Indigenous Health, Environment, and Disease before Europeans -- The Early Fur Trade: Territorial Dislocation and Disease -- Early Competition and the Extension of Trade and Disease, 1740- 82 -- Despair and Death during the Fur Trade Wars, 1783-1821 -- Canada, the Northwest, and the Treaty Period, 1869-76 -- Expansion of Settlement and Erosion of Health during the HBC Monopoly, 1821-69 -- Treaties, Famine, and Epidemic Transition on the Plains, 1877-82 -- Dominion Administration of Relief, 1883- 85 -- The Nadir of Indigenous Health, 1886-91 -- Conclusion.
Summary
James Daschuk examines the roles that Old World diseases, climate, and Canadian politics--the politics of ethnocide--played in the deaths and subjugation of thousands of aboriginal people in the realization of Sir John A. Macdonald's "National Dream."