deloria, Philip J. Indians in Unexpected Places. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2004.

Deloria, Philip J. Playing Indian. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998.

Devine, Heather. The People Who Own Themselves: Aboriginal Ethnogenesis in a Canadian Family, 1600-1900. Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2004.

Dickason, Olive Patricia. The Myth of the Savage and the Beginnings of French Colonialism in the Americas. Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 1984.

_____. Canada’s First Nations: A History of Founding Peoples from Earliest Times, Reprinted. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1992; 1994.

Duncan, Dorothy. Canadians at Table: Food, Fellowship, and Folklore: A Culinary History of Canada. Toronto: Dundurn Press, 2011.

_____. Nothing More Comforting: Canada’s Heritage Food. Toronto: Dundurn Press, 2012.

Drees, Laurie Meijer. Healing Histories: Stories from Canada’s Indian Hospitals. Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 2013.

Driver, Elizabeth. Culinary Landmarks: A Bibliography of Canadian Cookbooks, 1825-1949. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008.

Enloe, Cynthia. The Curious Feminist: Searching for Women in a New Age of Empire. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004.

Fahrni, Magda. Household Politics: Montreal Families and Postwar Reconstruction. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005.

Feldberg, Georgina. Disease and Class: Tuberculosis and the Shaping of Modern North American Society. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1995.

Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Pantheon Books, 1979.

Gabaccia, Donna. We Are What We Eat: Ethnic Food and the Making of Americans. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998.

Gandhi, Leela. Affective Communities: Anticolonial Thought, Fin-De-Siècle Radicalism, and the Politics of Friendship. Durham: Duke University Press, 2006.

Gavigan, Shelly A.M. Hunger, Horses, and Government Men: Criminal Law on the Aboriginal Plains, 1870-1905. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2012.

Gleason, Mona. Normalizing the Ideal: Psychology, Schooling, and the Family in Postwar Canada. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999.

333

_____. Small Matters: Canadian Children in Sickness and Health, 1900-1940. McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2013.

Hall, Catherine. Civilising Subjects: Colony and Metropole in the English Imagination, 1830-1867 Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002.

Harmon, Alexandra. Indians in the Making: Ethnic Relations and Indian Identities around Puget Sound. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998.

Harris, R. Cole. Making Native Space: Colonialism, Resistance, and Reserves in British Columbia. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2002.

Iacovetta, Franca. Gatekeepers: Reshaping Immigrant Lives in Cold War Canada. Toronto: Between the Lines, 2006.

Inness, Sherrie. Dinner Roles: American Women and Culinary Culture. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2001.

Ishiguro, Laura. Nothing to Write Home About: British Family Correspondence and the Settler Colonial Everyday in British Columbia. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2019.

Jacobson, Matthew Frye. Barbarian Virtues: The United States Encounters Foreign Peoples at Home and Abroad, 1876–1917. New York: Hill and Wang, 2000.

Jones, Esyllt. Influenza 1918: Disease, Death, and Struggle in Winnipeg. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007.

_____. Radical Medicine: The International Origins of Socialized Health Care in Canada. Winnipeg: ARP Books, 2019.

Kagan, Jerome. What is Emotion? History, Measures, and Meanings. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007.

Kelley, Robyn D.G. Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class. New York: The Free Press, 1994.

Kelm, Mary Ellen. Colonizing Bodies: Aboriginal Health and Healing in British Columbia, 1900- 1950. Vancouver: UBC Press, 1998.

Knight, Rolf. Indians at Work: An Informal History of Native Indian Labour in British Columbia, 1858-1930. Vancouver: New Star Books, 1978.

Korinek, Valerie. Roughing it in the Suburbs: Reading Chatelaine Magazine in the Fifties and Sixties. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000.

Lawrence, Bonita. ‘Real Indians’ and Others: Mixed Blood Urban Native Peoples and Indigenous Nationhood. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2004.

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Levenstein, Harvey. Paradox of Plenty: A Social History of Eating in Modern America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.

Little, Margaret Jane Hillyard. No Car, No Radio, No Liquor Permit: The Moral Regulation of Single Mothers in Ontario, 1920-1997. Don Mills, ON.: Oxford University Press, 1998.

Lux, Maureen. Medicine that Walks: Disease, Medicine, and Canadian Plains Native People, 1880-1940. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001.

_____. Separate Beds: A History of Indian Hospitals in Canada, 1920s-1980s. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016.

Mathieu, Sarah-Jane. North of the Color Line: Migration and Black Resistance in Canada. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2010.

McCallum, Mary Jane Logan. Indigenous Women, Work, and History, 1940-1980. Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2014.

_____ and Adele Perry. Structures of Indifference: An Indigenous Life and Death in a Canadian City. Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2018.

McLaren, Angus. Our Own Master Race: Eugenics in Canada, 1885-1945. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1990.

McPherson, Kathryn. Bedside Matters: The Transformation of Canadian Nursing, 1900-1990. Don Mills, ON: Oxford University Press, 1996.

Miller, J.R. Skyscrapers Hide the Heavens: A History of Indian-White Relations in Canada. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1989.

_____. Compact, Contract, Covenant: Aboriginal Treaty-Making in Canada. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012.

Milloy, John. A National Crime: The Canadian Government and the Residential School System, 1879-1986. Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 1999.

Mitchenson, Wendy. Giving Birth in Canada: 1900-1950. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002.

Morgan, Jennifer. Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004.

Mosby, Ian. Food Will Win the War: The Politics, Culture, and Science of Food on Canada’s Home Front. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2014.

Opie, Frederick Douglass. Hog and Hominy: Soul Food from Africa to America. New York: Columbia University Press, 2008.

