Review of <i>Medicine That Walks: Disease, Medicine, and\nCanadian Plains Native People, 1880-1940</i> By\nMaureen K. Lux
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Medicine That Walks recounts the impact of the federal government's Indian policy on the health and well-being of Canadian Plains Indians. The end of the bison as a staple of life, the treaties with the Crown, and the subsequent removal of Indians from the land, followed by settlement replacement-these form the backdrop for a thesis on historical cause and effect. The thesis is that race-based federal policies resulted in social, physical, and spiritual degradation for Indian people. Lux's account unfolds as a clash of cultures in which Indian traditions and practices struggle to survive the relentless onslaught of western domination and pressures for assimilation. While the theme is not new, the premise of multiple and interacting causation for a decline in the Indian condition is provocative.\nThe text is written partly in narrative form, with numerous details bolstering the general premise. The survival and ongoing influence of traditional practice as a mainstay for Indian cultural continuity is supported by a general account of Indian pharmacological and spiritual medicine. Some insights are given into various Indian spiritual beliefs and ceremonies and their continued role in promoting health and healing. The book introduces the reader to imposed culture change and its impacts on the health of the Canadian Plains' Native Peoples as a result of increasing dependencies on federal programs, isolation on reserves, attendance at residential schools, as well as susceptibility to infectious diseases. Descriptions of traditional Indian medicine and the application of the western medical model are provided in contrast, along with their relative efficacy for Indian health during the post-treaty period.\nLux concludes that conditions of degradation in the health and well-being of Indian people continue under a legacy of generations of-paternalistic intervention and control. Yet there is an acknowledgment that advances are being made in self-determination along many fronts, including health care. The revival of traditional medical knowledge and practice in turn provides a support for cultural continuity. The prognosis would indicate that greater autonomy through cultural renewal may result in a long-term positive outcome for Indian people.\nThe book presents a holistic approach to the analysis of culture contact and health impacts for Indian people of the Canadian Plains, questioning explanations of Indian degradation in health through the single cause of biological invasion of European infectious diseases. This approach opens the way for analysis of other contact experiences and their influence on Indian health, including presentday policies for the management of Indian affairs. The volume is a good resource for Indian studies, especially regarding the history of Plains Indian health and healing.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".