Inventing the Thrifty Gene
Inventing the Thrifty Gene

Author: Travis Hay

Publisher: Univ. of Manitoba Press

Published: 2021-09-10

Total Pages: 158

ISBN-13: 0887559360

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Though First Nations communities in Canada have historically lacked access to clean water, affordable food, and equitable health care, they have never lacked access to well-funded scientists seeking to study them. Inventing the Thrifty Gene examines the relationship between science and settler colonialism through the lens of “Aboriginal diabetes” and the thrifty gene hypothesis, which posits that Indigenous peoples are genetically predisposed to type 2 diabetes and obesity due to their alleged hunter-gatherer genes. Hay’s study begins with Charles Darwin’s travels and his observations on the Indigenous peoples he encountered, setting the imperial context for Canadian histories of medicine and colonialism. It continues in the mid-twentieth century with a look at nutritional experimentation during the long career of Percy Moore, the medical director of Indian Affairs (1946–1965). Hay then turns to James Neel’s invention of the thrifty gene hypothesis in 1962 and Robert Hegele’s reinvention and application of the hypothesis to Sandy Lake First Nation in northern Ontario in the 1990s. Finally, Hay demonstrates the way in which settler colonial science was responded to and resisted by Indigenous leadership in Sandy Lake First Nation, who used monies from the thrifty gene study to fund wellness programs in their community. Inventing the Thrifty Gene exposes the exploitative nature of settler science with Indigenous subjects, the flawed scientific theories stemming from faulty assumptions of Indigenous decline and disappearance, as well as the severe inequities in Canadian health care that persist even today.

Inventing the Thrifty Gene
Inventing the Thrifty Gene

Author: Travis Hay

Publisher:

Published: 2021-09-10

Total Pages:

ISBN-13: 9780887559341

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Though First Nations communities in Canada have historically lacked access to clean water, affordable food, and equitable healthcare, they have never lacked access to well-funded scientists seeking to study them. The Science of Settler Colonialism examines the relationship between science and settler colonialism through the lens of "Aboriginal diabetes" and the thrifty gene hypothesis, which posits that Indigenous peoples are genetically predisposed to type-II diabetes and obesity due to their alleged hunter-gatherer genes. Hay's study begins with Charles Darwin's travels and his observations on the Indigenous peoples he encountered to set the context for Canadian histories of medicine and colonialism, which are rooted in Victorian science and empire. It continues in the mid-twentieth century with a look at nutritional experimentation during the long career of Percy Moore, the medical director of Indian Affairs (1946-1965). Hay then turns to James Neel's invention of the thrifty gene hypothesis in 1962 and Robert Hegele's reinvention and application of the hypothesis to Sandy Lake First Nation in northern Ontario in the 1990s. Finally, Hay demonstrates the way in which settler colonial science was responded to and resisted by Indigenous leadership in Sandy Lake First Nation, who used monies from the thrifty gene study to fund wellness programs in their community. The Science of Settler Colonialism exposes the exploitative nature of settler science with Indigenous subjects, the flawed scientific theories stemming from faulty assumptions of Indigenous decline and disappearance, as well as the severe inequities in Canadian healthcare that persist even today.

Epidemiology and the People's Health
Epidemiology and the People's Health

Author: Nancy Krieger

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2024

Total Pages: 521

ISBN-13: 0197695558

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"Theory. Traced to its Greek roots, "theory" means to see inwards; to theorize is to use our mind's eye systematically, following articulated principles, to discern meaningful patterns among observations and ideas (Oxford English Dictionary [OED] 2022). The implication is that without theory, observation is blind and explanation is impossible"--