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Parr, Joy. The Gender of Breadwinners: Women, Men, and Change in Two Industrial Towns, 1880-1950. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990.

_____. Domestic Goods: The Material, the Moral, and the Economic in the Postwar Years. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999.

Penfold, Steven. The Donut: A Canadian History. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008.

Perry, Adele. On the Edge of Empire: Gender, Race, and the Making of British Columbia, 1849- 1871.Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001.

_____. Colonial Relations: The Douglas-Connolly Family and the Nineteenth-Century Imperial World. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015.

_____. Aqueduct: Colonialism, Resources, and the Histories We Remember. Winnipeg: ARP Books, 2016.

Pettipas, Katherine. Severing the Ties that Bind: Government Repression of Indigenous Religious Ceremonies on the Prairies. Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 1994.

Pilcher, Jeffrey M. Food in World History. New York: Routledge, 2006.

_____. ¡Que Vivan los Tamales!: Food and the Making of Mexican Identity. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1998.

_____. Planet Taco: A Global History of Mexican Food. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012.

Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. London: Routledge, 1992.

Raibmon, Paige. Authentic Indians: Episodes of Encounter from the Late-Nineteenth-Century Northwest Coast. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005.

Reddy, William M. The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.

Shewell, Hugh E. Q. ‘Enough to Keep Them Alive’: Indian Welfare in Canada, 1873-1965. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004.

Sangster, Joan. Earning Respect: The Lives of Working Women in Small Town Ontario, 1920- 1960. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995.

_____. Regulating Girls and Women: Sexuality, Family, and the Law in Ontario, 1920- 1960. Don Mills, ON: Oxford University Press, 2001.

336

Shah, Nayan. Stranger Intimacy: Contesting Race, Sexuality and the Law in the North American West. Berkley: University of Carolina Press, 2011.

_____. Contagious Divides: Epidemics and Race in San Francisco’s Chinatown. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001.

Simonsen, Jane. Making Home Work: Domesticity and Native American Assimilation in the American West, 1860-1919. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2006.

Simpson, Leanne Betasamosake. As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom through Radical Resistance. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017.

Smith, David F. and Jim Phillips, eds. Food, Science, Policy and Regulation in the Twentieth Century: International and Comparative Perspectives. London and New York: Routledge, 2000.

Smith, David F., ed. Nutrition in Britain: Science, Scientists and Politics in the Twentieth Century. London and New York: Routledge, 1997.

Smith, Linda Tuhiwai. Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. London: Zed Books, 1999.

Stewart, Kathleen. Ordinary Affects. Durham: Duke University Press, 2007.

Stoler, Ann Laura. Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule. Berkley: University of California Press, 2002.

Strange, Carolyn, and Tina Loo. Making Good: Law and Moral Reform in English Canada, 1867- 1939. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997.

Strong-Boag, Veronica. Fostering Nation? Canada Confronts its History of Childhood Disadvantage. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2010.

Tester, Frank, and Peter Kulchyski. Tammarniit (mistakes): Inuit Relocation in the Eastern Arctic, 1939-63. Vancouver: UBC Press, 1994.

Theophano, Janet. Eat My Words: Reading Women’s Lives through the Cookbooks They Wrote. New York: Palgrave, 2002.

Thiessen, Janis. Snacks: A Canadian Food History. Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2017.

Thrush, Coll-Peter. Native Seattle: Histories from the Crossing-over Place. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2007.

_____. Indigenous London: Native Travelers at the Heart of Empire. New Haven, NJ: Yale University Press, 2016.

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Turner, Dale. This is Not a Peace Pipe: Towards a Critical Indigenous Philosophy. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006.

Twitty, Michael. The Cooking Gene: A Journey Through African American Culinary History in the Old South. New York: Amistad, 2017.

Tye, Diane. Baking as Biography: A Life Story in Recipes. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2010.

Valverde, Mariana. The Age of Light Soap and Water: Moral Reform in English Canada, 1885- 1925. Rev. Edition. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008.

Van Kirk, Sylvia. Many Tender Ties: Women in Fur Trade Society, 1670-1870. Revised Edition. Winnipeg: Watson and Dwyer, 1996.

Vennum, Thomas Jr. Wild Rice and the Ojibway People. St. Paul, MN: Minnesota State Historical Society Press, 1988.

Walker, Barrington. Race on Trial: Black Defendants in Ontario's Criminal Courts, 1858-1958. The Osgoode Society and University of Toronto Press, 2010.

Wanhalla, Angela. Matters of the Heart: A History of Interracial Marriage in New Zealand. Auckland University Press, 2013.

Wetherell, Margaret. Affect and Emotion: A New Social Science Understanding. London; Los Angeles: SAGE Publications, 2012.

Williams-Forson, Psyche A. Building Houses out of Chicken Legs: Black Women, Food, and Power. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2006.

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Barman, Jean. “Taming Aboriginal Sexuality: Gender, Power, and Race in British Columbia, 1850-1900.” In In the Days of Our Grandmothers: A Reader in Aboriginal Women’s History in Canada, eds. Mary-Ellen Kelm and Lorna Townsend, 270-300. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006.

Baron, Ava and Eileen Boris. “‘The Body’ as a Useful Category for Working-Class History.” Labor: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas, 4, no. 2 (2007): 23-43.

Bennett, Judith, Jacqueline Leckie, and Angela Wanhalla. “Mothers' Darlings: Secrets and Silences in the Wake of the Pacific War.” In The Pacific War: Aftermaths, Remembrance and Culture, eds. C. Twomey & E. Koh, 214-232. New York: Routledge, 2015.

