Content deleted Content added
|
|
|
==== Indigenous health ====
The medical scientist [[Frederick Banting]] was travelling in the Arctic in 1927 when he realized that crew or passengers on board the HBC paddle wheeler SS[[Distributor (HBC vessel)|''Distributor'']] were responsible for spreading the influenza virus down the [[Slave River]] and [[Mackenzie River]]. Less than a decade after [[Spanish flu|the 1918 global flu pandemic]], a similar virus spread territory-wide over the summer and autumn, devastating the aboriginal population of the north.<ref name=":42">{{Cite journal |last=Jackson |first=Alexander Young |date=15 May 1965 |title=Men and books: Memories of a fellow artist, Frederick Grant Banting |url=https://insulin.library.utoronto.ca/islandora/object/insulin%3AT10193 |journal=Canadian Medical Association Journal |volume=92 |pages=1077–1084 |via=University of Toronto Libraries}}</ref><ref>{{Cite web |title=1925–1949, Historical Timeline of the Northwest Territories |url=https://www.nwttimeline.ca/1925/1928JacksonBanting.htm |access-date=13 March 2019 |website=Historical Timeline of the Northwest Territories |archive-date=5 December 2018 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20181205154729/http://nwttimeline.ca/1925/1928JacksonBanting.htm |url-status=dead }}</ref> Returning from the trip, Banting gave an interview in Montreal with a ''[[Toronto Star]]'' reporter under the agreement that his statements on HBC would remain off the record.<ref name=":42" /> The newspaper nonetheless published the conversation, which rapidly reached a wide audience across Europe and Australia.<ref name=":42" /><ref name=":52">{{Cite journal |last1=Tester |first1=Frank James |last2=McNicoll |first2=Paule |date=Nov 2008 |title=A Voice of Presence: Inuit Contributions toward the Public Provision of Health Care in Canada, 1900–1930 |journal=Social History/Histoire Sociale |volume=41 |issue=82 |pages=535–561 |doi=10.1353/his.0.0034 |s2cid=144773818}}</ref> Banting was angry at the leak, having promised the Department of the Interior not to make any statements to the press prior to clearing them.<ref name=":52" />
The article noted that Banting had given the journalist C. R. Greenaway repeated instances of how the fox fur trade always favoured the company: "For over $100,000 of fox skins, he estimated that the Eskimos had not received $5,000 worth of goods."<ref name=":52" /> He traced this treatment to health, consistent with reports made in previous years by RCMP officers, suggesting that "the result was a diet of 'flour, [[hard tack|sea-biscuits]], tea and tobacco,' with the skins that once were used for clothing traded merely for 'cheap whiteman's goods.{{'"}}<ref name=":52" />
|
