When Disease Came to This Country
Epidemics and Colonialism in Northern North America

Connects the history of epidemics in northern North America to persistent health disparities arising from settler colonialism.

Liza Piper (Author)

9781009320870, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 10 August 2023

362 pages
23.5 x 15.9 x 2.5 cm, 0.67 kg

'An impressively researched work, drawing from a rich variety of settler colonial and Indigenous sources, Piper transforms our understanding of the epidemic landscape under colonialism in northern Canada, into the mid-20th century. Re-examining historiographical claims about Indigenous de-population, de-centring diseases that loom large in the literature (particularly smallpox), and giving a new timeline for the devasting impact of influenza in the north over multiple epidemics, she insists on the value of local and community perspectives that correct and complicate simplified narratives of Indigenous mortality. When Disease Came to this Country is not easy in many ways, and does not soften the impact of unjust and inequitable colonial relations on Indigenous health and healing. Yet through Piper's careful attention to disease interactions and the importance of time, place, and the land, readers understand more fully the diversity of Indigenous experience, disease in Indigenous oral traditions and identities, and Indigenous resilience and persistence.' Esyllt Jones, University of Manitoba

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.

Subject Areas: History of the Americas [HBJK]