mmm... Manitoba
mmm... Manitoba

Author: Kimberley Moore

Publisher: Univ. of Manitoba Press

Published: 2024-04-05

Total Pages: 469

ISBN-13: 1772840440

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A tasty oral history In 2018, Janis Thiessen, Kimberley Moore, and collaborator Kent Davies refashioned a used food truck into a mobile oral history lab. Together they embarked on a journey around Manitoba, gathering stories about the province’s food and the people who make, sell, and eat it. Along the way, they visited restaurant owners, beer brewers, grocers, farmers, scholars, and chefs in their kitchens and businesses, online, and on board the food truck. The team conducted nearly seventy interviews and indulged in a bounty of prairie delicacies, from Winnipeg’s “Fat Boys” to Steinbach’s perogies to Churchill’s cloudberry jam. Thiessen and Moore serve up the results of this research in mmm... Manitoba. Mixing recipes, maps, archival records, biographies, and full-colour photographs with fascinating stories, they showcase the province’s diverse food histories. Through the sharing and preparing of food, the authors investigate food security and regulation, Indigenous foodways and agriculture, capitalism’s impact on the agri-food industry, and the networks between Manitoban food producers and retailers. The book also explores the roles of gender, ethnicity, migration, and colonialism in Manitoba’s food history. Hop on the Manitoba Food History Truck and journey into the province’s past with engaging essays and easy-to-follow recipes for kjielkje and schmauntfat, snow goose tidbits, chicken karaage, the Salisbury House flapper pie, duck fat smashed potatoes, Ichi Ban cocktails, pork inihaw, and more. mmm... Manitoba offers a thoughtfully nuanced, deliciously digestible, and wholly unique regional history that is sure to satisfy.

Plundering the North
Plundering the North

Author: Kristin Burnett

Publisher: Univ. of Manitoba Press

Published: 2023-10-27

Total Pages: 196

ISBN-13: 1772840513

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The manufacturing of a chronic food crisis Food insecurity in the North is one of Canada’s most shameful public health and human rights crises. In Plundering the North, Kristin Burnett and Travis Hay examine the disturbing mechanics behind the origins of this crisis: state and corporate intervention in northern Indigenous foodways. Despite claims to the contrary by governments, the Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC), and the contemporary North West Company (NWC), the exorbitant cost of food in the North is neither a naturally occurring phenomenon nor the result of free-market forces. Rather, inflated food prices are the direct result of government policies and corporate monopolies. Using food as a lens to track the institutional presence of the Canadian state in the North, Burnett and Hay chart the social, economic, and political changes that have taken place in northern Ontario since the 1950s. They explore the roles of state food policy and the HBC and NWC in setting up, perpetuating, and profiting from food insecurity while undermining Indigenous food sovereignties and self-determination. Plundering the North provides fresh insight into Canada’s settler colonial project by re-evaluating northern food policy and laying bare the governmental and corporate processes behind the chronic food insecurity experienced by northern Indigenous communities.

Planetary Health Humanities and Pandemics
Planetary Health Humanities and Pandemics

Author: Heike Härting

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2024-03-29

Total Pages: 258

ISBN-13: 1003853331

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This volume explores the variable meanings and discourses of historical and contemporary pandemics to rethink theories and practices of planetary health. Rather than conflating the planetary with anthropogenic climate change, planetary geo-engineering, or the "global," the volume elaborates a version of planetary health humanities that invites decolonial, creative, and pluridisciplinary modes of thinking and sees "health" as a complex non-anthropocentric process that moves within the multiple scales of the planetary. The volume offers new historical trajectories as it considers an eighteenth-century woman author’s readings of plague, intersecting narratives of nineteenth-century lactation and vaccination, and the forgotten biopolitics of NASA’s Planetary Quarantine Program. It offers accounts of decolonial and oracular planetary health, insists that the role of literature in the health humanities is not merely instrumental, explores viral and planetary co-inhabitations, and scrutinizes inequities faced by global health workers. The volume also includes discussions of cybernetic addiction and the complex entanglements of humans, microbes, and bees. Its concluding interview addresses the concrete impact of current planetary transformations on individual and collective health. Bringing together multiple disciplines, the volume will be of interest to students and scholars in health humanities, literary studies, postcolonial studies, medical history, and narrative medicine.