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Bodirsky, Monica and Jon Johnson. “Decolonizing Diet: Healing by Reclaiming Traditional Indigenous Foodways.” Cuizine 1, no. 1 (2008). http://id.erudit.org/iderudit/019373ar. Accessed 11 February 2009.

Braunmühl, Caroline. “Theorizing Emotions with Judith Butler: Within and Beyond the Courtroom.” Rethinking History 16/2 (2012): 221-240.

Brunger, Fern and Julie Bull. “Whose agenda is it? Regulating health research ethics in Labrador.” Études/Inuit/Studies 35:1-2 (2011): 127-142.

Burnett, Kristin, Travis Hay and Lori Chambers. “Settling the Table: Northern Food Subsidy Programs and the (Re)Colonisation of Indigenous Bodies.” Critical Race and Whiteness Studies 11:1 (2015): 1-18. Special Issue: “The White Man’s Burden ‘After Race’.”

Caplan, Pat. “Approaches to the Study of Food, Health and Identity.” In Food, Health and Identity, ed. Pat Caplan, 1-31. London: Routledge, 1997.

Carby, Hazel. "Policing the Black Woman's Body in an Urban Context," Critical Inquiry 18 (Summer 1992).

Carstairs, Catherine and Rachel Elder. “Expertise, Health, and Popular Opinion: Debating Water Fluoridation, 1945–80.” Canadian Historical Review 89/3 (2008): 360, 352

Christen, Kimberly. “Does Information Really Want to Be Free? Indigenous Knowledge Systems and the Question of Openness.” International Journal of Communication 6 (2012).

Cidro, Jaime, Bamidele Adekunle, Evelyn Peters, and Tabitha Martens. “Beyond Food Security: Understanding Access to Cultural Food for Urban Indigenous People in Winnipeg as Indigenous Food Sovereignty.” Canadian Journal of Urban Research 24, no. 1 (Summer 2015): 24-43.

Cidro, Jaime and Tabitha Martens. Traditional food upskilling as a pathway to urban Indigenous food sovereignty: final report. Winnipeg: Urban Aboriginal Knowledge Network Prairie Research Centre, 2015.

Clow, Barbara. “‘An Illness of Nine Months’ Duration: Pregnancy and Thalidomide Use in Canada and the United States.” In Women, Health, and Nation: Canada and the United States Since 1945,” eds. Georgina Feldberg, Molly Ladd-Taylor, Allison Li, and Kathryn McPherson, 45-66. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2003.

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Drees, Laurie Meijer. “The Nanaimo and Charles Camsell Indian Hospitals: First Nations’ Narratives of Health Care, 1945 to 1965. Histoire sociale/Social History, 43:85 (May 2010): 165-191.

_____. “Indian Hospitals and Aboriginal Nurses: Canada and Alaska.” CBMH/BCHM, 27:1 (2010): 139-161.

Epp, Marlene. “The Semiotics of Zwieback: Feast and Famine in the Narratives of Mennonite Refugee Women.” In Sisters or Strangers: Immigrant, Ethnic, and Racialized Women in Canadian History, eds. Marlene Epp, Franca Iacovetta, and Frances Swyripa, 314-340. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004.

_____. “More than ‘Just’ Recipes: Mennonite Cookbooks in Mid-Twentieth Century North America.” In Edible Histories, Cultural Politics: Towards a Canadian Food History, eds. Franca Iacovetta, Valerie Korinek, and Marlene Epp, 173-187. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012.

Eustace, Nicole, et al. “Conversation: The Historical Study of Emotions.” The American Historical Review 117/5 (2012): 1487-1531.

Gammerl, Benno. “Emotional Styles—Concepts and Challenges.” Rethinking History 16/2 (2012): 161-175.

Gleason, Mona. “Avoiding the agency trap: caveats for historians of children, youth and education.” History of Education 45, no. 4 (2016): 446-459.

Guard, Julie. “Women Worth Watching: Radical Housewives in Cold War Canada.” In Whose National Security?: Canadian State Surveillance and the Creation of Enemies, eds. Gary Kinsman, Dieter Buse, and Mercedes Steedman, 72-88. Toronto: Between the Lines, 2000.

_____. “The Politics of Milk: Canadian Housewives Organize in the 1930s.” In Edible Histories, Cultural Politics: Towards a Canadian Food History, eds. Franca Iacovetta, Valerie Korinek, and Marlene Epp, 271-284. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012.

Haggis, Jane and Margaret Allen. “Imperial Emotions: Affective Communities of Mission in British Protestant Women’s Missionary Publications c1880-1920.” Journal of Social History 41/3 (2008): 691-716.

Harris, Aroha and Mary Jane Logan McCallum. ‘“Assaulting the Ears of Government”: The Work of the Maori Women’s Welfare League and the Indian Homemakers’ Clubs in the 1950s and 60s.” In Indigenous Women and Work: From Labour to Activism, ed. Carol Williams, 225-239. University of Illinois Press, 2012.

Hay, Travis. “The Science of Settler Colonialism: The Thrifty Gene Hypothesis and The Persistence of Nutrition Experimentation on Indigenous Peoples.” Transverse, Issue 15 (Spring 2016).

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Helps, Lisa. “Body, Power, Desire: Mapping Canadian Body History.” JCS 41, 1 (Winter 2007): 126-50.

Higginbotham, Evelyn Brooks. "African-American Women's History and the Metalanguage of Race." Signs 17:2 (Winter 1992).

Holcombe, Sarah. “The Arrogance of Ethnography: Managing Anthropological Research Knowledge.” Australian Aboriginal Studies 2 (November 2010), 22-32.

