Colonial landscapes: Public health programming, health districts, and nutrition education in Alberta, 1920s – 1960s

Emily’s dissertation studies the creation and expansion of public health programming with a focus on nutrition in Alberta from the 1920s to the 1960s, primarily in rural and northern areas. In the Prairies, where concerns of land dominated provincial concerns, public health, food, and nutrition were inextricably connected with the land. The discovery of macro- and micro-nutrients, vitamins, and minerals in the early twentieth century provided governments and medical professionals with important preventive tools to address infantile and maternal mortality and to build up a robust population. In the context of the settler colonial Canadian nation-state, public health programming must be understood in terms of the logic of Indigenous elimination predicated on land dispossession. Emily’s dissertation argues that public health and nutrition science operated as types of scientific knowledge that lent legitimacy to the province of Alberta in its project of Indigenous dispossession and settler permanence on the land.