Aboriginal Quality of Life in Canada
The state of health and health care for Canadian Aboriginal people is currently not improving, “Canadian Aboriginals tend to bear a disproportionate burden of illness; an outcome linked to their economic and social conditions [and] oppression” (Newbold 1998). European contact would forever change the course of life for the Aboriginals and their communities in Canada. It was only after the encounter between the old world and new world that two completely separate ecosystems had interaction between each other. Both worlds changed in radical ways through people, plants, animals, varmints and pathogens, this is known today as the “Columbian Exchange”. The New pathogens introduced to the Indigenous people who had no immunity, caused major depopulation up to 80 - 90% during the 1500’s. This completely changed the Indigenous people and posed as a massive threat to extinction of their population and culture. Contact between the Canadian Aboriginals and European voyagers brought in a mass amount of deadly and infectious diseases. Some of the diseases included smallpox, typhoid, the bubonic plague, influenza, mumps, measles, whooping cough, and later on cholera, malaria, and scarlet fever. Smallpox was a virgin soil epidemic, meaning that it was the first outbreak ever to the population that has had no previous experience with it. The Aborigines of the new world had no immunity to smallpox and the entire population was in danger of extinction. At around that time smallpox had a very high mortality rate which broke down the Aboriginal communities social mechanisms. This brought forth the break down of social the devices which were built within the Aboriginal culture, because the people were unable to hunt and gather food for the elders. This caused great knowledge loss as the elders in the Aboriginal community would perish from the disease. The greatest example of this is when Spanish explorer Cortez defeated the Moctezuma at Tenochtitlan. Cortez, had only 500 soldiers going