Iacovetta, Franca. “Gendering Trans/National Historiographies: Feminists Rewriting Canadian History.” Journal of Women’s History 19, 1 (2007): 206-13.

_____. “Recipes for Democracy? Gender, Family, and Making Female Citizens in Cold War Canada.” In Rethinking Canada: The Promise of Women’s History, eds. Mona Gleason and Adele Perry, 5th Edition, 264-277. Don Mills, ON: Oxford University Press, 2006.

_____. “Food Acts and Cultural Politics: Women and Gendered Dialectics of Culinary Pluralism at the International Institute of Toronto, 1950s-1960s.” In Edible Histories, Cultural Politics: Towards a Canadian Food History, eds. Franca Iacovetta, Valerie Korinek, and Marlene Epp, 359-384. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012.

Iacovetta, Franca and Valerie Korinek. “Jell-O Salads, One-Stop Shopping, and Maria the Homemaker: The Gender Politics of Food.” In Sisters or Strangers?: Immigrant, Ethnic and Racialized Women in Canadian History, eds. Marlene Epp, Franca Iacovetta, and Frances Swyripa, 190-230. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004.

Jasen, Patricia. “Race, Culture, and the Colonization of Childbirth in Northern Canada.” Social History of Medicine 10, no. 3 (1997): 383-400.

Jessee, Erin. “The Limits of Oral History: Ethics and Methodology amid Highly Politicized Research Settings.” Oral History Review 38, 2 (2011): 287-307.

Jones, Esyllt. “Politicizing the Laboring Body: Working Families, Death, and Burial in Winnipeg’s Influenza Epidemic, 1918-1950.” Labor: Working-Class History in the Americas, 3:3 (Fall 2006) 57-76.

Jones, Esyllt. “Disease as Embodied Praxis: Epidemics, Public Health and Working-Class Resistance in Winnipeg, 1906-1919.” In The West and Beyond, eds. Sarah Carter, Alvin Finkel and Peter Fortna. Edmonton: Athabasca University Press, 2010.

Kaplan, Caren and Inderpal Grewal. “Transnational Practices and Interdisciplinary Feminist Scholarship: Refiguring Women’s and Gender Studies.” In Women Studies on its Own, ed. Robyn Wiegman, 66-81. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2002.

Keane, Anne. “Too Hard to Swallow? The Palatability of Healthy Eating Advice.” In Food, Health and Identity, ed. Pat Caplan, 172-192. London: Routledge, 1997.

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Kauanui, J. Kehaulani. “A Structure, Not an Event: Settler Colonialism and Enduring Indigeneity,” Lateral: Journal of the Cultural Studies Association 5, no. 1 (Spring 2016).

Kelm, Mary Ellen. “Diagnosing the Discursive Indian: Medicine, Gender, and the ‘Dying Race’.” Ethnohistory 52, no. 2 (Spring 2005): 371-406.

_____. “Wilp Wa’ums: colonial encounter, decolonization and medical care among the Nisga’a.” Social Science & Medicine 59:2 (July 2004): 335–349

King, Thomas. “You’re Not the Indian I had in Mind.” In Racism, Colonialism, and Indigeneity in Canada: A Reader, eds. Martin J. Cannon and Lina Sunseri, 36-43. Don Mills, ON: Oxford University Press, 2011.

Kulchyski, Peter, Paule McNicoll and Frank Tester. “Arctic Abstersion: The Book of Wisdom for Eskimo Modernism and Inuit Assimilation.” Études/Inuit/Studies 23:1-2, 1999.

Lecompte, Emily, James McKinnon, and Elizabeth Kristjansson. “Food Insecurity in Aboriginal Urban Households.” University of Ottawa, accessed January 16, 2020. https://foodsecurecanada.org/sites/foodsecurecanada.org/

Lorde, Audre. “The Uses of Anger.” Women's Studies Quarterly Vol. 25, No. 1/2, Looking Back, Moving Forward: 25 Years of Women's Studies History (Spring - Summer, 1997): 278- 285.

Luby, Brittany. “From Milk-Medicine to Public (Re)Education Programs: An Examination of Anishinabek Mothers’ Responses to Hydroelectric Flooding in the Treaty #3 District, 1900-1975.” Canadian Bulletin of Medical History 32, no. 2 (2015): 363-89.

Lux, Maureen. “Care for the ‘Racially Careless’: Indian Hospitals in the Canadian West, 1920- 1950s.” Canadian Historical Review 91:3 (September 2010): 407-434.

_____. “We Demand ‘Unconditional Surrender’: Making and Unmaking the Blackfoot Hospital, 1890s to 1950s.” Social History of Medicine 25:3 (2012): 665-684.

Matt, Susan J. “Current Emotion Research I History: Or, Doing History from the Inside Out.” Emotion Review 3:117 (2011): 117-124.

Maurer, Donna and Jeffrey Sobal. “Introduction: Food, Eating, and Nutrition as Social Problems.” In Eating Agendas: Food and Nutrition as Social Problems,” eds. Donna Maurer and Jeffrey Sobal, 3-9. New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 1995.

McCallum, Mary Jane Logan. “Indigenous Labor and Indigenous History.” American Indian Quarterly 33:4 (2009): 523-544.

McCallum, Mary Jane Logan. “This Last Frontier: Isolation and Aboriginal Health.” CBMH/BCHM 22:1 (2005): 103-120.

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McCallum, Mary Jane Logan. "Starvation, Experimentation, Segregation, and Trauma: Words for Reading Indigenous Health History." The Canadian Historical Review 98, no. 1 (2017): 96-113.

