Wyndham-West, Michelle (2009) Phenomenologically productive "creation" stories: Aboriginal health discourse and mass media coverage of the Kashechewan "crisis". vis-Ã -vis: Explorations in Anthropology, 9 (1).

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Abstract

In this article I examine, through a case study of newspaper re-presentations of the Kasheche-wan crisis in late 2005, how the discursive discourse nodes of the academy/medicine and the mass media phenomenologically create and circulate conceptualizations of the “disordered” Aboriginal (Waldram 2004). To invoke the “disordered” Aboriginal, texts stemming from the academy/medicine and such innocuous products as the daily newspaper draw delineations between seemingly “unhealthy” Aboriginal peoples and their “healthy” mainstream coun-terparts (Crawford 1994). As I discuss in the article, these binaries come into relief during a health crisis and the mass media coverage of the events at Kashechewan invoke spatial and cultural metaphors to create native=reserve=poor=sick associations. The drawing of such figurative cordon sanitaires rests upon static notions of Aboriginal culture, which stem from early colonial renditions of Aboriginal peoples (Doxtator 1992). Ultimately, the textual co-lonialism unearthed in this article works to perpetuate policy decisions that reinforce the subordinate status of Aboriginal peoples in Canada.

Item Type:	Article
Divisions:	Faculty of Liberal Arts & Sciences
Date Deposited:	15 Jul 2016 16:04
Last Modified:	20 Dec 2021 19:45
URI:	https://openresearch.ocadu.ca/id/eprint/1053

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