The Impact of Imported European Infectious Diseases on

Aboriginal Health

David M. Patrick, MD, FRCPC, MHSc

Let’s Turn Travel Health Around

• We concern ourselves with the health of travellers.

• What about the visited?

• And … what if the travellers never leave?

History is Full of Travelling Plagues

• Siege of Kaffa,1346• Invading Tartars came

down with plague• Before retreating,

catapulted dead comrades into city

• Began a plague outbreak that spread across the face of Europe

Images of BC First Nations

Why Did Emily Carr See This?

Outline

• History and Who Tells it

• First Nations Health Pre-Contact

• First Contact

• Colonial Period

• Lessons for today?

History in Perspective

• The story-teller today, has European ancestry

• Cook / Vancouver had high ideals but were still part of a then active British imperial mind set

• Thompson – honoured his native wife and refused to trade in alcohol

Origins: Land Bridge or Coastal Migration

Evidence for Land Bridge and/or Southward Coastal Migration

• archeology• skeletal/dental

patterns • mitochondrial DNA

and Y chromosome sequencing

There Are Other World-Views

Nisga’a Tradition

We believe that the Creator - through His messenger Txeemsim - brought the life-giving sun to a bleak twilight world of hunger, deprivation and war.

Txeemsim taught people how to inhabit the land and interact with animals without disrupting the cycle of life.

This Nisga'a hero also taught people how to build houses to survive long winters, to defend the land, and to organize themselves into a coherent, moral society.

Above all, Txeemsim taught us to respect the land and its creatures, core values of Nisga'a life today.

Haida Tradition

• Speaks of a treeless land, lower sea levels – conditions that would have been in place during the last ice age

• A verbal tradition that speaks to a generation just waking up to global warming.

Culture Pre-Contact

• 1/3 of Canada’s pre-contact native population

• Eleven main language groupings

• North West Coast: Nootka, Coast Salish, and the Kwak'wala Speaking Peoples

Pre-Contact Culture

• Interior - the Kootenay, Carrier

• Tsimshians ranged the northern coast

• Tlingits occupied southern Alaska and northern British Columbia.

• The Sekani and Beaver occupied the eastern region of the north while the Haida lived on the Queen Charlotte Islands.

Contact Throughout the Americas

• Asymmetrical effects• Why? Jared

Diamond’s Guns Germs and Steel– Endemic disease– Domestic animals– Spread of technology– And what about

colonization itself?

Reasons Cited from First Nations Sources

• Environmental degradation

• New pathogens

• Social disruption

• Persecution

Was the Northwest Coast Protected from Infectious Disease?• Rocky Mountains and

vast Pacific Ocean• By the late 18th century,

residents may already have met some diseases of Europeans through cross continent aboriginal trade routes. – Like the fated Mississippian

culture?

Pre-contact Health in BC

• Hunter-gatherer societies thought to have been healthier than larger settlements with agricultural base

• Dyphillobothrium and roundworm from shell midden

Pre-contact Health in BC• Treponemal infections in the prehistoric record for the

Strait of Georgia and Prince Rupert Harbour dating between 1500 B.C. and A.D. 500.

• Trachoma and leprosy are documented for the early contact period and may have been present in pre-contact Northwest North America.

• Tuberculosis has been documented for a number of pre-contact Aboriginal groups but is as yet not known for British Columbia until after contact when first reported among the Nuu-chah-nulth at Nootka Sound in 1793.

Newman 1976 in Boyd, R. (1985). The introduction of infectious diseases among the Indians of the Pacific Northwest, 1774-1874. Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Pullman, Washington: University of Washington, p. 39.

First Contacts

• Unrecorded contacts (Chinese, Drake?)

• Spanish, British and Russians

• Seaborne Fur Trade

• Overland Fur Trade

Nootka Sound

• Mowachaht and Muchalaht peoples had a rich existence and culture based on whaling and river fishing.

