Taking Medicine

Hunters, medicine men, and missionaries continue to dominate images and narratives of the West, even though historians have recognized women's role as colonizer and colonized since the 1980s. Kristin Burnett helps to correct this imbalance by presenting colonial medicine as a gendered phenomenon. Although the imperial eye focused on medicine men, Aboriginal women in the Treaty 7 region served as healers and caregivers - to their own people and to settler society - until the advent of settler-run hospitals and nursing stations. By revealing Aboriginal and settler women's contributions to health care, Taking Medicine challenges traditional understandings of colonial medicine in the contact zone.