The March edition of the Salish Sea Sentinel featured a new book ‘Medicine Unbundled: A Journey through the Minefields of Indigenous Health Care’. The article contained excerpts including memories of Songhees elder Joan Morris about the Nanaimo Indian Hospital, just one of many segregated facilities for Indigenous peoples across Canada.

Shortly after that edition went to press, the Sentinel attended a standing-room-only event at the University of Victoria at which author Gary Geddes and Joan Morris discussed the important and timely book whose publication coincides with this, the Year of Reconciliation.

All of the royalties from ‘Medicine Unbundled’ will go to the Sellemah Scholarship, which will benefit an Indigenous student studying in the Faculty of Social Sciences at UVic. Sellemah is the traditional name carried by Joan Morris. She received it from her grandmother Elizabeth on Chatham Island in the Salish Sea waters off Oak Bay near Victoria.

Joanie, as her friends call her, shared the name Sellemah with the woman who made the introductions at the UVic event – the renowned enthnobotanist Dr. Nancy Turner.

“She is a star; brilliant, wise and generous,” Dr. Turner said, adding that despite Joanie’s
experiences at the Indian hospital, and before that at the Kuper Island residential school, “she has always maintained her integrity, her sense of humour and warm and loving spirit.”

100 times worse

One could here a pin drop as Joan Morris began to speak.

“I am honoured that you all came today… I have been waiting 72 years to say these things…
“I went to residential school before the Indian hospital. The hospital was 100 times worse.”

She said she ran an Indian hospital support group for a number of years and learned that “people had more compassion for animals, cats and dogs” than they did for the Aboriginal people in those facilities.

“We talked about the promises that (Prime Minister) Trudeau made about missing women and pipelines. He used words like ‘respect’ and ‘honor.’ I would really like to know where it is,” she said of those words, referring to “Trudeau and the high mucky-mucks.”

“I would like to see them live on a reserve for two weeks, drink the water they drink and food they eat.”

‘Medicine Unbundled’ describes Indian hospitals as places that were established “less to help the Indigenous sick than to keep them separate from a racist population… notorious sites of abuse and neglect.”

Joan Morris agreed with that assessment. “It hasn’t stopped,” she said. “It’s still ongoing. It is hard to digest and hard to believe.

“This mask of shame does not belong to us.

“It’s going to take all of us working together,” she said, in order to recognize that “we are all one.”