Medicine Chest, The

The Medicine Chest: A Physician’s Journey Towards Reconciliation
by Jarol Boan
Published by University of Regina Press
Review by Shelley A. Leedahl
$29.95 ISBN 9780889779730

I was expecting an academic text when I received The Medicine Chest: A Physician’s Journey Towards Reconciliation by Regina-raised-and-returned-to physician and educator, Dr. Jarol Boan, but immediately discovered there’s nothing dull about this engaging, well-researched and important book. In fact, I flew through it.

Boan, an internist who spent twenty years practising and teaching in the US, returned home in 2011—at fifty-seven—to find “Indigenous people played a different role in Saskatchewan’s affairs than they once had,” and this book documents her poignant experiences while treating Indigenous patients within Saskatchewan’s health care system from 2011 to the present. Her accounts are balanced between compelling anecdotes about patients in Regina and on reserves in the Touchwood Hills, other healthcare workers, the system (ie: fee-for-service) and politics; and medical history (ie: the TB epidemic), research and statistics.

A few details about Boan’s own personal history (ie: challenging divorce and custody battle) are included, but the true focus concerns the inequities, oppression and racism inherent in the Canadian health care system. Moreover, she explains how she and a few others in the healthcare field, both settlers and Indigenous, are using a “team approach” to address “profound inequalities and injustice” through a program called “Wellness Wheel.” The name’s adapted from Medicine Wheel, “to show our desire to enhance every dimension of the human experience.” Although the logistics of delivering this program—with limited resources, personnel and physical spaces, plus inter-agency/jurisdictional confusion—have been a challenge since its inception in 2016, it boasts countless victories, and it’s growing.

The book begins: “Imagine an Elder tells me a story.” The opening chapter then delves into the legend behind Turtle Island (North America); turns to the 1876 negotiation between Chief Ahtahkakoop and Commissioner Alexander Morris—the former requested a “medicine chest” for his people, so they’d receive “the same medical care the white settlers had;” returns to the present, with Boan writing the Elder a prescription for joint pain; explains the drug’s connection to willows; and finishes with Boan’s reflection that she’s “one of the keepers of the medicine chest,” which, for Indigenous people, “has often been empty or filled with horrors.”

Trust’s hard-won, but whether visiting patients on reserve or treating society’s most vulnerable at Regina General Hospital—sometimes the ER’s so busy there’s “no time to pee”—listening is the first step. She confesses to her own occasional “assumptions,” ie: being surprised that an unhomed, Indigenous ER arrival was reading Hemingway and Steinback, and he “grew up in Hollywood and went to a school in LA.” She cites Gordon Tootoosis, Allen Sapp, and Maria Campbell as Indigenous Saskatchewan talents who’ve shown “strength and resilience” to succeed, despite unjust treaties and prejudice.

Though “the road to reconciliation is messy” and “we need a reorganization of our health care system,” through “two-eyed seeing,” paying attention to “social determinants of health,” and using her settler-class power “for advocacy,” Roan’s working diligently and empathetically with “her Indigenous partners for a greater good.” This book’s earned my highest recommendations.

THIS BOOK IS AVAILABLE AT YOUR LOCAL BOOKSTORE OR FROM WWW.SKBOOKS.COM