Morgan, Sue. “Introduction: Writing Feminist History: Theoretical Debates and Critical Practices.” In The Feminist History Reader, ed. Sue Morgan, 1-48. New York: Routledge, 2006.

Morgensen, Scott. ”The Biopolitics of Settler Colonialism: Right Here, Right Now.” Settler Colonial Studies 1, no. 1 (2011): 52–76.

Mosby, Ian. “Making and Breaking Canada’s Food Rules: Science, the State, and the Government of Nutrition, 1942-1949.” In Edible Histories, Cultural Politics: Towards a Canadian Food History, eds. Franca Iacovetta, Valerie Korinek, and Marlene Epp, 409- 432. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012.

_____. “Administering Colonial Science: Nutrition Research and Human Biomedical Experimentation in Aboriginal Communities and Residential Schools, 1942–1952,” Histoire sociale/Social History 46, no. 91 (May 2013): 145-172.

_____ and Tracey Galloway, “‘Hunger was never absent’: How residential school diets shaped current patterns of diabetes among Indigenous peoples in Canada.” Canadian Medical Association Journal 189, no. 32 (August 14, 2017): E1045.

Nickels, Scot and Cathleen Knotsch. “Inuit perspectives on research ethics: The work of Inuit Nipingit.” Études/Inuit/Studies 35:1-2 (2011): 57-81.

Oikawa, Mona. “Cartographies of Violence: Women, Memory, and the Subject(s) of the ‘Internement’.” In Race, Space, and the Law: Unmapping a White, Settler Society, ed. Sherene Razack, 71-98. Toronto: Between the Lines, 2002.

Olofsson, Ebba ; Holton, Tara L ; Partridge, Imaapik “jacob”. “Negotiating identities: Inuit tuberculosis evacuees in the 1940s-1950s.” Études/Inuit/Studies 32:2 (2008): 127-149.

Parr, Joy. "Gender and Historical Practice." Canadian Historical Review (September 1995) 76:3.

_____. “‘Don't Speak For Me’: Practicing Oral History amidst the Legacies of Conflict.” Journal of the Canadian Historical Association 21, 1 (2010): 1-11.

Plamper, Jan. “The History of Emotions: An Interview with William Reddy, Barbara Rosenwein, and Peter Stearns.” History and Theory 49/2 (2010): 237-265.

Reddy, William. “Emotional Liberty: Politics and History in the Anthropology of Emotions.” Cultural Anthropology 14 (May 1999): 256-88.

_____. “Historical Research on the Self and Emotions.” Emotion Review 1:302 (2009): 302-315.

Ritchie, Donald. Doing Oral History: A Practical Guide. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.

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Rosenwein, Barbara. “Worrying about Emotions in History.” The American Historical Review 107 no. 3 (2002): 821-845.

Rosenwein, Barbara. “Problems and Methods in the History of Emotions.” Passions in Context I (1/2010). www.passionsincontext.de/uploads/media/01_Rosenwein.pdf. Accessed October 8, 2013. 11.

Rotz, Sarah, Daniel Rück, and Sean Carleton. “The Settler Playbook: Understanding Responses to #ShutDownCanada in Historical Context.” Active History, February 18, 2020, http://activehistory.ca/2020/02/exposing-the-settler-playbook-responses-to- shutdowncanada-in-historical-context/.

Rutherdale, Myra. “‘She Was a Ragged Little Thing’: Missionaries, Embodiment, and Refashioning Aboriginal Womanhood in Northern Canada.” In Contact Zones: Aboriginal and Settler Women in Canada’s Colonial Past, eds. Katie Pickles and Myra Rutherdale, 228-245. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2005.

Rutherdale, Myra and Jim Miller. “‘It’s Our Country’: First Nations’ Participation in the Indian Pavilion at Expo 67.” Journal of the Canadian Historical Association 17, no. 2 (2006): 148-173. https://www.erudit.org/revue/jcha/2006/v17/n2/016594ar.pdf.

Rutherford, Scott. “Canada’s Other Red Scare: The Anicinabe Park Occupation and Indigenous Decolonization.” In The Hidden 1970s: Histories of Radicalism, ed. Dan Berger, 77-94. New Brunswick, NJ, and London: Rutgers University Press, 2010.

Sangster, Joan. “Constructing the ‘Eskimo’ Wife: White Women’s Travel Writing, Colonialism, and the Canadian North, 1940-1960.” In Creating Postwar Canada: Community, Diversity, and Dissent, 1945-75, eds. Magda Fahrni and Myra Rutherdale. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2007.

Sheftel, Anna, and Stacey Zembrzycki, “Only Human: A Reflection on the Ethical and Methodological Challenges of Working with ‘Difficult’ Stories.” Oral History Review 37, 2 (2010): 191-214.

Simpson, Audra. “Whither Settler Colonialism?” Settler Colonial Studies 6, no. 4 (2016): 438- 445.

Smith, David. “The Social Construction of Dietary Standards: the British Medical Association- Ministry of Health Advisory Committee on Nutrition Report of 1934.” In Eating Agendas: Food and Nutrition as Social Problems,” eds. Donna Maurer and Jeffrey Sobal, 279-303. New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 1995.

Smith, George Davey and Diana Kuh. “Does Early Nutrition Affect Later Health?: Views from the 1930s and 1980s.” In Nutrition in Britain: Science, Scientists and Politics in the Twentieth Century, ed. David F. Smith, 214-237. London and New York: Routledge, 1997.

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St. Denis, Verna. “Feminism is for Everybody: Aboriginal Women, Feminism and Diversity.” In ed. Joyce Green, Making Space for Indigenous Feminism, 33-52. Winnipeg: Fernwood, 2006.

