SEARCHING FOR ANSWERS
It was called “Indian TB,” and it was believed to be a separate, highly virulent form of tuberculosis. Health authorities viewed the disease as a menace to the general population, so in the 1930s the federal government began to create hospitals and sanatoriums exclusively for Indigenous people.
The institutions were budgeted to operate at half the cost of regular medical facilities. They were drafty in winter, hot in summer, and infested with vermin, according to the Manitoba Indigenous Tuberculosis History Project (MITHP), a research project based at the University of Winnipeg.
Despite these conditions, Manitoba newspapers in the 1930s and 1940s “assured the public that the ‘threat’ of Indian TB was being managed,” the MITHP says on its new website, Indigenoustbhistory.ca.
The histories of the segregated TB hospitals and of residential schools frequently intersect. Many children contracted TB — an airborne pathogen that commonly attacks the lungs — while attending the overcrowded schools. The bacteria that cause tuberculosis can remain latent in the body for many years, and deaths due to TB can occur months or years after the onset of symptoms.
Indigenous TB patients from remote northern Manitoba communities were often sent to institutions in the south. Fifty years after the last facility in Manitoba was closed, the burial sites of many patients remain unknown to their families. The MITHP website includes a searchable photo database of former Manitoba patients and a research guide.
“Indigenous individuals in the photos are rarely named, and often the hospitals are unknown as well,” said Erin Millions, the project’s research director and a historian at the University of Winnipeg.
People are asked to contact the project if they see someone they know in the photos. —