Grant: Operating Grant - PA: First Nations, Inuit and Metis Health

Between 1930 and 1970, thousands of First Nations, Inuit and Métis people were diagnosed with and treated for tuberculosis (TB) in Manitoba. In the early twentieth century, the Sanatorium Board of Manitoba committed to a relationship with the federal government to manage distinct and segregated programs of TB case-finding, hospitalization and rehabilitation for First Nations in Manitoba and north-western Ontario, and some Inuit and Métis. Records of the SBM have recently become available to researchers and contain a wealth of information on Indigenous and non-Indigenous TB surveying, hospitals, treatment and post-recovery care. This project will use qualitative and quantitative analysis of archival records, material evidence and oral histories to examine the history of the management of TB and experiences of First Nations people with the disease. Recent scholarship acknowledges the colonial context of dispossession, poverty and violence that fostered diseases like TB and the health care responses to them. Our investigation will extend this work by focusing on Manitoba in the mid-twentieth century and by centering First Nations within the historical research and analysis with full involvement First Nations people. Moreover, this project goes beyond naming and identifying colonialism in the past because for Indigenous people, colonialism is not a historic period that has now ended. First Nations people are still unequal partners in health care and we are at a critical juncture where TB rates and multi-drug resistance and co-morbidity with HIV are on the rise and threatening First Nations populations. Thus, we are also engaging in extensive knowledge translation activities, including an Oral History Internship Program for First Nations community researchers, two films, a website and a symposium, in order to inform policies and procedures for TB health care and to motivate action to eradicate TB.