Diagnosing the Discursive Indian: Medicine, Gender, and the “Dying Race”

Kelm, Mary Ellen

doi:10.1215/00141801-52-2-371

Cited by 31 publications

(11 citation statements)

References 37 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…An understanding C N C N C N C N Volume 46, Issue 1, December 2013 © eContent Management Pty Ltd chosen. Hence, the fate of health status is not entirely a choice but the product of many historical-political-social determinants that are often not elaborated on within the discourse of medicine (Kelm, 1998(Kelm, , 2005Saggers & Gray, 2007).…”

Section: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Healthmentioning

confidence: 99%

Colonisation – It’s bad for your health: The context of Aboriginal health

2013

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Australia's history is not often considered to be an indicator of any person's health status. However, as health professionals we are taught the importance of taking and listening to our client's detailed history to assist us in our comprehension of the issues impacting upon their lives. This skill base is an important one in that it makes available valuable information that assists the health professional to be discerning of intimate and specific circumstances that could contribute to health related problems not previously diagnosed. It is a vital screening tool. I would like to advocate that history taking, that being Australia's colonial, political, social and economic histories be a course of action undertaken by all health professionals working with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. Health researchers of recent years have been able to clearly illustrate that there is a powerful relationship between health status and individuals or collectives; social, political and economic circumstances (Marmot, 2011; Marmot & Wilkinson, 2001; Saggers & Gray, 2007). This way of knowing how health can be affected through such social health determinants is an important health competency (Anderson, 2007; Marmot, 2011). As such this paper delivers a timeline of specific historical and political events, contributing to current social health determinants that are undermining Indigenous Australians health and well-being. This has been undertaken because most Australians including Indigenous Australians have not benefited from a balanced and well informed historical account of the past 200 and something years. The implication of this lack of knowing unfortunately has left its effect on the way health service providers have delivered health to Indigenous children, mothers, fathers, and their communities. Indigenous Australians view the way forward in improving health outcomes, as active partners in their health service delivery. This partnership requires health professionals to listen to their clients, with respect and a decolonising gaze.

show abstract

Section: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Healthmentioning

confidence: 99%

Colonisation – It’s bad for your health: The context of Aboriginal health

2013

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…For example, in the settler-colonial context of Canada, huge numbers of Indigenous children were forcibly taken from their families and communities and incarcerated in residential schools, which explicitly aimed to 'kill the Indian in the child' (Razack 2015). Here another powerful use of metaphor is evident in the construction of First Nations, Inuit and Métis peoples as an inevitably "dying race", incapable of self-governance, enabling residential schools to be justified as 'saving' Indigenous children' from "the death of their race" (Chapman, Carey, and Ben-Moshe 2014, 7;Kelm 2005). This logic has many similarities to the child apprehension policies within racist/colonialist child protection systems that led to the 'sixties scoop' (Chrisjohn and Young 1997;Blackstock 2009;LeFrançois 2013) and, in what is now Australia and Torres Strait, constituted the 'stolen generation' (Read 1981).…”

Section: Child/colonymentioning

confidence: 99%

Child As Metaphor: Colonialism, Psy-Governance, and Epistemicide

Mills

LeFrançois

2018

World Futures

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This article mobilises transdisciplinary inquiry to explore and deconstruct the often-used comparison of racialized/colonized people, intellectually disabled people and mad people as being like children. To be childlike is a metaphor that is used to denigrate, to classify as irrational and incompetent, to dismiss as not being knowledge-holders, to justify governance and action on others' behalf, to deem as being animistic, as undeveloped , underdeveloped or wrongly-developed, and, hence, to subjugate. We explore the political work done by the metaphorical appeal to childhood, and particularly the centrality of the metaphor of childhood to legitimising colonialism and white supremacy. The article attends to the ways in which this metaphor contributes to the shaping of the material and discursive realities of racialized and colonized others as well as those who have been psychiatrized and deemed 'intellectually disabled'. Further, we explore specific metaphors of child-colony, and child-mad-'crip'. We then detail the developmental logic underlying the historical and continued use of the metaphorics of childhood and explore how this makes possible an infantilisation of colonized peoples and the global South more widely. The material and discursive impact of this metaphor on children's lives, and particularly children who are racialized, colonized, and/or deemed mad or 'crip', is then considered. We argue that complex adult-child relations, sane-mad relations and Western-majority world relations within global psychiatry, are situated firmly within pejorative notions of what it means to be childlike , and reproduce multi-systemic forms of oppression that, ostensibly in their 'best interests', govern children and all those deemed childlike .

show abstract

“…20,28,29 Because of poor patient records, those who survived treatment were often unable to return home, as they did not know where they were or how to get back to their families. 28 Given this history of TB treatment and the associated negative experiences for Indigenous peoples, 26 it is not surprising that hospital isolation is experienced as being similar to jail, with deep fears about returning home or never seeing family members again. This is also informative in explaining why many Indigenous peoples may present to health care providers with such advanced disease.…”

Section: Sanatoriamentioning

confidence: 99%

Respiratory isolation for tuberculosis: the experience of Indigenous peoples on the Canadian prairies

Mayan

Robinson

Gokiert

et al. 2017

public health action

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The Prairie provinces of Canada. To understand how Indigenous peoples with infectious pulmonary tuberculosis living in different community settings in the Prairie provinces of Canada experience respiratory isolation. Using an exploratory qualitative approach, we interviewed participants living in urban centres, non-remote reserve settings and remote and isolated reserve settings. Through qualitative content analysis of 48 interviews, we determined that participants experienced feelings of confinement regardless of the community setting in which they lived. Participants also experienced family and social disconnect, but the experience was more potent for the remote and isolated reserve participants, who were required to be flown out of their home communities to receive treatment, and for those urban centre and non-remote reserve participants who lacked social connections. The roles of past experiences with sanitoria and of family in providing social support are discussed. The conclusions of this study focus on examining isolation policies and improving the hospital isolation experience.

show abstract

Diagnosing the Discursive Indian: Medicine, Gender, and the “Dying Race”

Cited by 31 publications

References 37 publications

Colonisation – It’s bad for your health: The context of Aboriginal health

Colonisation – It’s bad for your health: The context of Aboriginal health

Child As Metaphor: Colonialism, Psy-Governance, and Epistemicide

Respiratory isolation for tuberculosis: the experience of Indigenous peoples on the Canadian prairies

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About