Steinberg, Mark D. “Melancholy and Modernity: Emotions and Social Life in Russia Between the Revolutions.” Journal of Social History 41/4 (2008): 813-841.

Stearns, Peter N. and Carol Z. Stearns. “Emotionology: Clarifying the History of Emotions and Emotional Standards.” American Historical Review 90 (1985): 813-836.

Stoler, Ann Laura. “Tense and Tender Ties: The Politics of Comparison in North American History and Post-Colonial Studies.” Journal of American History 88 (December 2001): 829-865.

_____. “Colonial Archives and the Arts of Governance.” Archival Science 2 (2002): 87-109.

_____. “Intimidations of Empire: Predicaments of the Tactile and Unseen.” In Haunted by Empire: Geographies of Intimacy in North American History, ed. Ann Laura Stoler, 1-22. Durham: Duke University Press, 2006.

Strong-Boag, Veronica. “Home Dreams: Women and the Suburban Experiment in Canada, 1945- 60.” Canadian Historical Review 72:4 (1991).

Tarlow, Sarah. “The Archaeology of Emotion and Affect.” Annual Review of Anthropology 41 (2012): 169-185.

Tester, Frank James and Paule McNicoll. “A Voice of Presence: Inuit Contributions toward the Public Provision of Health Care in Canada, 1900-1930.” Histoire sociale/Social history 41:82 (November 2008): 535-561.

Tester, Frank James, Paule McNicoll and Tran, Quyen. “Structural violence and the 1962-1963 tuberculosis epidemic in Eskimo Point, N.W.T.” Études/Inuit/Studies 36:2 (2012): 165- 185.

Thistle, Jesse. “Vicarious Trauma: Collecting the Herd.” Active History 3 (November 2015). http://activehistory.ca/2015/11/vicarious-trauma-collecting-the-herd/.

Thompson, E.P. “Time, Work-Discipline and Industrial Capitalism.” In E.P. Thompson, Customs in Common, 97-184. London: Merlin Press, 1991.

Travers, Kim D. “Do You Teach Them How to Budget?” Professional Discourse in the Construction of Nutritional Inequities.” In Eating Agendas: Food and Nutrition as Social Problems,” eds. Donna Maurer and Jeffrey Sobal, 213-240. New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 1995.

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Voyageur, Cora and Brian Calliou. “Aboriginal Economic Development and the Struggle for Self- Government.” In Racism, Colonialism, and Indigeneity in Canada: A Reader, eds. Martin J. Cannon and Lina Sunseri, 203-218. Don Mills, ON: Oxford University Press, 2011.

Walters, Krista. “‘A National Priority’: Nutrition Canada’s Survey and the Disciplining of Aboriginal Bodies, 1964-1975.” In Edible Histories, Cultural Politics: Towards a Canadian Food History, eds. Franca Iacovetta, Valerie Korinek, and Marlene Epp, 433-451. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012.

Webster, Charles. “Government Policy on School Meals and Welfare Foods, 1939-1970.” In Nutrition in Britain: Science, Scientists and Politics in the Twentieth Century, ed. David F. Smith, 190-213. London and New York: Routledge, 1997.

Zembrzycki, Stacey. “Sharing Authority with Baba,” Journal of Canadian Studies 43, 1 (Hiver 2009), 219-238.

C. Edited Collections

Anderson, Chris and Jean M. O’Brien, eds. Sources and Methods in Indigenous Studies. New York: Routledge, 2016.

Avakian, Arlene Voski and Barbara Haver, eds. From Betty Crocker to Feminist Food Studies: Critical Perspectives on Women and Food. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2005.

Bagchi, Barnita, Eckhardt Fuchs, and Kate Rousmaniere, eds. Connecting Histories of Education: Transnational and Cross-Cultural Exchanges in (Post-)Colonial Education. New York: Berghahn, 2014.

Brown, Jennifer and Elizabeth Vibert, eds. Reading Beyond Words: Contexts for Native History. Toronto: Broadview, 1996.

Brownlie, Robin Jarvis and Valerie J. Korinek, eds. Finding A Way to the Heart: Feminist Writings on Aboriginal and Women’s History in Canada. Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2012.

Burton, Antoinette and Tony Ballantyne, eds. Bodies in Contact: Rethinking Colonial Encounters in World History. Durham: Duke University Press, 2005.

Cannon, Martin J. and Lina Sunseri, eds. Racism, Colonialism, and Indigeneity in Canada: A Reader. Don Mills, ON: Oxford University Press, 2011.

Carey, Jane and Jane Lydon, eds. Indigenous Networks: Mobility, Connections and Exchange. New York: Routledge, 2014.

Cooke, Nathalie, ed. What’s to Eat? Entrées in Canadian Food History. Montreal: McGill- Queen’s University Press, 2009.

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Counihan, Carole and Penny Van Esterik, eds. Food and Culture: A Reader. New York: Routledge, 1997.

Dubinsky, Karen, Adele Perry, and Henry Yu, eds., Within and Without the Nation: Canadian History as Transnational History. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015.

Estes, Nick and Jaskiran Dhillon, eds. Standing with Standing Rock: Voices from the #NoDAPL Movement (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019.

Feldberg, Georgina, Molly Ladd-Taylor, Allison Li, and Kathryn McPherson, eds. Women, Health, and Nation: Canada and the United States Since 1945.” Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2003.

Green, Joyce, ed. Making Space for Indigenous Feminism. Winnipeg: Fernwood, 2006.

Iacovetta, Franca, Marlene Epp and Valerie Korinek, eds. Edible Histories, Cultural Politics: Towards a Canadian Food History. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012.

