When Disease Came to This Country: Epidemics and Colonialism in Northern North America [Hardcover]

Connects the history of epidemics in northern North America to persistent health disparities arising from settler colonialism.A revisionist history of epidemic disease as experienced by northern Indigenous peoples in present day Canada's Yukon and Northwest Territories between 1860 and 1940. Liza Piper connects the history of epidemics in northern North America to persistent health disparities arising from settler colonialism.A revisionist history of epidemic disease as experienced by northern Indigenous peoples in present day Canada's Yukon and Northwest Territories between 1860 and 1940. Liza Piper connects the history of epidemics in northern North America to persistent health disparities arising from settler colonialism.Twentieth-century circumpolar epidemics shaped historical interpretations of disease in European imperialism in the Americas and beyond. In this revisionist history of epidemic disease as experienced by northern peoples, Liza Piper illuminates the ecological, spatial, and colonial relationships that allowed diseases  influenza, measles, and tuberculosis in particular  to flourish between 1860 and 1940 along the Mackenzie and Yukon rivers. Making detailed use of Indigenous oral histories alongside English and French language archives and emphasising environmental alongside social and cultural factors, When Disease Came to this Country shows how colonial ideas about northern Indigenous immunity to disease were rooted in the racialized structures of colonialism that transformed northern Indigenous lives and lands, and shaped mid-twentieth century biomedical research.1. Introduction; 2. When scarlet fever came to this country; 3. Colonial motifs and medicine; 4. The gold rush and after; 5. Infrastructures of extraction, sanitation, and care; 6. Race, gender, and control; 7. Experiences of influenza; 8. Colonial ecologies; 9. A smouldering fire; 10. Epilogue and conclusions; Appendix: Cause of death database.'Piper gives us a culturally sensitive anlҬ