ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Negotiated Racial Inclusion in Nursing Education: Japanese Canadians and Christian Humanism in Western Canada, 1925-1955

• In Event: Women Healers: Nursing in the Early 20th Century

English Abstract

In 1925, nursing students at the Lamont Public Hospital (LPH) in rural Alberta held a secret ballot and unanimously voted to admit Asian women to their School of Nursing. The students made the LPH the earliest known hospital training school in Canada to admit Asian women; nursing programs elsewhere generally refused to admit Asian students until the 1930s. The LPH Nursing School enrolled at least 18 Asian students, primarily Japanese Canadians, from 1925-1955. Rather than presenting LPH as a simple exception or celebratory site of racial inclusion, we argue that it represents a partial, negotiated inclusion that was shaped by the agency of Japanese Canadian women in particular, the LPH’s affiliation with the United Church of Canada (UCC), and the medical and nursing missionary milieu of Lamont’s early health system. Our study expands on historical scholarship that largely focuses on Chinese Canadian nursing experiences and uses a non-dual approach to examine racialization, viewing race relations as more complex than simple binaries and as processes through which identities are continually negotiated. Drawing on primary sources that centre the voices of a diverse group of students, including career questionnaires from all 594 LPH graduates, this paper traces the motivations, training experiences, and post-graduation careers of these early nursing students. By mapping their careers within the extensive and supportive networks of Japanese Canadian communities and the UCC and situating them within the broader landscape of Canadian nursing history, we examine how LPH became an early site of racial negotiation in Canada.

Authors

• Helen Vandenberg, University of Saskatchewan

• Letitia Johnson, University of Alberta

• Emily Kaliel, University of Guelph