Abstract

Should Aboriginal healing traditions be integrated into urban medical facilities? In spite of public and academic interest in bringing the two systems together, existing research on the topic shows how difficult integration would be due to historical/political, practical, and philosophical challenges. Not surprisingly, logistical measures for implementing the task have yet to be formalized. Based on 3.5 months of ethnographic fieldwork in a western Canadian city, this thesis explores what health administrators, people who use Aboriginal healing traditions, and people who practice Aboriginal healing traditions think about integration, and examines how attitudes within and about health care influence participants' views. Mobilizing anthropological concepts about biomedicine, bodily ways of knowing, sensorial dimensions of healing, and multiculturalism, I argue that prevailing attitudes, assumptions, and relations of power within health care culture, when combined with historical/political, practical, and philosophical challenges, seriously encumber the integration process. In conclusion, I suggest that Aboriginal healing traditions should only be integrated into urban medical facilities where health care providers and other staff relinquish the attitudes, assumptions, and relations of power that the biomedical paradigm upholds.