• 1774, Juan Hernandez traded near Estevan Point,

• 1775, Bruno de Hezeta, in the "Santiago," and the "Sonora," under Juan Francisco de la Bodega y Quadra, cruised by the North Pacific coast.

Royal Navy at Nootka

• Sustained contact began with Captain James Cook and crew on the H.M.S. Resolution and H.M.S. Discovery.

• Anchored in Resolution Cove, Nootka Sound on March 31, 1778.

• Met Chief Maquinna• Cook claimed the territory for

Britain, but did not start a permanent settlement there.

• Soon sparked a fur trade, involving first nations in sustained contact with Europeans and Americans.

Maquinna and Cook at Nootka Sound

Spanish Connection

• The Spanish later set up a base at Nootka under the command of Quadra, who had claimed the coast of Alaska for Spain.

• In 1792, Captain George Vancouver, with his ships Discovery and Chatham, arrived at Nootka Sound to regain control under the terms of the Nootka Convention.

• Commenced working together at the task of mapping and exploring the coast.

Vancouver

The Epic Explorations of David Thompson

Observations of the Overland Explorers

• Thompson and Fraser observed epidemic among Plateau groups around Kamloops in early 1800s.

• “deadly form of violent distemper” meningitis?

The Overland Fur Trade

Post-contact

• Smallpox• Influenza• Dysentery• Diphtheria• Typhus• Yellow fever• Whooping cough• Tb• Syphilis

Chief Weah of Masset:

• “It first came from the north land, from the Iron People who came from the land where the sun sets. Again it came not many years ago, when I was a young man. It came then from the land of the Iron People where the sun sets …. This foe we could not see and could not fight. Our medicine men are wise, but they could not drive away the evil spirit.”

From Collison WH 1915 In the Wake of the War Canoe. London: Seeley Service and Co, p 67-68

Estimated Decline in Aboriginal Population in North America

0

50,000

100,000

150,000

200,000

250,000

300,000

350,000

400,000N

ort

he

as

t

Pla

ins

No

rth

we

st

Co

as

t

Su

ba

rcti

c

Pla

tea

u

Arc

tic

At Contact

At Nadir

Based on Data from Ubelaker 1992

From Fur Trade to Colonization

• The Hudson's Bay Company built Fort Victoria in 1843, and the colony of Vancouver Island was established in 1849 when the entire island was leased to the HBC.

• In 1858, BC Gold Rush• Mainland colony of British Columbia in 1858. Governor

James Douglas, chief factor of the Hudson's Bay Company and governor of Vancouver Island, became the new governor of British Columbia.

• In 1866 the colony of Vancouver Island was combined with the colony of British Columbia, with Victoria becoming the provincial capital of British Columbia on April 2 1868.

Fort Victoria

Was Colonization More Important than Contact?

• Initial contacts linked to fur trade and missionary activity.

• Access to trade goods• Longer term dependence

on external technology:– Over-trapping – Logging– Mining– Over-fishing

• Crowding• Potlatch banned

Royal Proclamation of 1763

• "... Whereas it is just and reasonable and essential to our Interest, and the Security of our Colonies, that the several Nations or Tribes of natives with whom We are connected, and who live under our Protection, should not be molested or disturbed in the Possession of such parts of Our Dominions and Territories as, not having been ceded to purchases by Us, are reserved to them, or any of them, as their Hunting Grounds..."

Treaties in BC

• Policy of negotiation under Governor James Douglas.

• 1864, new Land Commissioner Joseph Trutch initiated widescale surveying throughout the province to satisfy the white settlers' appetite for land.

• Treaties - British or Canadian governments and bands largely never concluded them in BC

• Those written were not always good (peoples moved from lands etc)

• Reserves for natives on the basis of four hectares per family

Smallpox Outbreak of 1862-63

• 1/3 of native pop (20,000) estimated perished by Duff

• Others argue a 62-90 percent decline for Northwest Coast between 1835 and 1890

• Adults too sick to care for children • Central Coast Salish largely escaped – had

been immunized at that point – Missions• Haida from 7000 to 741 by 1881• Abandoned villages.

