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At the turn of the twentieth century, social medicine was emerging as a key contributor to the production of racial hierarchies. At this time, the North American medical community expanded its interest and involvement with native people and applied its beliefs about race and disease to this population. In the process, a new knowledge about native health was created that saw disease as both a racialized and a gendered phenomenon. Hoping to apply these linkages to a broader population, the medical community advanced assimilative and hybridizing strategies to improve native health by eradicating perceived racial difference.

The Nisga'a Nation of Northwestern British Columbia have been pioneers in the area of obtaining administrative control over health services. This would seem to mark the end of medical colonialism for this First Nation. But the author argues that health program devolution, in this case, was part of a longer tradition of incorporating aspects of non-Native medicine in a way that supported Nisga'a social structure. Nevertheless, the author argues that health program devolution is part of the process of decolonization since it has supported the traditional social structure, enhanced community self-esteem and provided an opportunity for the locus of control to shift from the medical profession and the federal government to Nisga'a people. This paper sets the development of Nisga'a-centered health care in a historical context that sees the Nisga'a exerting a resistive will in the context of medical colonialism in twentieth century British Columbia. Keywords: Medical colonialism; Post-colonialism; Medical services; Health policy; Nisga'a nation

The article examines the role of the family in the lives of women in a turn-of-the-century psychiatric institution in British Columbia, Canada. The continued connection between institutionalized women and their families is highlighted. Evidence drawn from the psychiatric case files of 774 women patients at British Columbia's Provincial Hospital for the Insane show that families significantly influenced such factors of institutional life as the conditions of care, the timing of discharge and the possibility of readmission. Conclusions presented here underscore the negotiated and conflictual nature of asylum practice.

Canadian Missionaries, Indigenous Peoples: Representing Religion at Home and Abroad. Edited by Alvyn Austin and Jamie S. Scott. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005. viii + 327 pp. $65.00 cloth; [...]