Diagnosing the Legacy
Diagnosing the Legacy

Author: Larry Krotz

Publisher: Univ. of Manitoba Press

Published: 2018-03-23

Total Pages: 220

ISBN-13: 0887555586

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In the late 1980s, pediatric endocrinologists at the Children’s Hospital in Winnipeg began to notice a new cohort appearing in their clinics for young people with diabetes. Indigenous youngsters from two First Nations in northern Manitoba and northwestern Ontario were showing up not with type 1 (or insulin-dependent diabetes), but with what looked like type 2 diabetes, until then a condition that was restricted to people much older. Investigation led the doctors to learn that something similar had become a medical issue among young people of the Pima Indian Nation in Arizona though, to their knowledge, nobody else. But these youth were just the tip of the iceberg. Over the next few decades more children would confront what was turning into not only a medical but also a social and community challenge. Diagnosing the Legacy is the story of communities, researchers, and doctors who faced—and continue to face—something never seen before: type 2 diabetes in younger and younger people. Through dozens of interviews, Krotz shows the impact of the disease on the lives of individuals and families as well as the challenges caregivers faced diagnosing and then responding to the complex and perplexing disease, especially in communities far removed from the medical personnel a facilities available in the city.

Distorted Descent
Distorted Descent

Author: Darryl Leroux

Publisher: Univ. of Manitoba Press

Published: 2019-09-20

Total Pages: 224

ISBN-13: 0887555942

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Distorted Descent examines a social phenomenon that has taken off in the twenty-first century: otherwise white, French descendant settlers in Canada shifting into a self-defined “Indigenous” identity. This study is not about individuals who have been dispossessed by colonial policies, or the multi-generational efforts to reconnect that occur in response. Rather, it is about white, French-descendant people discovering an Indigenous ancestor born 300 to 375 years ago through genealogy and using that ancestor as the sole basis for an eventual shift into an “Indigenous” identity today. After setting out the most common genealogical practices that facilitate race shifting, Leroux examines two of the most prominent self-identified “Indigenous” organizations currently operating in Quebec. Both organizations have their origins in committed opposition to Indigenous land and territorial negotiations, and both encourage the use of suspect genealogical practices. Distorted Descent brings to light to how these claims to an “Indigenous” identity are then used politically to oppose actual, living Indigenous peoples, exposing along the way the shifting politics of whiteness, white settler colonialism, and white supremacy.

Making the Mexican Diabetic
Making the Mexican Diabetic

Author: Michael Montoya

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2011-03-18

Total Pages: 282

ISBN-13: 0520267311

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“Making the Mexican Diabetic presents a finely-honed ethnography. Montoya is particularly attuned to the sensitivity and conundrums surrounding the use of DNA drawn from a population at high risk of diabetes, and he makes a strong case for understanding the rational value behind this approach as well as its potential reinforcement of racial stereotypes. This is a unique and important book.”- Rayna Rapp, author of Testing Women, Testing the Fetus: The Social Impact of Amniocentesis in America "This is a fascinating, broad-ranging, and fair-minded ethnography. In the best tradition of science studies, Montoya takes the scientific research seriously on its own terms. Yet he always brings us back to the sociopolitical context, including the tremendous conditions of inequality that Mexican immigrants encounter in the United States.” -Steven Epstein, Northwestern University

Medicare's Histories
Medicare's Histories

Author: Esyllt W. Jones

Publisher: Univ. of Manitoba Press

Published: 2022-05-27

Total Pages: 319

ISBN-13: 0887552846

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Medicare is arguably Canada’s most valued social program. As federally-supported medicare enters its second half-century, Medicare’s Histories brings together leading social and health historians to reflect on the origins and evolution of medicare and the missed opportunities characterizing its past and present. Embedding medicare in the diverse constituencies that have given it existence and meaning, contributors inquire into the strengths and weaknesses of publicly insured health care and critically examine medicare’s unfinished role in achieving greater health equity for all people in Canada regardless of race, status, gender, class, age, and ability. Fundamental to the stories told in Medicare’s Histories is the essential role played by communities ¬– of activists, critics, health professionals, First Nations, patients, families, and survivors – in driving demands for health reform, in identifying particular omissions and inequities exacerbated or even created by medicare, and in responding to the realities of medicare for those who work in and rely on it. Contributors to this volume show how medicare has been shaped by politics (in the broadest sense of that word), identities, professional organizations, and social movements in Canada and abroad. As COVID lays bare social inequities and the inadequacies of health care delivery and public health, this book shows what was excluded and what was – and is – possible in health care.