Smallpox Outbreak of 1862-63

• Cowpox vaccine available as early as 1830’s. Why did we still see devastating outbreaks 40 years later?

Residential Schools

• Removal from family • Attempted

assimilation• Widespread abuse• High MORTALITY

from infectious disease.

Nisga’a Summary

In 1793 a British sea captain named George Vancouver, seeking a northwest passage to the Orient, sailed into Ts'im Gits'oohl (Observatory Inlet) where he was met by Nisga'a chiefs. Greetings were exchanged and within years a thriving trade in sea-otter pelts prospered along the coast.

When overharvesting killed the coastal fur trade, European fur traders scrambled after land-based furs such as beaver. By the mid-1830s fur traders were coming through the mountain passes from the east.

In 1858 the colony of B.C. was established. Lured by the Gold Rush Europeans arrived by the boatload. But they brought with them smallpox, influenza, tuberculosis and measles which ravaged native populations. During the 1830s and 1860s whole villages were devastated, as natives had no natural immunity to diseases they had not encountered before.

Nadir

Between 1835 and 1906, diseases cut the population in half.

In 1871 B.C. joined Confederation and administrative responsibility for natives was transferred to the federal government under the British North America Act, although authority over land and resources remained with the province. This jurisdictional dichotomy has been one of the greatest problems for natives ever since.

Epidemiology of Infectious Disease

• Host– nutrition (starvation,

diabetes, obesity)– less natural resistance to

European strains

• Agent– more virulent

• Environment– Crowding– herd animals– industrial work places– Social disruption

Today?

Lessons

• 2007 - Health of people is not separate from health of the land

• To look forward:– Learn from but move past history– Work to healthy, autonomous,

environmentally balanced communities– Share understanding of the importance of

harmony in the natural world and of well thought out solutions springing from new science

Are There Modern Day Corollaries?

• People can be dispossessed by our own investment:– Resort Development– Rampant industrialization and displacement of

agricultural workers

• We’re not an evil civilization, but the experience of our First Nations must inform us about both unintended consequences of our own actions, and of the cost of ignoring the existence of others.

Bill Reid, The Spirit of Haida

Acknowledgements

• Heidi Verberg

• Mark McGowan

References1. Persistent Spirit. Edited by P Stephenson, S. Elliott, L. Foster, J. Harris. Canadian

Western Geographical Series Volume 311995 University of Victoria ISBN 0-919838-21-9

2. Aboriginal Health in Canada. James B. Waldram, D. Ann Herring and T. Kue Young. University of Toronto Press 2006 ISBN-13: 978-0-8020-8792-8

3. Cybulski, J. (1994). Culture, change, demographic history, and health and disease on the Northwest Coast. In C.S. Larsen (Ed.), In the Wake of Contact: Biological Responses to Conquest, pp. 75-85. Wiley-Liss, Inc., p. 81

4. Newman 1976 in Boyd, R. (1985). The introduction of infectious diseases among the Indians of the Pacific Northwest, 1774-1874. Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Pullman, Washington: University of Washington, p. 39.

5. Cyulski, J. (1990). Human biology. In W. Suttles (Vol. Ed.), Handbook of North American Indians: Northwest Coast, Vol. 7, pp. 52-59, Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, p. 57; Cybulski op. cit.

6. Cybulski (1994), op cit.; Skinner, M., McLaren, M., and Carlson, R.L. (1988). Therapetuci cauterization of periodontal abscesses in a prehistoric northwest coast woman, Medical Anthropology Quarterly 2:3:278-285.

7. Boyd, R. (1990). Demographic history, 1774-1874. In W. Suttles (Vol. Ed.,), Handbook of North American Indians: Northwest Coast, Vol. 7, pp. 135-148, Washington, D.C..: Smithsonian Institution, p. 137.

8. Kelm, Mary-Ellen. (1998). Colonizing bodies: Aboriginal health and healing in British Columbia, 1900-50. Vancouver: UBC Press.