This is one of the best books I have read in recent times. Piper offers a richly textured account of the appearance, course, and consequences of epidemic disease in Canada’s Northwest Territories from the 1860s through to the 1940s. Its principal concern lies with the experiences of the region’s diverse Indigenous peoples as they confronted diseases introduced through colonial expansion, even as they sought to sustain their social worlds, cultural practices, and relationships to land under conditions of intensifying extractive exploitation. While firmly anchored in the particularities of the far northwest, the book speaks well beyond its immediate setting and will be of considerable interest to historians of other parts of the Americas, as well as to scholars of settler colonialism elsewhere in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Piper’s achievement rests in large measure on the way they bring together painstaking archival research with a striking depth of Indigenous community and family histories, oral traditions, and personal reminiscence. Drawing on sources produced on both sides of the colonial frontier, Piper challenges assumptions that have shaped much historical, virological, and epidemiological thinking over the past half-century about the effects of disease on Indigenous populations under settler colonialism. These assumptions, the book insists, have been too readily accepted and demand careful re-examination.
This argument gains particular force when set against the continuing appeal of disease-centred explanations of colonial conquest. Shortly before writing this review, I spoke with a graduate student in virology who had recently read Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel and found its argument convincing—especially the claim that diseases to which Indigenous peoples of the Americas, Oceania, and sub-Saharan Africa lacked immunity were the primary cause of the destruction or transformation of their cultures. Piper takes direct issue with the persuasiveness of this view by subjecting the influential concept of “virgin soil epidemics,” coined by Alfred W. Crosby in the mid-1970s, to sustained historical scrutiny. Through close attention to specific outbreaks, epidemics, and pandemics in the far northwest, Piper documents—often in deeply distressing detail—the devastating effects of scarlet fever, influenza, measles, and tuberculosis on individuals, families, and entire communities. At the same time, the book shows how the language of “virgin soil epidemics” can flatten historical complexity, encouraging responsibility for catastrophe to be assigned to invading microbes rather than to the actions, omissions, and priorities of colonial societies.
The second chapter focuses on the arrival and spread of scarlet fever in the Northwest Territories during the 1860s. Making effective use of oral histories, Piper traces the movement of the disease along river systems and inland trails, carried through networks of trade and inter-tribal interaction. The consequences were severe. Scarlet fever coincided with seasonal influenza and outbreaks of whooping cough, producing death rates of up to twenty-five percent in some communities. Many survivors were left too debilitated to resume hunting, trapping, and fishing, and later died from malnutrition. Yet Piper also shows that not all communities were equally affected. Some Indigenous families and bands avoided infection altogether, drawing on prior experience of epidemics other than scarlet fever to alter their seasonal movements so as to avoid trading posts and missionary stations, which were major sites of contagion. Traditional health practices, moreover, proved less ineffective than colonial observers were inclined to believe. Nonetheless, the epidemic disrupted the fur trade on which both Indigenous communities and settlers depended and created new openings for colonial intervention. Missionaries sought to secure conversions by exploiting fear and grief, while residential schools were established to absorb orphans whom communities could no longer care for in customary ways.
In chapter three, Piper turns to the written record of northern epidemics produced by missionaries, traders, medical officials, and, later, anthropologists. These accounts, while invaluable as historical sources, are shown to have reinforced colonial assumptions and prejudices whose influence has proved remarkably durable. Missionaries often exaggerated levels of sickness in order to mobilise support for their work, while fur traders tended to minimise illness to protect commercial interests. Works claiming scientific authority—most notably William H. Dall’s Alaska and Its Resources (1870)—gave enduring credibility to the idea that Indigenous peoples of northern North America were biologically fated to extinction in the face of introduced disease. Piper suggests that these nineteenth-century discourses of extinction continue to echo, in troubling ways, in some late twentieth-century accounts of epidemic disease in the far north.
The fourth chapter moves into the early twentieth century, when gold discoveries in the Yukon and Mackenzie districts triggered major population influxes from across the world, bringing with them a range of infectious diseases. In 1900, an epidemic of influenza accompanied by measles swept through the Yukon, killing between twenty-five and fifty percent of the Indigenous population of Alaska. The demands of gold-driven extractive colonialism prompted the development of health infrastructure designed primarily to meet the needs of Europeans drawn to the region. As Piper explores in chapter five, the reshaping of Indigenous lifeways under these conditions ensured that diseases such as tuberculosis remained a persistent presence well into the second half of the twentieth century. Chapter six, which examines the smallpox outbreak of 1900, shows how the widespread acceptance of germ theory strengthened racialised perceptions of Indigenous peoples as both inherently susceptible to disease and dangerous reservoirs of infection threatening settler society. Indigenous communities were consequently subjected to new regimes of surveillance, quarantine, and enforced isolation.
Chapters seven and eight examine the influenza epidemic of 1928, detailing its devastating effects while demonstrating how deeply entrenched racial assumptions shaped the responses of the colonial state. Chapter nine is devoted to tuberculosis, tracing its impact from the earliest records of its presence in Indigenous communities in the 1880s through to the 1960s. Piper highlights how prior infections with measles and influenza weakened resistance to the disease, and how residential schools—established to assimilate Indigenous children into settler society—became sites of infection while often failing to provide adequate care. Many deaths occurred when infected pupils returned to their families. As Piper concludes, “the disease tore through the fabric of life, remaking social and environmental relations for decades to come” (p. 292).
This is an exhaustively researched and ethically engaged account of the ways in which the effects of disease among the Indigenous peoples of far northern North America were produced or intensified by extractive and settler colonialism. Central to this process were racially grounded assumptions of Indigenous biological inferiority and a persistent disregard for Indigenous knowledge and health practices. While attentive to the environmental and historical specificities of the far north, Piper’s study offers insights of broad relevance to Indigenous and non-Indigenous researchers, health professionals, and policymakers concerned with the legacies of settler colonialism in post-settler societies worldwide.