Iacovetta, Franca, Roberto Perin, and Angelo Principe, eds. Enemies Within: Italian and Other Internees in Canada and Abroad. Toronto: University of Toronto Press 2000.

Kelm, Mary Ellen and Lorna Townsend, eds. In the Days of Our Grandmothers: A Reader in Aboriginal Women’s History in Canada. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006.

The Kino-nda-niimi Collective, ed. The Winter We Danced: Voices From the Past, the Future, and the Idle No More Movement. Winnipeg: ARP Books, 2014.

Morgan, Sue, ed. The Feminist History Reader. New York: Routledge, 2006.

Naylor, C. David ed. Canadian Health Care and the State: A Century of Evolution. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1992.

Olsen, Stephanie, ed. Childhood, Youth, and Emotions in Modern History. London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2015.

Pickles, Katie and Myra Rutherdale, eds. Contact Zones: Aboriginal and Settler Women in Canada’s Colonial Past. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2005.

Rothblum, Esther and Sondra Solovay, eds., The Fat Studies Reader. New York: NYU Press, 2009.

Shoemaker, Nancy, ed. Clearing a Path: Theorizing the Past in Native American Studies. New York: Routledge, 2002.

St-Onge, Nicole Carolyn Podruchny, and Brenda Macdougall, eds. Contours of a People: Metis Family, Mobility, and History. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2012.

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Stoler, Ann Laura, ed. Haunted by Empire: Geographies of Intimacy in North American History. Durham: Duke University Press, 2006.

Waldram, James B., D. Ann Herring, and T. Kue Young. Aboriginal Health in Canada: Historical, Cultural, and Epidemiological Perspectives. 2nd Ed. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006.

White, Deborah Gray, ed. Telling Histories: Black Women Historians in the Ivory Tower. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2007.

Williams, Carol, ed. Indigenous Women and Work: From Labour to Activism. University of Illinois Press, 2012.

D. Theses and Dissertations

Blakney, Sherrie Lee. “Connections to the land: the politics of health and wellbeing in Arviat Nunavut.” PhD Diss., University of Manitoba, 2009.

Burnett, Kristin. “The Healing Work and Nursing Care of Aboriginal Women, Female Medical Missionaries, Nursing Sisters, Public Health Nurses, and Female Attendants in Southern Alberta First Nations Communities, 1880-1930.” PhD Diss., York University, 2006.

Grimes, Deborah. “Self-determination in health: a road to community wellness? A critical look at Island Lake's evolving model of health service delivery.” MA Thesis, University of Manitoba, 2006.

Linden, Amanda Brooke Sinclair. “The Advocate's Archive: Walter Rudnicki and the Fight for Indigenous Rights in Canada, 1955 – 2010.” MA Thesis, University of Manitoba, 2016.

McCallum, Mary Jane Logan. “Labour, Modernity and the Canadian State: A History of Aboriginal Women and Work in the Mid-Twentieth Century.” PhD Diss., University of Manitoba, 2008.

Millions, Erin. “‘By Education and Conduct’: Educating Trans-Imperial Indigenous Fur-Trade Children in the Hudson’s Bay Company Territories and the British Empire, 1820s to 1870s.” PhD diss., University of Manitoba, 2017.

Milne, Jennifer. “Cultivating Domesticity: The Homemakers’ Clubs of Saskatchewan, 1911-61.” MA Thesis, University of Saskatchewan, 2004.

Sinclaire, Monica. “Barriers to food procurement: The experience of urban Aboriginal women in Winnipeg.” MA Thesis, University of Manitoba, 1997.

E. Films

Hughes, David, producer (director not named). PowWow at Duck Lake. Ottawa: National Film Board of Canada, 1967.

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Bulbulian, Maurice, director. Dancing Around the Table, Part One. Ottawa: National Film Board of Canada, 1987.

_____. Dancing Around the Table, Part Two. Ottawa: National Film Board of Canada, 1987.

Defalco, Martin and Willie Dunn, directors. The Other Side of the Ledger: An Indian View of the Hudson’s Bay Company. Ottawa: National Film Board of Canada, 1972.

Rick Harp and Tim Fontaine, directors, The Power Was With Us: Idle No More. Winnipeg: APTN News, 2020. https://aptnnews.ca/thepowerwaswithus/. Accessed February 9, 2020.

Obomsawin, Alanis, director. Incident at Restigouche. Ottawa: National Film Board of Canada, 1984.

Ranson, Mort, director. You Are on Indian Land. Ottawa: National Film Board of Canada, 1969.

Thompson, Shirley, director. Growing Hope in Northern Manitoba. Natural Resources Institute, University of Manitoba, 2009. http://home.cc.umanitoba.ca/~thompso4/Movie.html.

F. Online News Media, Resources, and Blogs

Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs, “Enigok 2010 & Beyond: Strengthening AMC Health Information Research Governance Committee as a Health Research Ethics Board.” http://amc.manitobachiefs.com/images/pdf/enigok.pdf. Accessed 12 May 2014.

_____. Health Information Research Governance Committee and Chiefs Task Force on Health. “Enigok 2010-11 Project: Discussing Ethics & Benefits of Research.” Powerpoint scholarly resource guidelines online. http://umanitoba.ca/research/orec/media/Enigok2010- 11_OCT_12th_St._Boniface2_l.pdf Accessed 12 May 2014.

_____. “Traditional First Nations Code of Ethics.” http://amc.manitobachiefs.com/images/pdf/traditional_first_nations_code_of_ ethics.pdf. Accessed 12 May 2014.

