The story of a separate and unequal Canadian health care system – The Sunday Edition CBC
August 07, 2016
Canada is still coming to grips with several painful chapters in its history of relations with Aboriginal people. Canadians are finally becoming broadly acquainted with the shameful history of residential schools, and the issue of murdered and missing indigenous women is now officially the subject of a national inquiry.
Less well-known is the history of racially segregated hospitals in Canada. So-called “Indian hospitals,” as they were known at the time, operated in Canada until the 1970s.
Residential schools and Indian hospitals] are rather like nodes in a larger web of incarceration, segregation, marginalization. – Maureen Lux
Born out of a mixture of paternalism, prejudice, and fear, Indian hospitals were created to isolate Indigenous tuberculosis patients — but they soon became a way to ensure settler Canadians could reap the benefits of modernizing hospitals without having to share them with Indigenous patients.
