ncerning these hospitals throughout the 1920’s-1980’s in Canada. She provides an overview of this often-ignored part of Canadian history by examining it in detail, revealing unfortunate truths and forgotten events which impacted the resulting treatment of Canada’s indigenous population then and today. This analysis will strive to overview Lux’s in-depth description of Canadian history and the main arguments that she makes surrounding the experience of Indigenous Canadians and health care.

Lux begins by describing the shift in health care to address the growing problem of disease on reserves and the perceived threat of sick ‘Indians’ to other Canadians (Lux, 2016). Long before separate “Indian hospitals” were created, most health care institutions made use of isolated wings to house the non-white patients (Lux, 2016). “Indian wings” were increasingly utilized until the public argued that these patients should not even be housed in the same buildings, for risk of contamination to the white Canadians who were cared for at the same locations (Lux, 2016, p. 21). Beginning in the 1920’s, the government reluctantly agreed to create Indian hospitals, yet refused to pay for the care needed at any more than the bare minimum; meaning that aboriginal communities would have to fund these hospitals themselves (Lux, 2016). And thus began the decades long struggle between the Aboriginal communities and the government agencies to determine who should take responsibility for and ultimately pay for ‘Indian’ health care.

Lux gives several examples of the attempts and failures to achieve a successfully run ‘Indian’ hospital. These not only promised to solve the problem of isolating ‘Indian tuberculosis’, but also claimed to include the best doctors, treatments and success rates (Lux, 2016, p. 53). One of these was the Charles Camsell Indian Hospital, which officially opened under this new guise in 1946. Initially claiming to be one of the best and largest ‘Indian’ hospitals at the time, this soon was proven to be false (Lux, 2016, p. 54). The reality inside this hospital was that soon after its opening, the hospital became overcrowded, resources were dwindling and the building itself was in poor condition (Lux, 2016). The story of this ‘Indian’ hospital was not an uncommon one at the time and Maureen Lux uses the unfortunate number of similar examples to paint a picture of promise unfulfilled. In the first few chapters of her novel, she uses this history of the creation of ‘Indian’ hospitals to deliver her argument that the government used ‘Indian’ hospitals as a method of control to confine and assimilate the Aboriginal population in Canada (Lux, 2016). These supposed humanitarian efforts amounted to little more than a trap to force the assimilation of Indigenous peoples into mainstream canadian society, yet keep them in their place at the lowest rung of the ladder of citizens (Lux, 2016, p. 93). She goes on to portray the efforts of Aboriginal communities to hold onto their treaty rights and fight the increasing constraints put in pl