_____. “Traditional First Nations Code of Ethics and Indigenous Peoples and the Right to Free, Prior and Informed Consent.” http://amc.manitobachiefs.com/images/pdf/fpic_eng_ 110908web.pdf. Accessed 12 May 2014.

Barrera, Jorge. “Former Attawapiskat chief Theresa Spence begins hunger strike over state of community.” CBC News, last updated July 16, 2019. https://www.cbc.ca/news/ indigenous/theresa-spence-attawapiskat-hunger-strike-1.5213622.

Brandson, Ashley. “Shoal Lake 40 First Nation celebrates the official opening of Freedom Road.” APTN News, June 7, 2019. https://aptnnews.ca/2019/06/07/shoal-lake-40-first-nation- celebrates-the-official-opening-of-freedom-road/.

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CBC As It Happens. “Wild rice harvesting causes uproar on Pigeon Lake, Ontario.” CBC Radio. Last modified August 26, 2015. https://www.cbc.ca/radio/asithappens/as-it-happens- tuesday-edition-1.3203220/wild-rice-harvesting-causes-uproar-on-pigeon-lake-ontario- 1.3203499.

Canadian Association for Food Studies. http://www.foodstudies.ca/. Accessed 14 May 2014.

Concordia University Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling (COHDS) (Online research resource) http://storytelling.concordia.ca Accessed 4 April 2014.

Council of Canadian Academies (CCA), 2014. Aboriginal Food Security in Northern Canada: An Assessment of the State of Knowledge. Ottawa: CCA, 2014. Accessed January 8, 2020. https://cca-reports.ca/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/foodsecurity_fullreporten.pdf.

Culinary Historians of Canada. http://culinaryhistorians.ca/about.htm. Accessed 14 May 2014.

Davis, Sara. “Your Junk Food Preference Is Probably Not an Addiction.” Scenes of Eating blog website, last modified 17 January 2013, http://scenesofeating.com/2013/01/17/your- junk-food-preference-is-probably-not-an-addiction/.

First Nations Health Authority (FNHA). “Jordan’s principle Frequently Asked Questions.” Accessed January 16, 2020. https://www.fnha.ca/what-we-do/maternal-child-and- family-health/jordans-principle/faqs.

Graham, Angela. “Memorable Manitobans: Jean Folster (1922-1994).” Manitoba Historical Society. Accessed July 7, 2018, http://www.mhs.mb.ca/docs/people/folster_j.shtml

Indigenous Studies Portal Research Tool, University of Saskatchewan Library. Accessed January 16, 2020. http://iportal.usask.ca.

Jackson, Lisa. “Canada’s wild rice wars: How a conflict over wild ricing on Pigeon Lake is drawing attention to Indigenous rights and traditional foods.” Al Jazeera, last modified February 20, 2016, https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2016/02/canada-wild-rice-wars- 160217083126970.html

Laychuk, Riley. “Year-round garden provides free fresh vegetables to hundreds on Manitoba's Opaskwayak Cree Nation.” CBC News, last modified April 3, 2018, https://www.cbc.ca/ news/canada/manitoba/manitoba-first-nation-indoor-farm-1.4600746.

Laychuk, Riley. “Community gardens help Waywayseecappo First Nation residents access fresh, healthy foods.” CBC News, last modified July 11, 2017, https://www.cbc.ca/news/ canada/manitoba/waywayseecappo-community-garden-1.4197641.

Lee, Erica Violet. Moontime Warrior. Accessed July 12, 2018. https://moontimewarrior.com/ 2016/02/01/feeding-the-heart-of-the-city/.files/Aboriginal_food_insecurity_ report1.pdf.

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Nordal, Kaitlynn. “FCC, FHQ grow partnership for food security, herbal medicines,” Eagle Feather News, July 31, 2019. https://www.eaglefeathernews.com/health/ fcc-fhq-grow-partnership-for-food-security-herbal-medicines.

Schwartz, Daniel. “The politics of food guides: First guide, Canada's Official Food Rules, released 70 years ago.” CBC News, last updated August 3, 2012. https://www.cbc.ca/news/ health/the-politics-of-food-guides-1.1268575

Shoal Lake 40 First Nation. Accessed 12 May 2015. http://www.sl40.ca/water.htm.

Simpson, Leanne Betasamosake. Accessed 9 July 2015. http://leannesimpson.ca/.

Troian, Martha. “Waiting for a century: Shoal Lake 40 celebrates Freedom Road.” APTN News, June 4, 2019. https://aptnnews.ca/2019/06/04/waiting-for-a-century-shoal-lake-40- celebrates-freedom-road/.

Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (TRC). “TRC Calls to Action.” National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation. Accessed January 8, 2020. http://nctr.ca/assets/reports/Final% 20Reports/Executive_Summary_English_Web.pdf

Valois, Jessica and Daeran Gall. “Cumberland House grows own produce on road to self- sufficiency.” Eagle Feather News, April 08, 2015. https://www.eaglefeathernews.com/ news/index.php?detail=1191

G. Conference Papers

Walters, Krista. “‘Amused Natives’, ‘Happy Inuit’, and ‘(Dis)satisfied Researchers’: Nutrition Experts’ Emotional Encounters with an ‘Alien Race’ in Northern Canada, 1960-1980.” Presented at the 2014 Annual Meeting of the Canadian Historical Association, Brock University, St. Catharine’s, ON, May 2014.

Burnett, Kristin. “From Food Mail to Nutrition North Canada: Reconsidering federal food subsidy programs for northern Ontario.” Paper presented at the 2015 Canadian Association for Food Studies (CAFS) Annual Assembly, Ottawa, ON, June 1, 2015.

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