Indian Hospitals in Canada

The initial purpose of the Indian hospitals was to address the prevalence and spread of tuberculosis (TB), and the fear that the affected Indigenous populations would endanger nearby non-Indigenous populations. However, the operation and purpose of the hospitals was deeply rooted in racist sentiment and underpinned a falsely-perceived threat that Indigenous people posed to public health.

The hospitals were connected to the missionary hospital movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The hospitals were a method of segregation and restriction, and were part of the same colonial system as residential schools and the reserve system. Some of the earlier hospitals grew out of the makeshift sanitoria that had been created at residential schools to house and quarantine child patients as a result of the high rates of TB existing in the schools. Often children would be moved back and forth between a residential school and an Indian hospital.

The hospitals were chronically understaffed and the staff onsite were often undertrained and sometimes unlicensed. The hospitals were also often overcrowded. Practices such as experimental treatment, or painful and disabling surgeries were prevalent, even at a time when general hospitals where switching to less invasive treatments for TB. Although enforced hospitalization and physical restraint of patients was not permissible in a general hospital setting, they were considered common practice at Indian hospitals.

The formal Indian hospital system began in the 1930s, but saw its real expansion in the post-war years of the late-1940s and into the 1950s. In the 1970s and 1980s, most of the hospitals closed or were converted. At least three major Indian hospitals operated in British Columbia: Prince Rupert (Miller Bay), Sardis (Coqualeetza), and Nanaimo. Charles Camsell Hospital in Edmonton was the largest hospital in Canada.